Sample and hold: pop music in the digital age of reproduction

ANDREW GOODWIN

Sample and digital age ot reproduction

hold: pop music in the f l

‘Science fiction and nostalgia have become the same thmg.’ T. Bone Burnett

Pop eats itself Surveying the state of pop music at the end of 1987, postmodemists and devotees of Walter Benjamin’s cultural analysis could be forgiven for patting themselves on their theoretical backs and ruminating on the strange pres- cience of these two bodies of theory. Writing in this journal two years ago, Peter Wollen established the link between Benjamin and the postmodemists thus: ‘As Benjamin’s ‘‘age of reproduction” is replaced by our “age of electronic reproduction”, the trends which he discerned are further extended. Reproduction, pastiche and quotation, instead of being forms of textual parasitism, become constitutive of textuality’ (Wollen, 1986: 169).

Within two years, the British pop act M/A/R/R/S was enjoying a huge international hit with the single ‘Pump Up The Volume’ - a record that is made up largely of pieces of about thirty otherrecords. At the same time, the dominant technology in pop’s future is clearly going to be digital reproduction, as established in new processes of music production (such as sampling music computers] and in consumer software such as the Compact Disc (CD) and Digital Audio Tape (DAT) .

In addition to these technological developments, pop ideology is increasingly dominated by a sense that the future has now arrived, for good. Pop’s sounds and visions appear to be caught in a statis that is both aesthetic and political, and which is well summed up by the ex-leader of The Clash, Joe Strummer, in a recent Melody Maker interview: ‘All movements are bullshit’. As traditional political movements have become marginalised in pop politics, so notions of pop’s historical movement as ‘progress’ have withered and died. ‘Progressive rock’, that most diabolical symptom of pop’s desire to evolve into Art, has ceased to progress; and the question ‘what comes after punk?’ is heard less often. Instead, today’s pop musicians are busy blurring historical and cultural boundaries, as the music of ‘traditional’ Hispanic (Los Lobos, Ruben Blades), Celtic (The Popes) and African [Graceland, Hugh Masekela, Peter Gabriel) musics are made contemporary and enter the mainstream.

Sample and hold: pop music in the digital age of production 35

As Lawrence Grossberg [ 1987) has pointed out, our received notions of pop’s margins and its centre have ceased to apply. So too have our ideas about generation. It isn’t just that pop’s audience has grown older. That shift would merely return us to a pre-rock era of popular music. The essential change is that ‘older’ music has become contemporary for audiences of all ages. In their year-end surveys of 1987, rock critics on both sides of the Atlantic pointed to the extraordinary number of reissues and old records in the charts. The link with the new technologies is unavoidable. On the one hand, CD reissues partly account for the latest wave of apparent nostalgia (including the resurrection of punk - CBS have just released a CD package of greatest hits from The Clash). On the other hand, new digital technologies are being used to deconstruct old texts.

Digital developments appear to offer shattering evidence for the per- tinence of Walter Benjamin’s analysis, in the spheres of both production and consumption. In music production, the increasing use of digital recording and reproductive equipment gives enormous credence to Benjamin’s celebration of the end of the ‘aura’. In the age of mass production, Benjamin stated that the audience is no longer concerned with an original textual moment. In the age of digital reproduction the notion of the ’aura’ is further demystified by the fact that everyone may purchase an ‘original’. Digital recording techniques now ensure that the electronic encoding and decoding that takes place in capturing and then reproducing sound is such that there is no discernible difference between the sound recorded in the studio and the signal reproduced on the consumer’s CD system. This is something new: the mass production of the aura.

More radical still is the technology of DAT, against which the music industry has mounted a huge and largely unsuccessful campaign.’ Unlike CD, DAT can record. It opens up the possibility that consumers will simply make their own perfect copies of CDs, via home taping, thus obtaining the aura gratis. One response, from the record industry in the USA, has been the introduction of Personics - a system that attempts to co-opt home taping by selling consumers customised cassette tapes, dubbed (legally, of course) in record stores. Consumers are thus able to re-order the programme of music offered on records and tapes by the record company. Like the CD, Personics introduces new elements of consumer control. Furthermore, an increasing amount of contemporary pop music takes advantage of this technology to ‘sample’ sounds, voices and effects from other records and use them in new pieces of popular music.

These technological shifts go hand-in-hand (although sometimes just in parallel) with pop’s changing attitude to its history. As old texts have become new again (through new media forms like music video arid pop‘s increased

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use as a film soundtrack, as well as CD reissues), it has plundered its archives with truly postmodern relish, in an orgy of pastiche. The degree to which pop music in the 1980s has become self-referential is now so developed that some musics sound like copies of parodies. I recently attend- ed a gig in Berkeley where the band supporting The Meat Puppets seemed to be pastiching The Cult - a British rock group who made their name in 1986 by resurrecting the hard rock sound of Led Zeppelin. (It should be noted that Led 2kp T-shirts have now attained the status of symbols of ‘cool’, rather than being icons of rock prehistory. ) On his recent solo LP Now and Zen, ex-led Zeppelin vocalist Robert Plant samples from his old recordmgs, having spent the last few years listening to new bands sample his old records (see Gore & Goodwin, 1987; Pond, 1988). Plant decided it was time to pastiche from his own pastiche.

If much of this lends ammunition to Benjamin’s account of mass culture, then the postmodernists who’ve bothered to listen won’t have failed to take account of the fact that one of Britain’s leading new bands is called Pop Will Eat Itself. Aside from the fact that so much contemporary pop seems to be caught up in a statis of theft (as in ‘free sample’) and reissues, many of its most celebtrated new acts offer recycled versions of pop’s past: from the sixties (Husker Du, The Bangles), through heavy metal (The Cult, The Mission, Whitesnake), disco (The Pet Shop Boys, The Communards), and endless re-runs of punk rock (Fuzzbox, Screaming Blue Messiahs). Other bands delight in the production of bizarre historical juxtapositions (Sonic Youth, The Replacements) - a trend exemplified in the 1980s fashion for new bands to compete to perform the most unlikely cover versions of 1970s songs in their live sets.

‘It’s like cruising the 50’s again, dig?’, says Mickey Mouse in the ads for Disneyland’s latest attraction, Blast To The Past. ’Shake, Rattle And Roll Back The Years’ is the slogan. And the copy goes on: ‘During the Blast To The Past at Disneyland, everything then is now again, every day’. What is significant about this advertisement is that the humans cavorting with Donald, Mickey and Co. on the tail of a red and white convertible are all teenagers. No one who actually remembers the fifties is in sight - excepting the Disney characters, of course. The appeal, like Led Zeppelin’s, is not nost&c, it is postmodem; a sign that when the future arrives, pop teleology comes to a halt. Even its images of the future no longer connote progress. Just as Disney’s ’futuristic’ monorail is now read as a quaint notion derived from a bad sci-fi novel, so its space-age rock group Laserium, dressed in shiny silver suits and playing electronic instruments with all the latest gadgets, appear merely as an outdated idea of what we once thought the music of the future would be.


As I will try to show in this essay, the shiny ’technology’ that features so prominently in postmodern analysis can offer up some unexpected mean- ings. Without doubt the digital sampling music computer (the ‘sampler’ 1 is potentially the most postmodern musical instrument yet invented. I will argue that its use and meaning often remain wedded to earlier aesthetics.

Sample and hold Digital sampling computers are relatively new machines that digitially encode any sounds, store them and enable the manipulation and reproduction of those sounds with almost infinite parameters and no discernible loss of sound quality. [An important related technology is the digital delay line/pedal, which stores brief sequences of sound and replays them, often in rhythm with the music.) They do, however, have their roots in earlier analogue inventions.

The electronic synthesiser was of course used by pop and electronic musicians to simulate the sounds of conventional instruments, from the harpsichords of Switched On Bach to the string sounds used on many pop albums - one version of the analogue synth is in fact known as a ‘string machine’, for its ability to simulate [not very well] the sound of an orchestral string section. A technology that was closer to sampling is the Mellotron, an instrument that was used (rather excessively) in the 1970s by progressive rock groups like Genesis, The Moody Blues, and Yes. The Mellotron was a keyboard instrument that triggered analogue recordings of sounds such as human voices, strings and flutes.

Sampling technologies made the Mellotron obsolete technically, just as it was going out of fashion aesthetically - late 1970s pimk rock had little use for massed choirs and string sections! In 1979 the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument came on the market, although its enormous cost restricted its use to all but the most successful musicians, producers and studios. The Fairlight CMI was however followed, in classic music technology tradition, by a generation of machines that did the same thing more cheaply - the Emulator and the Synclavier, for instance; and then a further, and even cheaper wave of samplers such as ,the Greengate and Ensoniq Mirage. Eventually, in 1986, Casio brought out samplers which cost less than €100.

What is typical about this development is the way the technology was used to mirror practices that derived from low-tech innovations, first taking them out of the price-range of most musicians, and then returning them, via the sale of the High Street Casio, to the ‘street’ . . . or is it the spare room? For example: one common use of samplers is and was to mimic the stuttering

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effect of ‘scratching’ - a technique initially developed by DJs using record turntables. Another instance is the use of samplers to dub in segments of speeches, effects or music - a technique that art-punk bands of an earlier era achieved by splicing tape with a low-tech razor blade. I will try to show later in this paper that the new technologies have not removed the notion of ’skill’ involved in such (often extremely complex and delicate) procedures.

The question of skill is also raised, as I will demonstrate, by the fact that sampling computers are also music sequencers. Like some of their analogue predecessors, d@al samplers can be programmed to play sounds and rhythms independently of a keyboard and/or a human performer. This facilitated the development of a technology that is of paramount importance in recent pop history - the drum machine. Drum machines enable a musi- c i h to programme rhythmic patterns without actually hitting any drums. Early analogue machines simulated drum sounds electronically, using elements such as ‘white noise‘ to approximate to a snare drum sound. Sampling enabled manufacturers to create machines that @tially recreated a recording that exactly resembles a ‘real‘ drum recorded in a studio.

It is this combination of sampling and sequencing (as evidenced in drum machines and digital music computers) that has eroded the divisions not just between originals and copies, but between human and machine per- formed music. In each area, that of originality and of ‘feel’, the new music technologies raise some fascinating questions for cultural theorists. They place issues such as authenticity and creativity in crisis, not just because of the issue of theft, but through the increasingly automatednature of their mechanisms.

The real thing

The questions of theft and automation in modem pop production appear to challenge its essentially Romantic aesthetic (see Stratton, 1983; Pattison, 1987). And yet strangely enough cultural studies discussions of these areas have so far said very little about the music itself. In what follows I will attempt to focus on that neglected level, through some comments on the new technologies and their impact on rhythm and timbre.

The most striking point in the analysis of both areas is the fact that music made by machines, or to sound like machines, has not taken pop’s trajec- tory into electronic or art music, but has instead become the chief source of its dance music. Synthesisers, drum machines and digital samplers are identified less with modern composers (like Brian Eno) than with dance genres like disco, hip hop, Hi-NRG and House. In other words, while


cultural studies critics such as Frith (1985) debate the essentially critical and academic distinctions bemg made between technology on the one hand and ‘community’ and ‘nature’ on the other, pop musicians and audiences have grown increasingly accustomed to making an association between synthetic/automated music and the communal (dance floor) connection to nature (via the body). We have grown used to connecting machines and funkiness.

This observation doesn’t discredit the arguments of Frith, since his position is essentially that cultural studies debates about authenticity carried over from literary theory don’t travel well into the field of pop music. What I am suggesting here, however, is that Frith’s analysis needs to be supple- mented by a musicological critique. If anyone need be nervous about the arguments that follow it is surely the postmodernists, whose assertions about the role of technology in postmodern culture have rarely been tested via empirical analysis. It may be that all the high-tech wizardry of movies like Blade Runner and bands like Sigue Sigue Sputnik is merely yet more sci- f i iconography (hardly a postmodern phenomenon), while the more routine use of modern technology in pop music is thoroughly ntrturalised, through aural familiarity and via pop ideologies constructed beyond the level of the technical infrastructure (in art schools and in the music press, for instance).

The most significant result of the recent innovations in pop production lies in the progressive removal of any immanent criteria for distinguishing between human and automated performance. Associated with this there is of course a crisis of authorship. But where this crisis has generally been located at the level of copyright and ownership of intellectual property (see Frith, 1987)’ I want to focus on its musical manifestations. In order to get a sense of how far-reaching these changes are, consider this scenario, which is now common at the beginning of a pop recording session: before a note is committed to tape, a producer or engineer will use a sampling computer to digitally record each sound used by the group. A t this point, it is sometimes possible for everyone but the producer to go home, leaving the computerised manipulation of these sounds to do the work of performance and recording. Indeed, the recent court case involving Frankie Goes To Hollywood, producer Trevor Horn and his record company ZTT centred on exactly this problem - what exactly did Frankie and their lead singer Holly Johnson actually do?

The question of ‘who played what?’ isn’t new, and allegations that the act didn’t play on their ‘own’ records have been raised ;about many bands, from The Beatles to The Sex Pistols. What is new hexe is the increasing problem of distinguishing between originals and copies on the one hand, and between human and automated performance on the other.


There are four processes that lead to the blurring of distinctions between automated and human performance in today’s pop. The first is the grow- ing sophistication with which today’s pop technologies can be programmed. If one listens to a recordmg that uses state-of-the-art computer technologies (such as Scritti Politti’s Cupid &Psyche 85), it is clear that machines are being used to mimic many of the techniques normally developed over time by human ‘real time’ performers. These techniques include the elastic place- ment of the beat (slightly in front of or behind its ‘correct’ mathematical position) to create ‘feel’; the use of subtle changes of volume or velocity to create ‘lifelike’ dynamics; and deliberately makmg small changes in the tempo to emulate the way human performers speed up and slow down. Chris Lowe, who programmes much of The Pet Shop Boys’ music, has taken to boasting about his tambourines being ‘out of time’, even though they are programmed, via a drum machine and/or computer. In other words, today’s pop musicians are often technicians who have learned to programme every bit as skilfully as earlier generations (up until punk) learned to play.

A second reason for the confusion is very simple. Much of today’s technology allows musicians to play into the programme, using drum pads, keyboards or perhaps even the buttons on the machine itself. This information will often register at very fine degrees of subtlety, encompasses parameters such as velocity and extremely s m a l l shifts in tempo and place- ment of the beat, and might trigger digital samples of ’real’ sounds that are indistinguishable from the ongmals. The result can be that the machine programme contains every bit as much information as any piece of ’real’ playing.

A third overlap arises out of one prevalent use of digital sampling technology in the modern recording studio. Drum or keyboard sounds stored on a digital music computer can be triggered by analogue recordings. In other words, a recording of a ‘real’ drummer playing a drum kit in a studio can be used to trigger m y sounds that can be stored in the computer, including any other drum kit, any drum machine sounds, and an infinite number of percussive samples (including old stand-bys like breaking glass and the beating of sheet metal). Consequently, one modern recording process reverses the phenomenon described in my second point above. Here, a ‘real’ drummer, playing with human imperfections, can be made to sound like a machine, or a computer, through changes in timbre implemented via samples. Indeed, this technique has been consolidated into a piece of hard- ware called ‘The Human Clock’ - a triggering device that enables a drummer to drive machines in sync, according to a varying human tempo.

Finally, there is the use of a studio Iloop’, in which a few bars of music (perhaps a drum pattern, guitar riff or an entire rhythm section hitting a


particular groove) are recorded in real time and then re-recorded and repeated as the rhythm track for an entire song. The effect is human feel within the loop, but consistency of groove throughout the song. (And if the loop is recorded digitally, there is no degradation of sound quality in the re- recording process.)

These confusions between human and automatedrhythm are also evident at the level of timbre. Here the key distinction is between those sounds which seem natural and those which sound synthetic. It has become com- monplace in both music production and consumption to observe that analogue sounds/recordings are ‘warmer’ than digitally reproduced music. (The debate about CDs centres on this distinction; and see Baird, 1988, for a discussion of the analogue/digital debate in the field of production, where digital keyboards such as the Yamaha DX-7 became unfashionable almost as soon as they went into fashion, because of their allegedly ‘cold feel’. 1

The key shift here occurs in the 1980s when a generation of pop musicians emerges who grew up listening to electronic synthesisers. What then occurs is that the very technology (the synth) that was presumed in the 1970s to remove human intervention and by-pass the emotive aspect of music (through its ’coldness’ j becomes the source of one of the major aural signs that signifies ‘feel’! This is the sound of a bass analogue synth - often a Moog synthesiser (although the Prophet 5 is another popular analogue reference point). By the mid-1980s electro-pop band The Human League could talk about using analogue synths as a move buck to their ‘authentic’ music roots.

This sense that analogue is warmer and more natural than digital also extends to its visual signification, which is appropriately enough also signified via the words we use to describe these patterns - waves, as opposed to numbers. A year ago, when I bought a music programme for the computer on which this essay is being written, the salesperson showed me two different ways of visualising musical information. A digital keyboard presented me with lists of numbers. But there was a software programme that con- verted this information into an approximation of analogue-style wave- forms. Both were incomprehensible to me. But to the keyboard expert demonstrating the technology, it was ‘obvious’ that the analogue waves were more ‘natural’ than the digital numbers.

This confusion of synthetic and natural sounds (analogue electronic synths were supposed to be ‘cold’ and ‘unnatural’, according to rock’s realist critics and fans at the time of their invention) is more strikingly evident in the story of the strange case of the ‘ handclap’. The origins of the use of handclaps in pop music lie in its various American and African folk roots. Indeed, the handclap is, along with the voice, music’s most ’auth,entic’ sound; they


are both present in ’traditional‘ musics of most cultures. Handclaps have also been used on record both as percussion and to slgrufy audience involve- ment since the first popular music recordings. In the 1970s an electronically simulated handclap sound began to appear on many disco records. Its percussive appeal lies partly in the fact that it incorporates what drummers call a ‘flam’ - that is a spreading out of the impact of the beat that extends its duration beyond the point at which it is ‘supposed’ to fall. (Record producers often ampllry this effect by adding electronic delay in the recording process.) One of the most popular sources of this sound in the 1980s was the handclap on Roland‘s analogue TR-808 drum machine. [It can be heard prominently on Chic’s 1970’s recordings, and on Marvin Gaye’s 1982 hit ‘Sexual Healing’. J What is extraordinary about this is that by the time Roland came to work on its next generation of (digital) drum machines (such as the TR-707), the electronic handclap sounded so ‘ ~ t U T a l ’ to pop musicians and audiences that they sampled their own electronic simulation from the TR-808 machine, rather than ‘real’ handclaps. Simi- larly, many electro-pop bands and producers who use digital samplers began by storing and manipulating synthetic, analogue sounds on them - sounds that both musicians and audiences could recognise.

At first this looks like a perfectly postmodern instance. Our aural con- sciousness has become so invaded by the realm of synthetic signs that we now hear a mass-mediated electronically simulated ‘handclap’ as the ‘real’ thing. If however we abandon the idea that musical representation occurs via mimesis, and consider its process of signification in relation to intra- personal ‘states of mind’, emotions, and so on, we might conclude that the electronic handclap is real. It really produces certain physiological effects when you dance to it.

My point is this: the ‘recognition’ involved in knowing how to hear electronic music depends in part on understanding the associations attached to any given sound. One element of this is our recognition of rhythms and timbre. While digital technology might appear more ’real’ than analogue (since it can reproduce an actual snare drum sound instead of a synthetic simulation, a real bass guitar sound, not a synth-bass imitation), the opposite is often true: in pop’s digital age, analogue sounds are the real thing, however automated or synthetic. And as electronic technology has become naturalised, audiences have become habituated to seeing pop performers as technicians, computer programmers, DJs or studio engineers.


The end of an aura?

A landscape that revels in the fusion of originals and copies, and which can- not distinguish humans from machines, seems like unlikely territory for authors and auras. Yet despite the apparently postmodern nature of so much contemporary pop, the question of creativity and originality remains central. Once again, Frith (1987) focuses in his discussion on the demands of the industry. I want instead to comment briefly on the role of authorship in pop’s aesthetic, and then go on to look at the importance of the aura in contemporary digital pop.

The following comment from Tim Simenon (creator of the sampled hit ‘Beat Dis’) perfectly illustrates my first point:

We got the records and found a common denominator beat - we chose roughly a range between 108 and 118, we laid down a beat at 114 b.p.m. and slowed down or speeded up the tracks I was going to use. But what differs about this kind of ‘street fusion’ is that it isn’t straight cut-up like a 13ouble D & Steinski record, or Grandmaster Flash. It’s in that form but the bassline is original, we‘ve got a drum pattern around it, and that sound like a Shaft guitar isn’t ‘Shaft’. We sampled one note of wah- wah guitar and reconstructed it on the ke boards. You wouldn’t be able to find

Note how, in 1988, ‘creativity’ has shifted so far from its 1970s progressive rock heyday (when musicians tried to invent new, unique musical forms, as well as original music) that Tim Simenon can lay claim to it merely by noting that he didn’t steal something from another record.

This kind of practice and its ideology [that of the Age of Plunder) is grist to the mill%f the postmodernists, for whom it provides evidence of OUT total absorption in ‘the realm of signs’. Yet this is too simple. Simenon clearly is invoking the concept of creativity. And he isn‘t alone. Here is Martin Young of Colourbox and M/A/R/R/S: ’Scratching is actually more creative than sampling. With sampling you are basically limited to a staccato effect whereas a good scratcher can really mess things But while the musi- ciandtechnicians themselves are well aware of the sophisticated work that goes into contemporary automation and plunder, there reinains the problem of transmitting this information to the fans - indeed, this is precisely one purpose of interviews such as those I have just cited.

One recurring problem of pop history exposes postmodem interpretations of authenticity as inadequate: It is the persistent failure of all those acts who are marketed as a self-conscious hype. Sigue Sigue Sputnik are only the most spectacular failure in this category of pop about pop; even an apparently successful hype such as Frankie Goes To Hollywood ultimately failed to achieve

that guitar pattern on any other record. T

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any kind of long-term economic/artistic success, through career longevity. Neither of these bands could survive their image as postmod con men, because it deprived them of any position from which to market authorship. It implied that they were puppets - an image that real puppet groups (The Monkees, for instance] did their utmost to defuse. Other acts, like ABC and The Pet Shop Boys, have overcome this difficulty by promoting themselves as the authors of their own image. But the self-conscious hype is doomed precisely because its postmodern premises (audiences aren’t interested in truth or creativity any longer) defy pop’s Romantic aesthetic.

The most audacious challenge to the ‘truth‘ of pop performance has been mounted by The Pet Shop Boys - a duo fronted, significantly, by an ex- journalist, Neil Tennant. Where most electro-pop acts who don’t perform ‘live’ persist in maintaining the pretence that they cafl play ‘live’, either by announcing tours that never happen [a tactic they recently abandoned] or by touring with session musicians, Tennant recently upped the stakes of inauthenticity by boasting about their inability to actually play, or even sing, when they lip-synced at the American Music Awards: ‘It’s kinda macho nowadays to prove you can cut it live. I quite like proving we cm’t cut it live. We’re a pop group, not a rock and roll The Pet Shop Boys can defy some discourses of authenticity because they invoke others, such as the authorship of their own marketing images and a source of ‘truth‘ that lies in an explicit critique of ‘rock’ music.

For other acts, authorship and authenticity reside in the ability to actually play. This competence needs to be demonstrated in live performance - one key element in pop’s visual discourses. This factor is relevant every bit as much for those bands who rely on ‘postmodern’ sampling technology:

We’ve had some things built which look like abstract objects standing on the back of our risers. We mike them with contact mikes, and treat the sounds as samples. In other words, we can produce all kinds of different sampled sounds by hitting these objects. Most people think we must be miming when we hit these things on stage, because they can’t understand how all these sounds could be coming out of one piece of metal. In fact, we’re not miming; we’re triggering the sounds. I think we’d like to explore this a lot more next time we go out on the road, because it‘s an exciting way of producing lots of sounds through some physical effort. That creates some visual excitement. You actually see us working on stage, rather than just standing there.5

There are two points to pull out of this comment from electro-pop band Depeche Mode. First, the notion of authenticity is still very much present in the need for pop musicians to demonstrate musical competence. Indeed, the new sequencing and sampling technologies have cast such doubts upon our knowledge about just who is (or isn’t) playing what that some bands


have recently taken to placing comments such as ‘no sequencers’ on album covers - The Human League (Crash and Shriekback (Big Night Music I are two recent examples that recall the legend that rock group Queen used to place on their 1970s albums - ‘no synthesisers’!

Playing analogue synthesisers is now a mark of authenticity, where it was once a sign of alienation - in pop iconography the image of musicians standing immobile behind synths signifies coldness [Kraftwerk, for instance). Now it is the image of a technician hunched over a computer terminal that is problematic - but that, like the image of the synth-player, can and will change.

Which brings me to my second point - that audiences need to see their pop musicians doing something. Depeche Mode are troubled by the perception that they are miming instead of playing (perhaps this is because it is true - much of their ‘live’ show is replayed via tapes and/or sequencers), and yet they are happy to perpetuate it in the interest of visual spectacle.

This in its turn must prompt a question concerning why pop audiences continue to attend live events. The sound quality is often very poor, and the visual imagery is usually too distant to be of any great value. Indeed, most stadium concerts are now accompanied by simultaneous video replay on to large screens. Attending a live performance by a pop megastar these days is often roughly the experience of listening to pre-recorded music [taped or sequenced] while watchmg a small, noisy TV set in a large, crowded field. I do not believe that the ‘community’ that follows from being a participant in a social event begins to explain the appeal of the modem rock concert. What explains the pleasure of these occasions more fully is the oura.

As veteran US rock promoter Bill Graham puts it: ’In actuality rock and roll has become so successful that the majority of fans don’t go to see the artist but to be in the presence of the artist, to share the space with the artist.l6 In other words: to consume the only truly original aura available in mass-produced pop - the physical presence of the star[ s ) . If we abandon the abstractions of both cultural studies and postmodernist analysis of pop and consider the role of live performance in relation to musical meaning, it is clear that the role of the visual in live concerts serves three functions for audiences. First, it provides visual pleasure on an abstract level (the display of the body, the spectacle of special effects, etc.); second, it serves to authenticate musical competence [see Mowitt, 1987),; and third, it offers us the consumption of a star presence, an aura. In this last area it is clear that the realm of signs gives way to something more fundamental - the desire for an audience with an original, even if it is shared with 50,000 others.

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The importance of presence (crucially, a musical as well as iconographic term) is also khlighted in a second area where the aura continues to dominate pop consumption. It constitutes a return to the consideration of digital technology set up at the beginning of this essay.

It is clear that high-fidelity is the very embodiment, in consumerism, of the fetishisation of original performance. The digital reproduction offered by CDs takes this process to extremes, not just by promising greater sound quality than analogue systems, but by revealing to the listener at home ‘imperfections’ in the original recording that went unnoticed at the time. CDs of The Beatles’ early recordings apparently expose the sound of Rmgo Starr’s squeaky bass drum pedal. In addition, then, to the fetishisation of the ‘original’ recorded moment, CD appeals to a belief in a pure, unmediated reality (the location of the aura of music performance) which it supposedly reveals.

Thus while digital technologies like CD and DAT no doubt have the capacity to break the barrier between the original and the copy, they are in fact more likely to be used to enhance the power of the aura of the original moment of recordmg, via the consumerist practices of hi-fi.

The politics of sampling

I will finish by addressing the questions of realism and history in contemporary sampled pop. I want to suggest that there are really three strands of digital sampling in pop production, which roughly correspond to received cultural studies categories of realism (1 would prefer the term naturalism myself, but the two seem to have become synonymous), modernism and pos tmodernism .

First, there is the ’hidden’ sampling involved in using a machine such as a Linn drum to reproduce ‘real’ drum sounds, or in the process of using a Fairlight or Synclavier to steal a sound. This use of sampled sounds is motivated largely by economics rather than aesthetics - getting ‘good’ sounds and the ’right’ performance from a machine is cheaper and easier than hiring musicians. In this kind of sampling the object is transparency, since the producer is using the technology to achieve a realist effect (the imitation of a ‘real’ performance) without calling attention to the mediating role of production technology. And this use of sampling is indeed so per- vasive that we no longer notice it. Most of the songs we hear on the radio today use computerised and sampling devices at some point.

A second kind of sampling is more explicit. Some producers have created records and remixes that celebrate playfulness, sometimes through a kind of baroque over-indulgence. Trevor Horn (ABC, Frankie Goes To Hollywood,


Malcolm McLaren), Arthur Baker (Afrika Bambaataa, Cyndi Lauper, New Order), Bill Lasswell (Material, Sly & Robbie), Daniel Miller (Depeche Mode) and Rick Rubin (The Beastie Boys, The Cult) conie immediately to mind as producers who straddle a line between pop realism and the sometimes self-conscious exposure of their own craft.

The 1980s development of a mass market for extended 12” remixes of pop songs is central here. Samplers are often used on remixes because they can store a few bars of music as well as individual sounds. They can thus be used to manipulate, extend and/or condense the structure of a song, as well as its texture, arrangement and timbre. It is because this practice often seems to deconstruct the orlginal text (the 7” single) that record producer Arthur Baker was once named ‘Rock Critic Of The Year’.

This second layer of producers and musicians remain for me the most interesting group working with the new technologies, purely by virtue of the fact that their aesthetic radicalism takes place in what we once used to call the ‘mainstream’ - the charts. Listen to Arthur Baker turn m-o-r group Fleetwood Mac into modernist avant-gardism (on his remix of ‘Big Love’) and what you hear is a steadfast refusal to settle for the pleasures of pop formula offered in the original. But the point here is that this aesthetic isn’t postmodern at all - it is modernist, with a dance beat. It is Theodor Adorno mistreating Fleetwood Mac, not Walter Benjamin celebrating them. [Furthermore, the remix market is saturated with auteur-theories focusing on the producer-as-author.)

Finally there are those DJs, musicians and engineers, some of them associated with dance music and hip-hop, and others with punk and its after- math, who have made an aesthetic out of sampling . . . and in some case, apl i t ics out of stealing. M/A/R/R/S, Cold Cut, Steinski and Mantronix are

’ in the former category. For this school of sampling, ’stealing’ segments from other records is a part of the meaning of the ‘new‘ text. The music press have dubbed this The Age Of Plunder, and the New Musical Express in particular has tried to make a case for this aesthetic as the Next Big Thing. Punk col- lagists, my second sub-category, include Cabaret Voltaire, Big Audio Dynamite and the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu.

The problem here, for theorists of the postmodem condition, is this: first, many of these producers appear to be working with fairly traditional notions of creativity and authorship - M/A/R/R/S - typically for pop - followed up their ‘postmodern’ hit with a series of intra-band disputes designed to establish who was r e d y the ‘creative’ force behind their music. Second, and more devastating, is the argument that the Age of Plunder is in fact one in which pop recuperates its history, rather than denying it. This thread of interpretation is evident in the numerous instances in which digital


montagists and scratchers claim to be educating the pop audience about its history, as Tim Simenon suggests: ‘Take James Brown, all of his records are being reissued. Kids of 18, 19 wouldn’t have heard of him if it wasn’t for hip hop.” Arguments about authenticity, authorship and the aura in contemporary pop are clearly very complex, and I don‘t claim to have even sampled the whole truth here. But it is clear, in my view, that the postmodem and Benjaminite positions cited by Wollen are much too simple, bcause they are (typically) too abstract. In the first place, it is clear that the pleasure of consuming pop auras has not disappeared in the age of its mass production. If the aura is now produced on a mass scale, this has not led to its demystification. Indeed, I have noted that attempts to expose the marketing of the star aura in pop (some of them initiated by entrepreneurs informed by political and social theories such as post-structuralisms), failed precisely because the discourses of authorship remain dominant . . . and because large sections of the pop audience refuse to consume self- consciously. Pop fans generally appear to want their stars clad in demin, leather and spandex, not ironic quotation marks.

The fact the post-punk pop’s effort to make the past contemporary mght just as easily be viewed as a new interest in itshistory is a further problem. Just as serious, it seems to me, are the continuing concern with creativity informed via a Romantic aesthetic, the dominance of ‘realist’ and dance- oriented uses of sampling technology, and the naturalisation of the ‘technology’ that the postmoderns make so much of.

Pop might be eating itself, but the old ideologies and aesthetics are still on the menu. That, in my view, is indisputable. The fundamental questions for the postmodern theorists are these: First, do we need a postmodem theory of society/aesthetic in order to understand postmodem cultural forms? And, second, what is the status of the developing postmodern aesthetic? Is it, in Raymond Williams’s terms, an emerging condition that will perhaps rise to aesthetic dominance? Or is it in fact an aspect of economic, historical and technological developments in pop that need to be understood in the context of the continuing dominance of realism, modernism . . . and Romanticism?

In the essay I referred to in my opening comments, Peter Wollen con- fidently states: ‘Clearly, post-modernist forms . . . demand a post-modemist aesthetic.’ He goes on: ‘The old critical apparatus has tended, in practice, to lead either to an exaggerated cultural pessimism or to a polemical over- enthusiasm’ (Wollen, 1986: 169). And yet the fact that so-called postmodem theory reproduces exactly that banal polarity (albeit sometimes as parody) suggests that this body of work has no privileged hold on postmodern cultural developments. In my view the reason for this is very simple: by


conflating postmodernism as theory and as condition, the former finds itself with a vested interest in promoting the latter, if not morally and/or politically, then as a cultural form of far greater significance than the evidence often suggests. It is for this reason that we need to probe beyond the ritual incantation of pastiche.

Notes My thanks to Joe Gore for many suggestive and helpful comments on this essay.

As I write, in March 1988, the US National Bureau of Standards has just ruled againt record company proposals to include ‘copy code’ (an electronic system for preventing home taping) on CDs. ‘Beat generator’, New Musical Express, 27 February 1988. ’Bytes and pieces’, New Musical Express, 14 November 1987. Random Notes, Rolling Stone, 24 March 1988. ‘The wilder side of Depeche Mode’, Keyboard, October 1986. Interview, Calendar Magazine (San Francisco), 1 March 1988. ‘Beat generator’, New Musical Express, 27 February 1988. I am thinking of the anarcho-situationist politics of Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid (The Sex Pistols, Bow Wow Wow), and the playful post- structuralism of Green Gartside (Scritti Politti] and Paul Morley (Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Art of Noise, Propaganda].

References Baird, J. (19881, ‘The neo-analogue revival hits NAMM’, Musician, No. 114, April. Frith, S. (19851, ‘Art versus technology: the strange case of pop’, Media, Culture

& Society, Vol. 8, No. 3, July. Frith, S. (1987), ‘Copyright and the music business’, Popular Music, Vol. 7/1. Gore, J. & Goodwin, A. (1987), ’Your time is gonna come: talking about Led

Zeppelin’, ONETWOTHREEFOUR: A Rock and Roll Quarterly, No. 4, Winter. Grossberg, L. (1987), Paper to Conference on ‘Popular Music: Research Trends and

Applications’, San Jose State University, May. Mowitt, J. [ 1987), ‘The sound of music in the era of electronic reproducibility’, in

Richard Leppert & Susan McClary (eds.), Music and Society, CUP. Pattison, R. (1987), The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music In The Minor of

Romanticism, OUP. Pond, S. (19881, ‘The song remains the same’, Rolling Stone, 24 March. Stratton, J. (19831, ’Capitalism and Romantic ideology in the record business’,

Popular Music, No. 3. Wollen, P. (19861, ‘Ways of thinking about music video (andl postmodernism)’,

Critical Quarterly, Vol. 28, Nos. 1 &2.

CQ M L D

Sample and hold: pop music in the digital age of reproduction

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