Warhol: the Herald

Cal CUIIIe LO ±II'O[¢, Satu IIaIi 1U111ucvqtuv, rizo was the festival's director general from 1974 to 1976 Continued on Page 55 ®.3t .T 4 ---==--=~~------~: il :.4? Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy, Eliza- [ beth Taylor and Elvis Presley; the;• remakes of the "Mona Lisa"; the;' Warhol: "Skull" pictures. Regardless of how he; worked, his art was unabashedly sec-© ond generation. More than anyone=] else, Warhol accustomed artists and }; critics to the use of borrowed imagery. pi The Herald He was the founding father of appro-;7 priation" (the currently fashionable '3 critical term), which has become a[] staple of postmodernism, an aesthetic { Of Sampling' strategy for an era in which the con-}} cepts of originality and authorship are {] rigorously questioned. ' JANN!Jl®I!WWW!NNWNlAAAwIJAAAAAOlMOAJANI»ANN»All»AO8AA . 'il By TONY SCHERMAN B the 70's, the theory and prac- ,b tice of appropriation had pen- [; ! . ,etrated the more cerebral " ENTION Andy Warhol's · corners of rock, with bands ~ relationship to pop music, like Can using tape recorders to bor• and the first name to crop row others' music. But working with [! M. up will be that of the Vel• tape was cumbersome, and pop-music j vet Underground, the band Warhol appropriation got a tremendous boost (" championed in the mid-60's. In fact, from the arrival of digital technology j! Warhol's art and ideas didn't find mu• in the early 80's. Now musicians had a !Z sical expression until the Velvet Un• miraculous tool, the sampler, with ! derground was long defunct. The arts which to mine the entire history of j don't evolve in temporal lock step, and recorded music., E it wasn't until the mid-80's, largely A sampler converts sound into digi-{± because of advances in technology, tal data; enabling its user to lift a ~ that pop music began to explore the musical sequence from one recording i; territory Warhol had opened up long and drop it into another. Samples can {} before. Today, the connections be• be used unaltered (like the James tween Warhol's ideas and pop music• ·Brown grunts that are a hip-hop cli-[ especially electronica and hip-hop = che) or, since digital data is infinitely [7 have only deepened, offering one more malleable, processed into unrecognl-! strand of evidence that Warhol, far zably new sounds. A short musical', from being the poseur and opportunist phrase (say, a catchy bass lick) can be [" many still consider him, was an artist sampled and looped'- programmed js and thinker of uncanny prescience. to repeat- forming the rhythmic and ; Warhol, who died in 1987, wasn't the commercial imagery in which the harmonic foundation for an entire i: first artist to use horrowed images, United States, circa 1960, was newly Stephen Savage song. With sampling, it became possi-!• but he was the first (along with Pop awash: the stuff of television, movies, ble to make recordings that bypass the {' Art colleagues like Roy Lichtenstein) photojournalism, advertisements and or the front page of The Daily News. In performer: second-generation, appro- }? to make the practice central to his art. comic strips, a barrage so insistent 1962, he worked out a semimechanical priated music. \ In doing so, Warhol, Lichtenstein & and seductive that it demanded atten• procedure in which he printed a silk• Our environment is as saturated au- f: Company were registering the tide of tion. screened photograph onto a painted rally as it is visually. Recorded music ; At first Warhol worked by hand, canvas. It became his trademark tech• is omnipresent: piped into stores, of-±, Tony Scherman is the author of painting simulacra of mass-cultural nique, used for most of his best-known fices and elevators, transportable via 'Backbeat: Earl Palmer's Story. artifacts like nose-job advertisements pictures: the portraits of Marilyn Continued on Page 49 (. lye [i«es /A/ov 7, )? I . , . The Herald of Sampling ] a oc save"ers et. Asa » sat ass Continued From Page 46 For all their pride in altering sam- saying that he wantedt om ake arj ples to the point of unrecognizability, that. reflected its origins in late-inf boombox, Walkman and car radio. the Chemical Brothers can't resist dustrial society, both inth e means o Armed with samplers, musicians the lure of wholesale, undisguisedi tsc reation and in its appearance. H} were free to respond to.sensory over• appropriation. Their breakthrough wanted a machinelike technique .-fi load as the Pop artists had, by help• hit Setting Sun" meticulously cop- found it, toan extent, inth e photome{ ing themselves to the- shards flying ies the memorable rhythmic under- chanical process that. let· -:3 past. In an environment crammed to pinning of the Beatles' Tomorrow produce an unlimited number..9 l bursting with recorded sounds, piec• Never Knows." That the Chemical identical pictures. Hew anted his.@J ing and patching them together may Brothers didn't actually sample any- to look machine-made, too, and D indeed be a more rational composi• thing is beside the point: Setting substituting silk-screened photo tional approach than ransacking that Sun" is an unabashed lift. Twenty. graph for painted image, he tried:t hallowed Romantic source, the soul. .. · i banish from his pictures every tra It didn't take long for sampling to, five years ago,they would have been ofhishand.®; { work its way into the pop main• The artist who wanted tob e" stream, but it was used sparingly, for Andy Warhol gave machine would have been fascinal33 exotic touches here and there or as a by electronica and hip-hop, for. tliey] : cheap substitute for real musicians. shape to ideas realize his ideal of machine-genera Sampling found its first real home in ed art. He. would have appreciate : hip-hop, whose pioneering South about art that are their negation of traditional musica 'Bronx D.J's used records and turn• skills like- instrumental technique] tables to splice songs together as far now embodied in ensemble playing and note readirs back as the mid-70's. Hip-hop had an for he performed just such a neg : appropriative, re contextualizing aes• electronic a and tion himself when he aband thetic from the start and took to hand painting, thumbing his nose : sampling like Elvis to a comb. hip-hop. the venerable legacy of picture me'} (Those early D.J's, by the way, ing. And just' as Warhol sought't j spawned a brand new, .. postmodern efface himself from his pictures, ti '} recording artist, the remixer, who abused by critics for a lapse in taste electronic pop musician, who funnel} · was hired to alter a recording as he and originality. Not today. Rolling every idea through a machine, rel : saw fit, usually for a dance club Stone called Setting Sun" 'the best moves his human presence,' ni-l audience. The result, a new record single of 1996, hands down." Borrow- touch, from the song. Whether he&; that incorporates an old one; is a ing someone else's work, in other knows it or not, he lives in a Warho} perfect instance of appropriation.) words, is no longer a failure of imagi- lian world: . · . ' ,. , . ; _: :,,:-- ' ... -,:-:,.· The hip-hop producer tends to nation but a strategy, an accepted In 1961, Warhol, anxioust o distin} : leave samples in their original, rec- method of music making.. guish his work from Lichtenstein's : ognizable state. The result works on • two levels. Aficionados 'get' the ref• I want to be a machine," Andy began to increase his use of repeti erence and appreciate the creative Warhol said in 1963. In part, he was tion, or seriality. It becameo ne of his recycling of pop history, while most acting the provocateur against the hallmarks. Gazinga t a6 -by-8-foot listeners, unaware that that funky still-powerful Abstract Expression- painting of 200 Campbell's soup cans : bass line was recorded before they ist dogma that every drip and brush one's eye roams restlessly, unable td} were born, still think it sounds great. stroke must express the artist's in- find an organizing principle.or /} A current example is the punchy : horn riff from Earth, Wind and • E$ Fire's 1978 song Fantasy" that p%%• Sean Puffy" Combs (whose major : skill as a producer may be his ear for a good sample) uses to anchor his NEW MUSIC new song "Angels With Dirty 11/9 Fiona Apple Faces." ,283'31 The other pop-music genre to em• Andrea Bocelli . brace sampling_ is electronica, a + N catchall term for- the mostly instru• 11/16 Beck Ani Difranco + , 'Jg mental, largely English-based dance Po 4.,1 + musics (trip-hop, hardcore, drum• Celine Dion TuER and-bass, big-beat) that have flirted with mainstream status for most of Marilyn Manson this decade. Unlike hip-hoppers, elec• Metallic a tronica musicians prefer to camou- F. RE. E 1, 5/I flage their sampling. The big-beat Will Smith superstars the. Chemical Brothers, MUSIC F© for instance, are painstaking alche• 11/23 Blondie % • mists to whom samples are mere putty, the starting point for their Dave Matthews Band sonic sorcery. A song like Elektro• bank," for instance, which reported• ROB ZOMBIE ly contains some 300 samples, is a HITS molten mass," as the group mem• ber Tom Rowlands put it. ''Things Choose From are knitted together very tightly, and [you can't see where one sample is These Great r~~ Chart developed large· armchair audiences. Electronica's seriality has as much to do with post-modernist aesthetics as with dancing. Regardless of the putative gap be• tween "high" and "mass" culture, Warhol's art, electronica and hip-hop inhabit the same aesthetic universe.

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