Girl Talk

[manny at garfieldartworks.com]

> You're comparing putting a CD into a CD player and training for two
> decades on an instrument.

That's right, I definitely *am* comparing the two.
The advancement in technology allows you to put a CD into a CD player to
play other people's music, whereas in the 18 century you had to hire an
orchestra. The result is the same, regardless of the training time or
preparation. The result, not the means or the process.

> I compose music with computers. I put CDs into CD players. I perform
> on instruments. They're not the same thing. They're only loosely
> comparable in that the end product is some sound.

No, the process and the means are not the same, but I wasn't addressing that.
I'm talking about a specific end result, which is the performance of
non-original music.
In both cases, it applies, regardless of the means. It's either original,
or it isn't, by definition.
You playing "Axel F" on your keyboard is the same as Manfred Honeck
conducting Beethoven
as far as the originality of the result is concerned.

However, the thing about postmodernist tendencies is that with techniques
such as sampling (going back to Dadaism, Gysin's cutups, musique concrete,
etc), and with the whole cultural shrug that almost everything's been done
or tried already (kind of the musical version of Nakayama's "End of
History" spiel), the boundary between what is your creativity and what is
someone else's creativity breaks down. This doesn't have to be treated at
length here - Negativland and Josh Oswald dealt with it, as did I'm sure
many term papers and dissertations in the '80s. In the 21st century, no
more musical originality will emerge from Western culture (have you heard
anything original from Generation Y? I haven't!) unless a new technology
that produces new, unheard sounds is invented (like say, the ability to
make people hear subsonics or supersonics with the aid of in-ear nanobots,
or something crazy like that). otherwise, all creativity will flow from
hybridization of the West with other cultures whose music still sounds new
to us. This is happening now.

But anyway, what Girl Talk does is compose music on computers, and then
play music on computers using a program that allows for live performance
(Ableton Live). He doesn't just push a play button as if it were a CD
player. Therefore he is not a DJ.

And the reason I drew the analogy between the DJ and the orchestra was to
draw you into the heat of the argument, to get you to realize that when
you are performing live in your band, you are doing the exact same thing
that Girl Talk is doing, which is performing your original music in real
time. Only the process is different.