The Man Who Stole Michael Jackson's Face John Oswald creates new works from existing sonic materials. His Plunderphonic got him in trouble with the copyright police. (It also got him gigs with the Kronos Quartet and the Grateful Dead.) By David Gans On John Oswald's Plunderphonic CD, Dolly Parton's voice slows to that of an operatic tenor - aural sex change, the artist calls it. The bombast of Beethoven's Seventh blares like a bronco in the chute, Count Basie's "Corner Pocket" twists in a kaleidoscope of sound, fragments of James Brown's voice slip from Public Enemy recordings. And in the pièce de r/sistance, Michael Jackson squeaks out a version of "Bad" like a kid on nitrous. I played the Canadian composer's work recently at a dinner party I threw for some friends, and eventually someone asked the crucial question: "Did he have permission to do this?" Why should John Oswald have to get permission? Both the vinyl EP and the CD are clearly marked "Not For Sale." His work is the sketchbook of an inspired audio artist, a calling card intended to raise Oswald's profile by bringing the listener inside his head for a taste and showing off his mastery of offline editing. But Michael Jackson, CBS Records, and the Canadian Recording Industry Association said his work is illegal, and Oswald found himself hiring an attorney, agreeing to a settlement, and giving up copies of his work. John Oswald's instrument is technology - analog and digital editing. His "revised performances," created from existing works, often make wry commentaries on the content of the source material. He makes some interesting points about how we hear and listen to music. Oswald calls the genre that creates new works from existing sonic materials plunderphonics. The moniker comes from a paper he gave to the Wired Society Electro-Acoustic Conference in Toronto in 1985, titled "Plunderphonics, or audio piracy as a compositional prerogative." Oswald scrupulously credits the creators of all the material used in his plunderphonic releases. He is not trying to slip anything past his listeners, nor is he hoping to profit from the inspiration of others. But in this day of digital samplers and tape recorders, "plagiarism" as a moral or legal concept is almost beside the point. A powerful idea is not going to crawl back down his brain stem just because of a chance encounter with some traditions about "intellectual property." Oswald lists the sources of his work. Unfortunately, Oswald says, in aural media "there is no convention for putting quotation marks around something." By freely appropriating sound from the vast sea of information that surrounds us, and by taking pains to acknowledge that he is doing so, John Oswald is making explicit what is often ignored or obscured in the highly derivative world of mass-marketed culture. The music industry traffics heavily in familiarity but values what it considers uniqueness: it's the nature of the game, if you're a recording artist, to come up with something that sounds enough like everything else to get the attention of a record company or radio programmer but is just different enough to be copyrighted. It's perfectly OK, commercially speaking, to copy the guitar tone of a revered rock star or employ without alteration the factory-preset sounds in your electronic keyboard, or to raid wholesale the gestures and tonalities of a much-loved genre from the past. Everything old gets to be new again and again, as the Stray Cats, Harry Connick Jr., and any number of kids with granny glasses and Rickenbackers have demonstrated over and over and over. But if your music too closely follows a sequence of notes, you can get into a heap of trouble. Fantasy Records once attempted to sue John Fogerty for plagiarizing himself - it claimed a song he recorded for Warner Bros. was a rip-off of a song he recorded with Creedence Clearwater for Fantasy. Heavyweight George Harrison couldn't summon enough legal horsepower to fend off the owners of The Chiffons, who beat up the Beatle in court for plagiarizing "He's So Fine" in his song "My Sweet Lord" a few years later. The damnedest things are coming up for legal disposition these days. Astronomer Carl Sagan took issue with Apple Computer's use of his name as the code word for a project in development - and when they changed the name of the project to "butthead astronomer," he sent the lawyers around again, apparently seeking to defend his dignity. Onetime counterculture ironist par excellence Bob Dylan took offense when Apple used "Dylan" - again as an internal project designation, not even a commercial product. (Apple contends that the name derives from the phrase "dynamic language.") Plunderphonics challenges how we listen to music. The inner sleeve of the EP features a long essay by British journalist David Toop, expounding on the pervasiveness and randomness of sound. Toop notes the lack (until very recently) of fossilized sound for study by audio archaeologists ("It is unlikely that the buzz of a mosquito will ever be found transfixed in perfection like a buried Chinese horseman") and asks some of the questions about ownership of sound that John Oswald has brought to the foreground. When you buy music, Toop writes, you get "the privilege of ignoring the artist's intentions. You can take two copies of the same record, run through them with an electric drill, warp them on the stove, fill the grooves with fine sand and play them off-center and out of phase half-speed on twin turntables through a Fender Vibro Champ amplifier with the vibrato on maximum and the volume on 11." "I started off as a listener," says Oswald, "but like most kids, I had a short attention span. I couldn't comprehend the structural pretenses of classical music: in the sonata form, the exposition and development would stretch on for several minutes, and by the time the recapitulation arrived, I would have capitulated." Over time, Oswald made himself into an "active" listener. "I'd play 33-1/3 rpm LPs of classical music at 78 rpm, and - lo and behold - the structure would come into focus in an aural version of an overview." Listening to Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" at 78 rpm "gave it the edge I imagined it must have had to upset people in 1913." (Stravinsky's Paris première caused riots, which may have had more to do with the dance than the music.) "I'd listen to be-bop slow," Oswald says. "Charlie Parker would sound like a beluga whale, but I could begin to hear how he put a solo together. That's something a lot of jazz musicians have done. And quite often I found that I preferred listening to some pieces of music at speeds other than the ones they were intended to be played at. "I was doing a kind of manipulative listening in fairly complex ways, and as my interactive listening habits grew more complex, I began to think of ways to preserve them for other people to hear." Digital audio has opened up a world of possibilities for both musicians and attorneys. Samplers and digital-editing systems have given rise to new genres of derivative works. Composer Carl Stone, who creates exquisite music with computers and appropriated sounds, says, "We must distinguish between musical laziness and transforming a musical object using your own creativity. But there's absolutely no way you can put that into a statute." Since the '80s, "sampling" has referred to taking small portions of existing recordings as building blocks for new works. The practice is controversial, both artistically and legally, and some have tried to devise a system for licensing samples so the originating artists can be paid for materials. But what John Oswald does is not "sampling." Rather than incorporate fragments of other people's recordings in his compositions, Oswald usually works with a complete piece of source music. Oswald has used a variety of tools and techniques, from archaic to futuristic: he varies the speed of a turntable; slices up analog tape; builds an "imaginary orchestra" in which each virtual musician plays only one note (klangfarbenprobe); builds a jazz quartet from four separate and unrelated solo performances; presents ambiguous information to a computer; loads fragments of the Beatles' "Birthday" into a sampling keyboard; instructs live musicians to play along with an Elvis Presley record, instructs other musicians to play along with those tracks, then wild-tracks the once-removed tracks on top of an edited version of the Presley cut without the intermediary material. And so on. In 1989, Oswald collected his experiments and pressed a thousand copies of the Plunderphonic CD, which he distributed free of charge to radio stations, libraries, musicians, and critics. Plunderphonic asked the musical question, How can we be sure the "original" artist, whose wishes are sacrosanct, did not derive anything from any other source? Oswald's stunning cover montage for Plunderphonic grafted Michael Jackson's head and leather jacket onto an otherwise naked, Caucasian, shapely, young, female body. According to Oswald's reading of US and Canadian copyright law, and some lawyers' interpretations, Oswald had thought that by not selling Plunderphonic he was legally in the clear. "I was fairly confident that what I was doing was not breaking the law, but I got a threatening letter from some record-industry lawyers saying that they considered what I was doing illegal," Oswald recalls. Oswald found irony in Michael Jackson's action against him: Jackson has done his share of appropriating.