MICHAEL JACKSON AND PLUNDERPHONICS
He was still the King of Pop, but like most modern monarchies, it was a largely ceremonial position.
John Oswald’s 1989 album plunderphonics consists of 25 pieces in which samples are taken from a single performer and radically altered to create a wholly new composition, both challenging the idea of copyright (permission was neither asked nor granted) and exploring the possible atomic properties of an artist.
Oswald’s inversion of Bad’s title track furthers the skittering that lays in the original. The song is savaged, diced by Oswald’s digital Ginsu and brutally pieced back together as a convulsive eruption of ego devolving into the chirping of crickets and cold howling wind, eerily predicting the coming change in the public perception of Jackson as he transformed himself from beloved to spectacle. It is interesting that no matter how finely Oswald cuts this music, each tiny morsel is immediately identifiable. Each molecular grunt is Michael Jackson, a particle that in the right medium could replicate the whole. It’s not until we get to the arid crickets and wind section that we lose touch with the source.
DAB (mp3)
