|
Down by Law: Great Dance Records You Can't Buy
In the fall of 1983, the aggressive indie dance label Tommy Boy tried
to put some legs on a less-than-swift 12-inch by sponsoring something
called "G.L.O.B.E. & Whiz Kid's 'Play That Beat Mr. D.J.' Mix
Context!" The idea was for club DJs to doctor the G.L.O.B.E. &
Whiz Kid record after the manner of Kiss-FM's Shep Pettibone, whose
exclusive versions of the hits exploited an old club technique by
intermixing hot dance tracks with hooks and breaks from other hot or
classic dance tracks. The grand prize was $100, the Tommy Boy
catalogue, a Tommy Boy shirt, and, oh yes, airplay and club
distribution for your mix. For most of the contestants, that last was
basically a career opportunity--a chance to get out of the clubs and
turn into the next Jellybean Benitez. But in the public arts,
distribution is power--aesthetic power. Tommy Boy certainly didn't
realize it then and possibly never will. But by offering to expose a
single mastermix to listeners all over the country, the label was
putting into motion a set of artistic, ethical, legal, and political
contradictions far beyond the power of an indie dance label to
resolve.
Pettibone and Benitez were part of a blue-ribbon panel who downed
pizza and beer at a listening party where the winner would be chosen
from 10 finalists. The hot dance track of the moment, Shannon's "Let
the Music Play," saw heavy action in the early going--since both songs
are addressed to DJs, there was even a thematic connection. But the
ninth entry didn't come from a DJ, and it didn't dip into Shannon's
well, either. It did glance off hot dance tracks by Yaz, the Peech
Boys, Herbie Hancock, Culture Club, and Indeep amid rap, disco, funk,
and rock and roll classics too numerous to mention--as well as less
melodic material from Humphrey Bogart, Dr. Saint, Betty White's dance
instructor, and the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration. When the tape was through, the judges broke into
applause. They knew instantly that Double Dee & Steinski had taken
mastermixing into new realms--or appeared to, which was good enough
for openers.
On the dance floor, the aesthetic charge of any kind of mix--be it the
reshaping of a single song's trajectory by repeating key passages and
adding filigrees and sound effects from other records, or the
cross-referential interweaving of different pieces of music--has
always been what literary ideologues refer to as
sensationalistic. It's not just that it's perceived kinetically,
without passing Mind, which though bad enough is reluctantly
recognized as inevitable in some lower forms. Even worse is that in
most cases it never goes upstairs for processing, because each
thrill-packed improvisation is designed to be obliterated by the
next--in an environment that is not, let's face it, conducive to
cogitation. Once the mix is preserved on tape or disc, some sort of
considered perception becomes possible, but even then meanings are
hard to grasp, much less define, because they're so often purely body
meanings. The mixer looks for rhythmic relationships that provide an
invigorating surprise rather than an alarming shock--a love bite that
doesn't unswitch the pleasure circuits, a popper that doesn't kick off
a coronary. Sometimes there'll be lyrical links, but rarely will they
do more than throw one DJ or fire or I-will-survive reference smack
against another. Less showy but deeper are strictly musical
connections, likely and unlikely. It's one thing to know that James
Brown begat George Clinton begat Rick James begat Grandmaster Flash,
or that "Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll" and "Another One Bites the Dust"
have the same papa, another to put those genealogies into
practice. And when a pancultural visionary like Afrika Bambaataa
follows a hip hop medley with a percussion break from Grand Funk
Railroad's "Inside Looking Out," it can really change your worldview,
in a small way.
Double Dee & Steinski--for Doug DeFranco, a 27-year-old engineer
at a small commercials studio, and Steve Stein, 32-year-old producer
of TV spots for Doyle Dane Bernbach--went over the top with both kinds
of meaning. Fast-talking hip hop junkie Stein had gotten r&b fan
DeFranco hooked at the Roxy a few months after they'd met that summer,
and soon they'd evolved into a natural team, splitting roles like a
rock group--funky technician DeFranco the reliable bassist/drummer, a
regular guy whose tastes ran to the latest dance records, idea man
Stein the mercurial singer/guitarist, a record-collecting media nut
with global-village tendencies. "The Payoff Mix," as their tour de
force came to be called, was pieced together in DeFranco's studio in
12 or 14 hours over two days. What was most striking about it wasn't
the plethora of quotes, 24 in all--most of the contestants went for
quantity, though few got over 20. It was the specificity and
catholicity of their references. This was underlined by the spoken-word
stuff: in the middle of a record whose chief lyrical motif was
"play it on the radio," "play it for the punk rock," etc., here was
Bogie rasping out
"you played it for Harry, play it for me"--on the one.
But the record's underlying kick was somewhat subtler. "Play That Beat
Mr. D.J." is almost designed for mastermixing--with the DJ importuned
to play that beat after almost every line at times, new musical
phrases can be substituted constantly. At first, "The Payoff Mix"
sticks with scratching on the original, using quotes as brief bridges
or pointed interjections, such as the abrupt but perfectly timed
self-promotion by a rival crew, the World's Famous Supreme Team, after
"play it on the radio." Midway through, however, the original is
reduced to bridgework, as the mastermix, having respectfully pointed
out G.L.O.B.E. & Whiz Kid's virtues, goes on to show who's boss
with a series of 10- or 15-second dance collages comprising, say,
"Apache," "I'll Tumble 4 Ya," and "Starski Live at the Disco Fever."
One of them even incorporates "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on
the Wheels of Steel" the first (and still damn near only, as we'll
see) mastermix ever commercially released. And for an epilogue there's
a comment from Fiorello LaGuardia: "And say, children--what does it
all mean?"
By asking itself that question--and inducing a populist hero to equate
this arcane dance record with the Sunday comics he loved to be baffled
by--"The Payoff Mix" finesses the answer. This doesn't mean there
isn't one, though. It's just that as in so much speculative art,
question and answer are all but identical, complementary functions of
a very contemporary, self-mocking, quasi- parodic tone--a tone you
could call postmodernist if it weren't so unpretentious and
optimistic, so pop (and maybe populist). The mix's cognitive
dissonance comes from the voluble Steinski, it's heartening synthesis
from Double Dee's hands-on groove, which endows the absurdist bits and
pieces with a logic as ineluctable as a whole greater than the sum of
its parts. Half deconstruction and half celebration, this is a message
of brotherhood for the age of media overload, disarming
"postindustrial" capitalism with humor, know- how, access, and
leftfield panculturalism. And like so much optimistic art, it's more
utopian--hence more trouble--than it knows.
Hardcore dancers were never wholly convinced by Double Dee's
groove--they admired "The Payoff Mix" as a novelty and did their thing
to less nerve-racking backing tracks. But on dance radio, which like
all radio is for listening, there were no such hitches. Though their
only obligation was to air the contest winner once, many stations put
the promo cassette into serious rotation, thus sparking sales of "Play
That Beat Mr. D.J." Perhaps not quite as much as might have been
hoped, however--there was discernable consumer demand for the
mastermix itself, and Tommy Boy thought seriously about turning it
into a retail item. According to the label's Rick Dutka, these
fantasies were quashed by the company's attorney. The problem was
simple: releases for those 24 absurdist bits and pieces, almost every
one copyrighted. Getting them would obviously be an administrative
nightmare. But putting the record on the market without them would be
a legal one.
This was cautious advice from a music-biz lawyer whose priority was
keeping a modestly capitalized client out of litigation, which
threatened from two classes of plaintiff--music publishers and record
companies. Legally, you see, my use of the word "quote" has been
misleading, because Double Dee & Steinski don't quote, they
reproduce, electronically. Not that this is anything new. The homey
glow of interpretive approximation that once surrounded the notion of
quotation was blown away in 1956 by "The Flying Saucer," a "crazy
novelty" in which Brill Building eccentrics Buchanan & Goodman
lifted dialogue directly off hit records that they pretended were
platters from outer space, e.g.: Newsman: "We're about to hear the
words of the first spaceman ever to land." Spaceman: "A
womp-bom-a-loo-mom, ba-lom-bam-boo." "The Flying Saucer" rocketed into
the top 10 and stimulated sales of such one-and two-year-oldies as "I
Hear You Knockin'" and "Earth Angel" before lawsuits from less
good-humored copyright owners led to a royalty agreement. Quotation is
more like the Ritchie Family's "The Best Disco in Town," a maxi-medley
in which Jacque Morali's studio group strung together phrases of a
line or two from more than a dozen songs and ended up owing full
statutory royalty on all of them, which is why Jaap Eggermont
negotiated fractional payments before marketing his Stars on 45 studio
group in 1981. The publishers could sock Morali because his record was
a fait accompli; when Eggermont threatened to withhold release, they
dealt. Why not? As Jay Lowy of Motown's Jobete Music (long notorious
for its prohibitive lyric reprint rates) told Brian Chin in Record
World: "Medleys have acted as a very positive force: they act as
good demos. There's not enough on a medley to stop anyone from
recording the whole song again. It's found money."
As a publisher, Lowy fails to draw the rather far-reaching conclusion
that would seem to follow from this estimably realistic assessment: if
medleys are so "positive," what entitles the copyright owners to their
"found money"? Quiet as it's kept, the rationale of copyright law
isn't that private property is the highest philosophical good. It's to
provide economic incentive for the spread of ideas and information,
incentive that would presumably be vitiated were works open to
unlimited reproduction and resale. Historically, copyright has been
circumscribed by the doctrine of fair use, designed among other things
to permit criticism, which is often impossible without examples. In
non-critical discourse, the chief test of fair use is whether the use
impairs the potential market value of the appropriated material. And
as Lowy acknowledges, Stars on 45 no more cut into Stevie Wonder's
sales than "The Flying Saucer" did into the Penguins'--or than "The
Payoff Mix" did into Culture Club's.
But demo or no demo, Lowy wouldn't have been as sanguine about Double
Dee & Steinski's electronic reproduction as he was about Stars on
45's medley of quotes, not in an era when the home taping flap has
occasioned attacks on "rampaging technology" like this one from RCA
president Robert Summer: "Our defense of copyright, while rooted in
this industry's struggle for solvency, is part of an overall defense
of what is so fundamental to living society--its cultural
foundations." And who can say what a judge would have made of "The
Payoff Mix" had Tommy Boy released it and (by no means a certain
consequence) gotten sued. Aesthetics and law mesh poorly if at all,
and while I say the mix qualifies as parody and discourse and for that
matter criticism, a more literal soul might well conclude that Double
Dee & Steinski grabbed a piece of "I'll Tumble 4 Ya" because it
has a good beat and you can dance to it--and be right. So no manner of
parallel--the increasing dependence of the visual arts on
appropriation techniques, or the untroubled experience of WBAI's Peter
Bochan, a significant influence on Steinski who sells duplicates of
his spoken-words-and-music Shortcuts tape collages--proved
encouraging enough to give the ordinary consumer access to "The Payoff
Mix."
The biggest push came in England, at Polygram, Tommy Boy's
well-staffed U.K. distributor. It was a nightmare. After a month of
form letters and phone calls, legal assistant Sally Bevan left for
A&M believing she'd landed almost every release. But Island's
Clive Wills, who took up the job after Tommy Boy moved to his label,
found that many of Bevan's contacts denied having granted
clearance. In two significant areas, however, Bevan's and Wills's
experiences were identical. First, indie labels were pleased to help,
while majors balked. (Bevan says she was down to two acts on one
major--"Labels always tell you it's the acts." She declined to name
either; my guess is CBS, corporate home of Culture Club and Herbie
Hancock.) Second, nobody expected money--all clearances were granted
gratis, with no royalties at issue.
Meanwhile, Doug DeFranco and Steve Stein proceeded with their lives.
Delighted with their newfound renown even though they'd long since
gone through the prize money, the did a James Brown mix called "Lesson
Two" in the spring of 1984, shortly after Stein got himself canned at
Doyle Dane. DeFranco had a career objective: he wanted to build his
rep as an engineer and mixer. Stein's basic motives were tribute (to
JB, to Bambaataa's "Fusion Beats," to Fiorello LaGuardia) and
"personal satisfaction," the chance to apply his professional skills
and global vision to what he loved most--and then, if "The Payoff Mix"
was any example, have people hear it. "Lesson Two" was distributed to
DJ and radio stations in a pressing the duo financed themselves. Soon
DeFranco had moved into Stein's Brooklyn apartment, where they set up
their own eight-track studio. Stein was working as a free-lance cable
consultant; DeFranco quit his job and began to organize his own
free-lance gigs, including board work and a little mixing at Tommy
Boy. By early 1985 the label had something else for them.
And thus Double Dee & Steinski wound up with one more tour de
force and one more administrative nightmare. Hip-Hop--The
Album, the centerpiece of both, was an exemplary venture for an
aggressive indie dance label: a compilation of six long-out-of-print
indie dance hits that hip hop DJs had been buying used and bootlegged
for 25 and even 50 bucks ever since they'd revealed their funky break
beats to mixer-shamans like Kool Herc, Bambaataa, and others. Tommy
Boy's licensing included the right to create a single out of all this
groove, and Double Dee & Steinski were commissioned to mastermix
one up. In fact, they did two--one constructed from nothing but the
six album tracks, the other incorporating their usual plethora of
references. But neither was ever commercially released, and neither
was Hip-Hop--The Album. Seems that ownership of Herman Kelly
& Life's "Dance to the Drummer's Beat," which as it happened
provided the mastermix's recurrent theme, was, shall we say, in
dispute. Dance music is a rough business. Tommy Boy shelved the
project.
I have a cassette of the album, and it's too bad you can't buy it--a
more user-friendly gathering of strange percussion bits and
unselfconcious James Brown imitations would be hard to duplicate, much
less make up from scratch. But the real mastermix you couldn't have
bought in any case. My tape begins with the commercial-release
version, a virtuosic piece of mixing that masks the slight tempo
shifts between break beats with refrains and intros also lifted from
the six records. In its subtle way, it shows a lot of wit, but this
time subtlety isn't the big prize. The proof is in the three-song
promo 12-inch of all Double Dee & Steinski's mastermixes that
Tommy Boy graciously mailed out after Hip-Hop--The Album
died. "Lesson 3," as the full-length hip hop mastermix is called, has
the pizzazz of a full-fledged administrative nightmare. It begins with
spoken words from Otis Redding--"We gonna do a song that you never
heard before"--and goes on to JFK announcing that "the torch has been
passed to a new generation of Americans," Lauren Bacall inviting the
Human Beat Box to pucker up and blow, Ed McMahon jamming Johnny into
Newcleus, the castanet break from "Hernando's Hideaway," a Groucho
Marx joke, a "Flying Saucer" quote, applause from the Whoopi Goldberg
album ("We wanted something polite," Steinski explains), and Fiorello
LaGuardia taking his second curtain call. Also, perhaps, his last.
For in the course of 1985, DeFranco fell in love, took another job
doing commercials, and moved out, no longer inclined to pursue the
nocturnal habits of a hip hop junkie. He took the equipment with
him--Stein his hardly the first media nut who can't work a board--and
Double Dee & Steinski are no more.
The split seems completely congenial, and both artists will pursue
their own careers, as the saying goes, but you know what's lost when a
group breaks up: synthesis. The spoken-word interjections on Double
Dee's hot dance remix of downtown composer Peter Gordon's "That Hat"
share the cut-up surrealism one hears on other arty remixes, and I
suspect a certain aura of abstraction will linger when he gets
mainstream assignments, as he surely will. Steinski's "Technical
Difficulties," a medley drawn from indie phenom Steve Gottlieb's hit
compilation of TV themes and set over a functional "Planet Rock"
electrogroove, is more overtly satiric (hence less complex tonally)
than any of his Double Dee collaborations. Yet though both pieces
diverge discernably from their common heritage, they do continue on
all too familiar tradition: neither seems likely to achieve commercial
release. The head of CBS Masterworks was so baffled by "That Hat" that
he had to be talked into pressing up white-label DJ copies. And though
Gottlieb had been warned that Steinski did better on radio than in
clubs, he was disturbed by the mastermix's "fragmented" groove and
commissioned a substitute.
After dozens of hours and several thousand dollars, Steinski is also
nearing completion on another piece you won't be able to buy: a
mastermix of JFK's assassination that he compares to Paul Hardcastle's
"19." One keystone of the concept is a specific newscaster: "Walter
Cronkite is the national daddy. I don't want anybody else. You want
the thing, you don't want the almost-thing." But CBS, fearing
"trivialization" of Big Daddy's wholly owned vocal cords, refused
clearance on Cronkite's 1963 coverage. So Stein is settling for more
personal satisfaction. He'll get Cronkite-included cassettes out to
interested parties when he's done, and as long as he's not taking
money for them, the law will protect him. But the law is an ass.
Profit isn't the issue for Steinski, and except in a speculative way
(will "trivialization' reduce Walter Cronkite's market value?), it's
not the issue for CBS either. The issue is who gets to use this stuff,
and for what--whether the public has any claim on the output of
public artists whose creations would mean nothing without it. In an
age when all products of the mind have been commodified, the freedom
to sell equals the freedom to disseminate. It means access,
control. That's what's really at stake in Steinski's work.
I wouldn't claim Steinski is any kind of rad; disarming
"postindustrial" capitalism is a sideline for him. He's just a
perpetually disillusioned optimist who still assumes that the sounds
and images rippling through the American consciousness are, forget
copyright, every American's birthright--that we're all free to
interpret and manipulate them as we choose. His disillusion, I should
say, didn't begin with his recent disappointments--it goes back at
least as far as JFK's assassination, and it's what activates his
absurdist, quasi-parodic tone. A rad like me could even wonder whether
his disillusion isn't a little corny, but--especially but not
exclusively when it's turned around by Double Dee's freewheeling
natural optimism as well as Steinski's own--it's clearly too much for
the information barons. The keepers of the copyright at CBS wanted to
protect the physical and intellectual property called "Walter
Cronkite" from "trivialization" because they didn't want it sullied by
Steinski's absurdist disillusion, or his lowlife pancultural optimism
either. They didn't want it criticized --not as a judge is
liable to understand that concept, with its traditionally forbidding
baggage of essay form, but much more sensationalistically, and much
more potently and directly for that.
I don't mean to single out CBS, although I do suspect that the more
information one controls, the less one worries about other people's
information deprivation. And I should make clear that neither Stein
nor DeFranco, media pros both, fully agrees with me. But I think this
is censorship, and I think it's reprehensible. Appropriation art isn't
even the parallel, because appropriation art's primary purpose is
undermining images. Double Dee & Steinski only recontextualize, as
in that quintessential 20th century genre, collage, thus achieving a
cool tone that's more affectionate, more irreverent, and more
distanced, than, say, a Weird Al Yankovic takeoff. Maybe
G.L.O.B.E. & Whiz Kid or James Brown can legitimately claim
partial credit for the vitality, meaning, and commercial value of
their respective mastermixes. But to make the same kind of claim for
Culture Club or Ed McMahon is like forcing Tom Wesselmann to get a
clearance from House Beautiful, or wherever he cut out the
gardenscape you can see through the Great American Nude's window. I'm
not saying there isn't a kick to hearing Culture Club or Ed McMahon
changed utterly--to hear the thing, not almost-the-thing, subjugated
by a rival culture and vision. And I'm not saying they should like
being taken over by hip hop's new generation of Americans. But they
shouldn't be able to stop it by administrative fiat. As long as the
copyright is a weapon of censorship, "postindustrial" capitalism will
remain armed.
Village Voice, Mar. 25, 1986
|