#8 - Miller Quotes and Who Sampled

#8 – Miller Quotes and Who Sampled

Rhythmic Cinema

“They found freedom in the abandonment of roles that they, like everyone around them were forced to play.” p. 80

In this section Miller is discussing the perceived tyranny of Isaac Newton’s “absolute time” and how Surrealists attempted to escape from the sort of strict regulation of time that the Industrial Revolution fostered.  It also touches on individuality and how people are forced to adhere to certain roles and “play a role.”  Individuality comes up a lot in “Rhythm Science”, and I found this mention of social roles interesting because I am always trying to figure out where society leaves off and the individual begins.

“Prime Time: Life as a boundless-level video game with an infinite array of characters to pick from.  Poker-faced the dealer tells you “Pick a card, any card.”  It’s a game that asks “Who speaks through you?” p. 77

                This quote also has to do with individuality; specifically Miller seems to be addressing the effect of mass media on the creating of individual identity.  With the constant bombardment of media comes an “infinite” number of possible roles to take on, none of them entirely new.

Rhythmic Space

“It all seems more and more that the creative act itself is becoming a source-code like Linux where people create and add modules of thought-ware to the mix, making it all a little more interesting.” p. 89

                Here Miller is talking about how our expressions of creativity are changing; he’s suggesting a remix ethos where everyone contributes in some small way to the development of a shared creation, from which (I assume) individual projects are shaped, reshaped and returned to the meld.  This particular part reminded me of Weinberger’s “social knowing” where everyone shares their knowledge and works towards a consensus together.

Errata Erratum

“Put simply, he was “into” the space between things, the motes of ideas and intentionality that objects and the emotions that they invoke in us drifted through his mind like a self directed swarm of birds.  The flocking instinct holds the geometry of ideas together.” p. 93

                The “he” that Miller is referring to here is Marcel Duchamp, another Surrealist, perhaps best known for “The Fountain” a signed urinal.  I am absolutely unsurprised that Miller is so fond of Duchamp; they seem to have a similar outlook on art and both seem to tend/tended to eclectic creative repertoires.  Miller is attempting to convey the driving force behind Duchamp’s work.  It was the elegance of the phrasing that attracted me to this quote.

The Future is Here

“Once you get their basic credit information and various electronic representations of that person who needs the real thing anymore?  That’s one of the oppositions I explore: my art critiques live and non-live.  The two are utterly mutually conditioning, and this cycle will only intensify throughout the twenty-first century.” p. 101

                In this section Miller seems to be addressing the interesting state of social contact that the internet has engendered.  This seems to refer to how people can know interact solely by electronic mediums. However, this seems to suppose that the electronic representation is both less real than and is divorced from an immediate biological presence.  Which is to say, if you only know someone over the internet, do you automatically know less of them than if you’d met in person?  This quote also reminds me of the “technological determinism vs. technological neutrality” debate.  From this I would guess that Miller leans more towards technological determinism, but perhaps I am misinterpreting his intent.

The Prostitute

“Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.  The truth is cruel, but can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.” p. 109

                I’m not entirely sure what Miller is trying to say here (or in general really, but hey), but I wanted to include this because, again, it is wonderfully written.  I would guess that Miller is making an argument against “art for art’s sake”, especially considering the preceding commentary regarding argument and advertisement.  Miller seems very concerned with the meaning behind things, especially music.  I expect that he wouldn’t be terribly invested in something created solely for its beauty, except in what meaning he could derive from it.  This is not a philosophy that I subscribe to, but I can understand the reasoning behind it.  

“The sample is an interrogation of the meaning we see in a song, of its emotional content lifted away like a shroud from a dead corpse, only to be refitted and placed on another body.  That’s the deal – you renew the cloth by repurposing the fabric.  That’s recycling.” p. 113

                This seems to be an excellent quote to demonstrate Miller’s feelings towards sampling as a way of recycling content.  It’s an interesting idea; taking something that’s already been used and keeping it from going to waste, a way of applying the recycling method to music.  It is an able analogy, creating something new from something old is what the best remixing and sampling is able to accomplish.

Who Sampled

                The song whose “genealogy” I chose to explore was “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen.  The first thing I noted about this song is that it doesn’t sample or remix any other songs (at least according to the site).  By contrast there are a lot of songs that have sampled it, and a veritable legion of covers done by artists as diverse as the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to Weird Al.    The diverse flavors of the sampling/cover songs ties into the ideas of breaking out of roles and the freedom from time.  Artists were able to weave whatever genre Bohemian Rhapsody is into their own vision, be it either rap (“Poor Boy” Shaun Boothe), or slow guitar music (Grey DeLisle).  The “breaking out of roles” also can apply to the original song given the bewildering range of genres in a single song.  Different artists are also able to take this song from a specific time (Queen has always seemed to me to be very much a song of its era, before my era though so take that with a grain of salt) and bring its ideas into a contemporary setting (some with more facility than others).  This is also a good example of sampling as recycling; Bohemian Rhapsody is an interesting song and there seem to be a number of interpretations of its meaning.  The artists who chose to sample or cover this song are able to take an aspect of its emotional resonance, reinterpret it, and put it into a personalized context (or a parody context, but I suppose humor can be personal too).  Another thing that I found interesting is the way that Queen recorded the song with multiple tracks recorded over each other and many sections spliced together, almost as if Queen were sampling themselves.