Techno-Prosthetic Romantic Futurism

Wilke's Parlor, or listen to the pork sizzle

Sampling isn't necessarily a new practice, although its application to LP records only dates back thirty years or so. [1]   Before that, however, there were oppressed people who's only access to culture was its commodities. They didn't have the education or the social advantage to become writers in the honorific sense. So they sampled. They hacked and snipped and recombined. Think of a book like Thomas Spence's Pigs' Meat. [2]   A counterblast to Edmund Burke, but not an argument. A mix, a series of samples that turns the works of majority culture against an oppressive majority. That's the politics of mixology, the cultural politics of sampling.


Notes

1. See The Vibe History of Hip Hop, ed. Alan Light (New York: Three Rivers, 1999).

2. Thomas Spence, Pigs' Meat; or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude, 3 vols. (London, 1795). Like any other cultural practice, sampling can have its reactionary uses, but I prefer to emphasize its insurgent effects.


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