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RB: And music as commodity, what does that mean to you?
GL: It’s going to take a little while for artists to find a new way of making money but the record companies have to go down.
PM: You’re going to see a lot more live shows. Bands just touring constantly, like forever. Like the eternal Grateful Dead tour.
RB: Music as a service rather than a good.
GL: No, I think you’ll find a good, but they’ll be alternative kinds of goods.
PM: Limited edition DVDs. Weird multimedia stuff that gives a special environment. Stuff that takes you out of the normal mix scene.
GL: Products, knick knacks, instruments. I mean, look at Maywa Denki. These are the Japanese guys who did a whole series of mechatronic instruments to perform with and among other things they’re basically very good hardware and software designers so they make these products and they make one of a kinds and they also work with toy companies in Japan to produce multiples that they then sell. And frankly they have some really cool equipment.
RB: What really interests me is that the Maywa Denki package as a performance with the incredible Japanese irony added in that is not apparent or not emergent from the products.
GL: I think they represent a really important mode of artistic practice right now. They design their own instruments, they perform on them and they also make those little plastic knickknacks, they’re making a fine income and they’re rock stars in Japan. Their schtick is that they pretend to be a company. What they bill as a concert -- what ultimately is a concert, in their narrative is a product demonstration. They dress up in these kinds of worker costumes and then they perform on these instruments and say, this is the following product.
PM: This is slamming!
RB: It’s fantastic.
GL: It’s incredible. You should see the video tapes because they are of product demonstrations that almost look like infomercials, you know.
RB: He has a very sophisticated understanding of kitsch.
GL: One of the products is basically a vibrator that you hang around your neck and it gives you a vibrato, and so the product demonstration is him singing...
PM: [looking at book] This is amazingly good and smart.
GL: These guys are ten times more hard core than Christian.
PM: [laughs] The conventional artworld has probably never heard of these people.
RB: They are rockstars in japan.
GL: They are huge in Japan.
RB: He’s got syndicated television performances. He’s a national comedian.
PM: Did you check out Albert-László Barabási’s book, what’s it called, Think Networks?
GL: No, and you’re going to have to say that name slower.
RB: And you’re going to have to spell it for me.
GL: Lazlo Blahdeblahdy?
PM: Albert-László Barabási. It’s a book getting a lot of hype because it’s about social networks and we have an interview with him on 21C at www.21cmagazine.com.
RB: We’ve talked a lot about the technical dimensions of this, let’s talk a little about the cultural dimensions. Paul, you’ve just had an encounter with someone accusing you of being inauthentic because you’re referencing Wagner...
GL: And that person was an Austrian doing reggae...
RB: Absolutely. Could you talk a little about the resurgence of reggae in popular music and how the sorts of cultural integrations and samplings and layerings feel to you and where you think that’s going? Sorry, that’s not a very coherent question.
PM: Well, reggae is sort of a global... at least for pop culture right now, it’s the global rhythm architecture, it’s set up a structure that everything from hip hop to dub to dance hall to house music, everything reflects that notion of polyphony, you know, multiple layers of rhythm interacting...
GL: That goes back further than reggae...
PM: Yeah, but I’m talking about global issues and each... each region might have had different types of polyphony, but if you go to India, you go to Brazil, you go to Iceland, you go to Greece, you go to whatever, everybody has that kind of beat going.
GL: Who’s more influential, James Brown or Bob Marley?
RB: Right now, I’d say Bob Marley. That’s what I’m saying, I’ve just been to 13 different countries in Europe and in every country they’re playing reggae. Reggae seems to have become the lingua franca of the pop culture scene. There’s also a lot of hip hop...
PM: But hip hop comes out of reggae...
RB: Sure. And it’s dub and older reggae resurging...
PM: If you look at the Indian diaspora they also had a lot to do with that because they brought in the different Bangla styles, there’s a large Indian community in Jamaica and also a large Chinese community. I like this idea that it’s a lingua franca, I mean, rhythm is a universal code, again when I think of code, I think of structures, I think of ideas of implicit structure and how that unfolds, you know, you can think about DNA as an expressionary kind of structure that’s not activated until it gets into certain situations, and it’s the same thing, when you’re looking at genetics or sound, to make a long story short, reggae somehow is the same equivalent, that expression of DNA in a global context right now, because it’s got so many other rhythm structures of other sounds and the way that it’s been able to absorb a lot of what was going on in America and transform it, because I think that Jamaica primarily had this kind of Caribbean diaspora in a way that was different from the African-American diaspora in the sense that they had a much more consolidated culture whereas the African-American was much more fragmented, they were able to have the island itself be a very accelerated laboratory for research and rhythm and style and sound, I’m just fasicnated with it as how the post-colonial context allowed the style to develop and change and transform and spread, again it’s a kind of viral modelling because the rhythm structure of reggae just works, it just literally falls into place in terms of polyphony and the idea of being able to absorb any other style, again that’s a dub issue, those are structural issues, but reggae really has an omnivorous quality, because of that I think that’s why local populouses respond to it. Hip hop is a similar thing but I think it’s an offshoot of reggae.