On Appropriation

What if Appropriation—no one knows when or how—were to become an insight whose illuminating lightning flash enters into what is and what is taken to be? What if Appropriation, by its entry, were to remove everything that is in present being from its subjection to a commandeering order and bring it back into its own?

—Martin Heidegger, "The Way to Language" (133)

David Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, originally released in 1981, marks a key moment in the history of sound culture. Recorded just prior to the advent of digital sampling, Byrne and Eno used edited and looped found, field, and folk recordings (mostly of devotional singing and preaching from around the world), but also radio recordings, setting them to synthesized ethno-funk grooves. Spanning the Dadaists' use of found materials in their art, Duchamp's famous urinal sculpture Fountain or his Mona Lisa appropriation L.H.O.O.Q.; the modernist cutting and pasting practices of Eliot and Pound; the use of found sounds by Cage; the discovery of musique concrete by Pierre Schaffer; Burroughs and Gysin's discovery of the cut-up as a technique for both writing and tape manipulation; and the situationist practice of detournement, appropriation has a long and well-known history in twentieth-century western avant-garde art, one which Byrne and Eno were keenly aware of when they made My Life in the Bush of Ghosts in 1981. Parallel to this tradition is an African Diasporic tradition of appropriation, which we can trace from the mixing of breaks by hip-hop DJs like Grandmaster Flash in New York in the 1970s; through the use of collage and editing in Jamaican reggae (I am thinking, for example, of the cow sounds on Lee Perry's "Cow Thief Skank"); back through various traditional practices, such as the "spiritualization of found and recycled objects placed in yards and upon the tomb as altar," which Robert Farris Thompson has described as being characteristic of the greater Afro-Atlantic world (1996, 181). Nigerian author Amos Tutuola's 1953 novel My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (whose title Byrne and Eno appropriated apparently without having read the book) also has its place in this tradition. Written in English by a Christian Yoruba man, the book describes a series of acts of possession and dispossession that the narrator is subject to when he is driven out of his village by the wars of slavery. The originality of Byrne and Eno's Bush of Ghosts consists in bringing together these two traditions of appropriation in a new way—one that has profoundly influenced contemporary musical forms, including hip-hop (Hank Shocklee, Public Enemy's producer, has cited it as a key moment in his musical education), drum and bass (Goldie sampled the record on Metalheadz's genre-founding "Saint Angel"), and more.

What is appropriation? The word has at least two contradictory—but related—meanings. First of all, the sense in which it is used above, that of taking something and making or claiming it as one's own, or using it as if it was one's own. Secondly, that which is proper to a situation or a person—that which is "appropriate." Appropriation, according to the first definition, often involves taking something that arguably belongs to someone else. There is the sense of seizing, of making a claim on something that has already been claimed by someone else. According to the second definition, it is that which one has a right to claim as one's own, which is "properly" one's own (we will set aside for now the question of where this right and claim come from). I began with a quote from Heidegger, from a lecture given in January 1959, six years after Tutuola's book was published. Appropriation plays a highly significant role in Heidegger's later work. In his second, esoteric book, Contributions To Philosophy (written in 1936–38 with the subtitle "Of Appropriation"), and throughout the latter part of his career, Heidegger emphasized the significance of appropriation...