Rappers and Bloggers

Rappers and Bloggers

The young wizard Ezra pointed me to this, rather disapprovingly:

Essentially, blogging is sampling plus a new riff. Political bloggers take a story in the news, rip out a few chunks, and type out a few comments. Rap songs use the same recipe: Dig through a crate of records, slice out a high hat and a bass line, and lay a new vocal track on top. Of course, the molecular structure of dead-tree journalism and classic rock is filthy with other people's research and other people's chord progressions. But in newspaper writing and rock music, the end goal is the appearance of originality—to make the product look seamless by hiding your many small thefts. For rappers and bloggers, each theft is worth celebrating, another loose item to slap onto the collage.

I kind of like it - I just spent my Friday night doing laundry so even the slightest hint of bad-ass image is appealing.

Back at the dawn of the video era, when MTV had about eight videos, three of them were Devo and two were David Bowie. And dwelling on the bloggers and rappers thing this line came to mind:

I am a DJ, I am what I play.

So I am a blogger. I am what I link? And I remember that vague feeling from the overnight radio days - wondering if anyone's listening. At least the blog has a hit counter...

And here's a serious thought: will print media's trend to pay-to-play archives (or, shudder to think, pay to play content) do to bloggers what the increased price of copyright clearance did to rappers? The spot-the-sample brilliance of BombSquad era Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys' "Paul's Boutique" vanished rapidly as it became too expensive to clear all the soundbites. If you were going to pay top dollar for the sample, for just ONE source. you better base the whole damn song around it, as I explain to my 15 year old daughter, in my best David Spade voice: "Oh, yeah. 'Bootylicious.' I liked it the first time I heard it, when it was called 'Edge Of Seventeen.'"

Will that happen to us bloggers?

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