Editor's Note, 2/21/2013

Last week I bought tickets to see James Blake perform at Cat’s Cradle the day after graduation. I celebrated by revisiting Blake’s entire discography in what I later noticed was reverse chronological order. It took me a week to arrive where his back catalog began because I took a six-day siesta with “CMYK,” the title track from one of Blake’s 2010 EPs and my new favorite song of his. In his dizzying yet seamless arrangement of sounds, Blake samples a track that once overworked my iPod in much the same way—“Are You That Somebody?” by Aaliyah. Without a doubt, it’s this sample and previous attachment with Aaliyah’s music that makes “CMYK” so appealing, at least to me. And in a revelation that came soon afterward, I realized that some of my favorite songs also incorporate Aaliyah’s music to varying degrees: Kendrick Lamar’s “Blow My High” explicitly pays tribute to the late R&B singer and features an extended, computerized sample of her “4 Page Letter”; less noticeable is The Weeknd’s use of “Rock the Boat” to introduce his bare, seductive track “What You Need.” All of this is to say that art does not exist in a vacuum; every piece of artwork is inevitably derivative. But out of all of the artistic mediums—film, dance, visual art, literature—it’s music that has become the least obstructive to creative development via appropriation. A dubious honor, to say the least.

Both hip-hop and electronica are sample-heavy genres, and unapologetically so. Clearing a sample is a multi-step process, one entangled in copyright law, ownership agreements and royalties. In the hip-hop community, the de facto rule is that you don’t need clearance for samples used on mixtapes because a) mixtapes are usually released for free and thus fall under the “nonprofit” clause of the fair use balancing test, and b) your mixtape probably won’t reach 50 Cent-levels of fame anyway, so the chances of getting caught are slim. The framework is shaky, and there are definitely instances of lawsuits that fall outside of this general rule, but it’s a step in at least acknowledging that derivative work isn’t antagonistic to useful, inspiring art. Rather, it isn’t really antagonistic toward anything.

Part of the problem lies in the current usage of the word “derivative.” It’s one of those pointy barbs that each music critic reserves for a truly devastating below-the-belt hit when describing an album, because the last thing any artist wants to have their work called is “derivative.” What used to be a neutral term to describe anything that’s based off an already-existing work is now conflated with being unintelligent, uninspired, boring. These adjectives are antagonistic to what every artist wants to be, which is original and creative. Of course, this isn’t a zero-sum game, as the many detractors of “derivative bullsh*t” would have you think. Music harbors many testaments of creation through appropriation; a popular example is the late hip-hop producer J. Dilla, whose album Donuts is reminiscent of an intricate, sprawling watercolor, where each color is a different looped sample, each brushstroke a careful manipulation of the original track. What’s more, many other artists have re-used J. Dilla’s beats, burying the samples’ original context even further into abstraction. If we can accept that recontextualizing music “artifacts” through sampling is indeed a skill, why are we so reluctant to transfer the same line of thinking to other mediums?

We are especially resistant when it comes to literature, where the curse of the two-dimensional medium is to think in terms of binaries­ of artistic creation. Lifting someone else’s paragraph to include in your novel consequently means not writing your own in that space. And more importantly, lifting someone else’s paragraph would be called plagiarism. As if that’s a bad thing. Thankfully, authors like Johnathan Lethem and David Shields are speaking up to address the literary community’s skittishness with the p-word. In a 2007 essay entitled “The Ecstasy of Influence,” Lethem discusses how art functions both in a market economy and a gift economy, both of which treat plagiarism in markedly different ways. The kicker? Lethem plagiarized the entire article, ending with a list of sources from which he “stole, warped, and cobbled together” his essay. Is it wrong to call Lethem’s piece brilliantly “written”? I’d argue not, and I’d also argue that today, a writer’s foremost goal doesn’t need to be originality. Both Lethem and Shields proved their ability for more traditional creative success before taking on a more experimental form. Shields’ self-described manifesto Reality Hunger takes issue with this idea, saying, “People are always talking about originality, but what do they mean? As soon as we are born, the world begins to work upon us, and this goes on to the end. What can we call our own except energy, strength, and will?” Preach.

True originality—at least, originality as we have come to believe in it and praise it—is also becoming increasingly unattainable in the digital age. How do we lay claim to entirely new territory in an artistic world that’s being populated at an exponential rate? Maybe originality or creativity shouldn’t be endgame after all. Kenneth Goldsmith, a poet and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, teaches a class called “Uncreative Writing,” where assignments include retyping five pages of any existing work, transcribing an audio piece or planting an already-existing slogan in a new space. The emphasis is not on creating the “new,” but managing the “old.” In this way, plagiarism is just as much an art itself than a detraction from art. Obviously, there’s a difference between Lethem’s article and dude’s Paradise Lost English paper that he “cobbled together” with his ass. And everyone is so wary of unintentionally plagiarizing because the idea of ownership both empowers us and terrifies us. Ownership is a responsibility, but it too does not exist in a vacuum, and is itself an illusion of control.

When The Weeknd re-released his three mixtapes as a compilation album the following year, the Aaliyah sample at the beginning of “What You Need” was noticeably missing. He probably removed it to avoid the trouble of clearing the sample, but now the song lacks both the subtle intertextuality and the whispery foreword to what is easily The Weekend’s most seductive track. The original track is so clearly his, even if it’s not all his. If I could have plagiarized this Editor’s Note from other sources to prove a point, I would have, but I’ve always imagined my swan song at The Chronicle to be a Recess-wide rendition of Beyonce’s “Countdown” instead of being unceremoniously fired.