Sampling Media ed. by David Laderman, Laurel Westrup (review)

“Take something. Do something to it. Do something else to it.” That was a gnomic utterance by the artist Robert Rauschenberg, riding high (Time magazine cover story) when I was in college. It could be an epigram in this informative essay collection. What some call mix culture, and Stefan Sonvila-Weiss called mashup culture, David Laderman and Laurel Westrup, looking back to the 1980s rap group the Beastie Boys, prefer to call sampling. The catholicity of their introductory flyover cites the tape loops of Jim Shaw in his college-age audio sessions with Mike Kelley, Oulipo literary experiments and the Beats’ cut-up texts, even the allusions to Hong Kong cinema found in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill.

Laderman posits that what was once Dada is now normative in mainstream media, a viewpoint shared with Lev Manovich, historic techniques coming to the fore with the artists in the 1970s New York “Pictures Generation.” He mentions Bruce Conner’s rhythmic use of found footage and notes the music by Nick Cave and Barry Adamson. A key work is DJ Spooky’s 2004 Rebirth of a Nation, which I found myself telling my graduate Digital Media class about on the 100th anniversary of D.W. Griffith’s racist Birth of a Nation predecessor, the source material for Spooky. Like Danger Mouse, Spooky demonstrates unique artistry found within a cloud of broken parts. Richard L. Edwards’s “Remixing with Rules” examines restrictive remixes, such as that of the rule-making Oulipo writers. One might add Ron Silliman’s 1978 book-length poem Ketjak, which used a Fibonacci sequence to assemble its sentences. R.D. Crano’s “What Ever Rubbish Was at Hand” appreciates the images of the spectacle and intentional exploitative class dynamics in the films of Guy Debord, giving us a fine explanation of Debord’s motivation and process. In his chapter, Barry Mauer juxtaposes textual strategies in three personages in different realms. These three are the Paris Cine matheque Director Henri Langlois’s small-c catholic curatorial practice; Memphis radio disk jockey Dewey Phillips’s genre-busting in days of racial segregation, to excite and inspire musicians like Elvis Presley; and Jean-Francois Lyotard’s sampling in curating a labyrinthine, tech-heavy 1985 exhibition, which Mauer knows only from eyewitness descriptions. All of these curators of pop culture succeeded through showmanship and theatricality. Ryan Alexander Didich contemplates duration, and Martin J. Zeilinger appreciates Martin Arnold’s “Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy,” a deft sampling of young Mickey Rooney’s movies. Other pieces explore fans’ own re-cuttings of anime and hip hop documentary films (Laderman authored an enjoyable 2010 book on punk musicals). We learn of the Trailer Park, a contest for assistant editors to mash up movie trailers put on by the Association of Independent Creative Editors (AICE) remixing given footage. One result was Robert Ryang’s “Shining,” where footage from The Shining is transformed from a horror movie to a feel-good tale of a bucolic family.

Outside the U.S., chapters cover Mexican music in its political context, romantic imagery in Hong Kong and Chinese karaoke, and Sydney, Australia, dance clubs’ interface with the international dance scene. Spanish artists David Domingo and María Cañas use motifs of pigs and sausages, causing this review to remember a trip to Extremadura, whose shops proudly featured jamon, jamon y jamon. Even the Macarena, of Spanish but dubious origin, was a source of remixes, including “MacArena,” where interviews with the ’90s dance craze’s purveyors root in the trough beside anti-McDonald’s messages.

Corella Di Fede examines the 15-minute celebrity of Antoine Dodson, and undertones of class and race disparities, despite the best inclusive efforts of Gregory Brothers, who autotuned and sampled the news story where Dodson expressively told of his sister’s near-rape in their Huntsville, AL housing project. She might have mentioned the similar news story of Sweet Brown, a Southern black woman...