The Aesthetics of Consumption in the Age of Electrical Reproduction: The Turntablist Texts of DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist Michael Phillips Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the PhD degree in English Department of English Faculty of Arts University of Ottawa © Michael Phillips, Ottawa, Canada, 2012. ii ABSTRACT With new technology come new possibilities for the creation of artistic works. The invention of sound recording towards the end of the nineteenth century enabled musical performances to be “written” in the same manner as traditional, printed literature. The status of records as a form of writing and, moreover, as the material for further writing is demonstrated in the work of two hip hop artists, DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist, who assemble new, heteroglossic texts out of a wide array of sampled records. Two concerts by these artists, Product Placement (2004) and The Hard Sell (2008) – both of which have been memorialized on DVD – serve as fruitful examples of the potential for artistic production enabled by technology. Indeed, the genre of turntablism, which involves the live manipulation of vinyl records, requires the usage of technology in ways not intended by its original developers – a recurrent theme throughout the history of sound recording. By transforming the turntable from a passive playback device into an active compositional tool, turntablism, as exemplified by these performances, collapses the distance between consumption and production and so turns the listener into a performer. Furthermore, the exclusive usage of 45 rpm records as the source texts for the two sets dramatizes theories of intertextuality while simultaneously tracing the constraints placed on such artistic piracy by the copyright regime. These texts entail more than just their cited musical content; they also involve visual components. These include not only the video imagery that accompanies and comments on the records being played, but also the physical performance of the DJs themselves and the spectacle of the attending crowds whose response to the music constitutes part of the text itself. Following a theoretical and historical background that will situate these works within the history of hip hop and literature in general, this study will explicate these two multimedia texts and reveal how they demonstrate a concern not only with the history of sound recording, but also such issues as the influence of technology on cultural production, the complication of authorship through intertextuality, and the relationship between culture and commerce. Above all, however, both the form and content of these two performances also serve to highlight the value of physical media as historical artifacts in the face of increasing challenges from incorporeal digital media. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to acknowledge the work of Dr. David R. Carlson whose guidance and support was instrumental in this project. I would also like to thank Dr. Geoff Rector, Dr. Robert Stacey, David Taylor, Trevor Zimmermann, and Christopher Wilson for all their valuable input. Special thanks goes, of course, to my parents for their support throughout this time. Finally, I should also thank not only DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist as well as the innumerable sampled artists whose music made this study possible, but also all the DJs, collectors, bloggers, file- sharers, and record stores who help keep these texts in circulation. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Illustrations ........................................................................................................................................ vii I – GENERAL INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 1 II – THEORETICAL AND HISTORICAL BACKGROUND ...................................................... 6 A. Technology and the Author .......................................................................................................... 6 1. Benjamin, records, and aura ......................................................................................................... 6 2. The author and print ...................................................................................................................... 9 3. Copyright and authorship: the author as owner ...................................................................... 20 4. The electric author ....................................................................................................................... 23 5. The digital author and hypertextuality ...................................................................................... 26 B. Intertextuality ................................................................................................................................. 29 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 29 2. T.S. Eliot and The Waste Land .................................................................................................. 30 3. Centos ............................................................................................................................................ 31 4. The mobile .................................................................................................................................... 36 5. Stigmergy ....................................................................................................................................... 42 C. The History of Hip Hop ............................................................................................................. 46 1. Origins in dub ............................................................................................................................... 46 2. Early hip hop ................................................................................................................................ 51 3. Sampling: legal and aesthetic challenges ................................................................................... 61 4. Turntablism ................................................................................................................................... 72 5. Heteroglossia and the archive .................................................................................................... 74 D. The Invention of Sound Recording ......................................................................................... 84 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 84 2. Music notation and automated music boxes ........................................................................... 86 3. The first recorded sounds ........................................................................................................... 88 4. Fidelity and originality ................................................................................................................. 90 5. Bell‟s graphophone ...................................................................................................................... 93 6. Phonograph parlours and the consumer market ..................................................................... 97 7. The disc ....................................................................................................................................... 100 8. Piracy and radio .......................................................................................................................... 103 v E. From Acoustic to Electric Recording .................................................................................... 110 1. The electrical process ................................................................................................................ 110 2. The formal constraints of disc sides ....................................................................................... 115 3. Nipper, reality, and stereo ......................................................................................................... 121 4. Magnetic recording and tape .................................................................................................... 127 5. Cassettes and tape players ......................................................................................................... 131 F. Digital Sound, MP3s, and the Resurgence of Vinyl .......................................................... 137 1. The compact disc and digital audio ......................................................................................... 137 2. The MP3: discorporated sound ............................................................................................... 141 3. MP3s and collecting ................................................................................................................... 143 4. The resurgence of vinyl ............................................................................................................. 146 III – EXEGESIS ........................................................................................................................................ 153 A. Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 153 B. Product Placement .....................................................................................................................