MUSIC; Warhol: The Herald Of Sampling
Published: November 7, 1999
(Page 2 of 2)
The other pop-music genre to embrace sampling is electronica, a catchall term for the mostly instrumental, largely English-based dance musics (trip-hop, hardcore, drum-and-bass, big-beat) that have flirted with mainstream status for most of this decade. Unlike hip-hoppers, electronica musicians prefer to camouflage their sampling. The big-beat superstars the Chemical Brothers, for instance, are painstaking alchemists to whom samples are mere putty, the starting point for their sonic sorcery. A song like ''Elektrobank,'' for instance, which reportedly contains some 300 samples, is a ''molten mass,'' as the group member Tom Rowlands put it. ''Things are knitted together very tightly, and you can't see where one sample is and one isn't.''
For all their pride in altering samples to the point of unrecognizability, the Chemical Brothers can't resist the lure of wholesale, undisguised appropriation. Their breakthrough hit ''Setting Sun'' meticulously copies the memorable rhythmic underpinning of the Beatles' ''Tomorrow Never Knows.'' That the Chemical Brothers didn't actually sample anything is beside the point: ''Setting Sun'' is an unabashed lift. Twenty-five years ago, they would have been abused by critics for a lapse in taste and originality. Not today. Rolling Stone called ''Setting Sun'' ''the best single of 1996, hands down.'' Borrowing someone else's work, in other words, is no longer a failure of imagination but a strategy, an accepted method of music making.
''I want to be a machine,'' Andy Warhol said in 1963. In part, he was acting the provocateur against the still-powerful Abstract Expressionist dogma that every drip and brush stroke must express the artist's inner self. And in part Warhol was saying that he wanted to make art that reflected its origins in late-industrial society, both in the means of its creation and in its appearance. He wanted a machinelike technique and found it, to an extent, in the photomechanical process that let him produce an unlimited number of identical pictures. He wanted his art to look machine-made, too, and by substituting silk-screened photograph for painted image, he tried to banish from his pictures every trace of his hand.
The artist who wanted to be a machine would have been fascinated by electronica and hip-hop, for they realize his ideal of machine-generated art. He would have appreciated their negation of traditional musical skills like instrumental technique, ensemble playing and note reading, for he performed just such a negation himself when he abandoned hand painting, thumbing his nose at the venerable legacy of picture making. And just as Warhol sought to efface himself from his pictures, the electronic pop musician, who funnels every idea through a machine, removes his human presence, his touch, from the song. Whether he knows it or not, he lives in a Warholian world.
In 1961, Warhol, anxious to distinguish his work from Lichtenstein's, began to increase his use of repetition, or seriality. It became one of his hallmarks. Gazing at a 6-by-8-foot painting of 200 Campbell's soup cans, one's eye roams restlessly, unable to find an organizing principle or focal point, which is just what Warhol intended. As far as he was concerned, any immanent, organic structure would be an artificial overlay; any sense of resolution, artificial. Seriality, moreover, gave his work the machine-made look he wanted; those 200 red-and-white Campbell's cans could be fresh off the assembly line. So could the multiple Marilyns and Elvises: celebrities are products, too.
The same relentless seriality characterizes electronica and hip-hop, whose songs are strung together out of endlessly repeating one- and two-bar loops. The 32-, 16- and 12-bar choruses that have undergirded pop music since Stephen Foster no longer apply here. While electronica's repetitiveness is obviously rooted in its dance music function, a number of its stars -- the Chemical Brothers, Underworld, Fatboy Slim -- long ago developed large armchair audiences. Electronica's seriality has as much to do with post-modernist aesthetics as with dancing.
Regardless of the putative gap between ''high'' and ''mass'' culture, Warhol's art, electronica and hip-hop inhabit the same aesthetic universe. It's a reduced world, unwilling to attempt the modernist masterpieces of a Picasso or an Ellington (or even ''A Day in the Life''), for it holds such grandeur in suspicion. Its own aspirations are more modest: the soup cans of Warhol, the repetitions of dance music.
In this universe -- ours, for better or worse -- originality no longer matters. The challenge is not to fabricate something new but to cast the already fabricated in a new light. Creative rummaging for a ready-made source to reuse -- this becomes the crucial talent, supplanting the traditional virtues of imagination and technique. The only aspect of the picture-making process that intrigued Warhol was the search for the right photograph to silk-screen. ''The selection of the images,'' he told an interviewer, ''is the most important and is the fruit of the imagination.''
Years later, the dance music producer-remixer Armand Van Helden analyzes his work in strikingly similar terms. ''If you get the right loop . . . it's worth gold. But it's getting that right loop . . .''
What would Warhol say about such a remarkable coincidence of ideas, across such an apparently wide distance? Probably ''Fabulous!'' or something equally banal. Just to throw the scent off. Just to camouflage the acuity with which he saw our world for what it was, and what it would become.
Photo: Andy Warhol was the founding father of appropriation in art. (Associated Press)(pg. 49) Drawing (Stephen Savage)(pg. 46)