Three groups of digital artists devoted to the subversion of restrictive copyright laws have chosen an unlikely target for their latest bit of culture-hacking: Beck, a pop musician whose own innovative recordings are bristling with beats and melodic fragments appropriated - but paid for - from other musicians' work.
The 13-track CD, Deconstructing Beck, isn't available at your local record store. Its own creators readily acknowledge the illegality of the project, which its sponsor - a San Francisco-based coalition of art academics and pranksters who call themselves rtmark - referred to in a press release as a "Beck rip-off." The CD is available only by mail order from partner Illegal Art, the brainchild of a Dartmouth grad student in music who has adopted the nom de guerre of Philo T. Farnsworth, one of the inventors of television. The Illegal Art site is hosted by the third partner in crime, detritus.net, which declares its mission to be to defend the rights of artists to "recycle" cultural information into new forms.
Beck himself - who is in the studio, recording the follow-up to Odelay for Geffen - has not yet heard the disc, but his management representative, Shauna O'Brien, says he is interested in hearing a copy.
Farnsworth defends the right of artists to act creatively on the cultural materials they are given by the popular media. "I don't even have to buy a Beck record to hear him," he says. "We're bombarded by images and sounds more and more every year. It makes sense to me to take all this stuff that's pushed at us and do something with it."
The tracks on Deconstructing Beck were compiled by Farnsworth, Jane Dowe, Steev Hise, and other audio artists, using slice-and-dice digital-manipulation software like SuperCollider, SoundHack, SoundEdit and ProTools. The source material includes tracks from Beck's Odelay, Mellow Gold and Stereopathic Soulmanure, as well as a tape of the singer being interviewed by Jay Leno. Even with song titles like "One Beck in the Grave" and "Paving the Road to Hell Pt. 2," Deconstructing Beck isn't a shoo-in to edge Odelay off the pop charts, where it has lingered for 86 weeks. The music - which is excerpted in RealAudio on the Illegal Art site - makes Beck's own edgy soundscapes sound middle-of-the-road.
On hearing of the project, Beck's attorney, Brian McPherson, fired off an email to rtmark, warning that "bragging about copyright infringement is incredibly stupid. You will be hearing from me, Universal Music Group, BMG Music Publishing and Geffen Records very shortly."
The issue, McPherson says, is that "people have to realize that if they're not paying the artist, and they didn't ask permission, they're stealing." Farnsworth says, uneasily, that he would "probably" be prepared to go to court if it came to that.
In 1991, the band Negativland was brought to court, and driven into bankruptcy, by Island Records, for producing a parody record called U2. (The book Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2 relates the history of the case.) Perhaps the most accomplished audio manipulation artist, John Oswald, was sued by Michael Jackson for his 1989 Plunderphonic album, which was emblazoned with a picture of the pop star's head cropped onto the body of a young Caucasian woman. Oswald settled out of court, destroying hundreds of copies of the disc, though it remains in circulation in the underground network of tape traders. Oswald went on to compose pieces commissioned by the Kronos Quartet and Elektra Records.
Deconstructing Beck was funded with a US$5,000 grant from rtmark, which siphons money to projects that, an anonymous spokesperson says, "critique products and the cultural environment ... and point out the stranglehold the corporations have on our lives and our souls." Beck was an unusual target for the group because he's "so good," the spokesperson says, but says "he's still a product. Beck's lucrative persona is something to subvert."
The group takes the credit for sponsoring guerrilla hacks like the insertion of scantily clad male characters in the popular Maxis video game SimCopter during the 1996 Christmas season, and the switching of voice-boxes in talking dolls by the Barbie Liberation Organization in 1989 that resulted in Talking Barbies uttering things like, "Dead men tell no lies."
rtmark presents itself as a kind of think tank and grant organization for cultural saboteurs interested in pulling inside jobs. Its roster of proposed projects includes the substitution of old sitcom clips for prime-time news broadcasts by TV station employees, and hanging giant banners from the windows of prominent hotels in Times Square reading, "New York Welcomes Saddam Hussein."
