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Pop eats itself

April 27 2002
Daily Telegraph,
London

Neil McCormick encounters a new category of music - bastard pop -
which yokes together songs by odd and unwitting musical bedfellows, often
with startling results

I was flicking through 12-inch singles in an independent record shop
the other day, idly perusing the ever-proliferating multitude of genres
and sub-groupings (from "broken beat" to "electroclash") that constitute
the dance section, when I was struck by a particularly enticing new
category: "bastard pop".

Bastard pop is the rather clever name being given to a new form of
bootlegging, where two or more wildly different tracks are combined to (it
is hoped) original effect, usually without worrying too much about who
actually owns the rights. Among bootlegs currently doing the rounds is
Oops!... The Real Slim Shady Did It Again, which could be described
as the illegitimate offspring of Eminem and Britney Spears, a union
masterminded by a DJ who has chosen to remain anonymous, probably for fear
of prosecution for copyright theft.

Illicit and unlicensed recordings have long been a thorn in the side of
the music business, but, whereas in the past bootlegs tended to feature
live concerts and other hard-to-obtain material only of interest to the
most dedicated collectors, bastard pop has taken it into a new and
arguably more creative realm.

Certainly, it is throwing up some interesting if unwitting
collaborations between artists who would superficially appear to have
little in common. Urban girl group Destiny's Child get it together with
grunge legends Nirvana on Smells Like Bootylicious; big-voiced,
big-haired pop babe Christina Aguilera finds herself backed by scruffy
garage rock band the Strokes on A Stroke of Genius; and R&B
diva Whitney Houston is spliced with robotic German electro-pioneers
Kraftwerk on I Wanna Dance With Numbers.

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Cynics given to muttering that all pop music is the same may seize on
bastard pop as final proof. Here is a genre to erase all genres, existing
in a kind of alternative musical universe, where fashion distinctions are
blurred and every musical style is interconnected. "No one in their right
mind would put Christina Aguilera in a studio with the Strokes," says
James Hyman, co-host of London radio station Xfm's The Remix show and
something of a champion of the new bootleggers. "Yet it may be the best
record she never made. It's the work of a real musician's mind, someone
with an ear for detail."

Aguilera's record company, Warner Brothers, evidently feel differently
about it, having issued Xfm with a "cease and desist" order regarding
airing the bootleg. Bastard pop cuts to the core of what the music
business considers the major threat to its future profitability: internet
piracy.

Cut-and-paste montage techniques allowing the creation of something
ostensibly new out of old source material has been an essential part of
pop culture since the birth of hip hop, the invention of the twin record
deck and the proliferation of sampling technology in the late Seventies.
Grandmaster Flash's pioneering Wheels of Steel single in 1981 could
be said to be a prime example of bastard pop, combining elements from
recordings by Chic, Blondie, the Sugar Hill Gang and Queen. As for merging
two different records to artful effect, DJ duo DNA had a number one hit in
1990 by mixing one of their dance tracks with Suzanne Vega's a cappella
Tom's Diner, a recording that was made illegally but, after threats
of legal action, was subsequently licensed to Vega's record company.

In general, after an anarchic beginning, the recording industry has
managed to get a handle on sampling, so that officially released tracks
utilising samples tend to credit accordingly and pay royalties. However,
the explosion of illicit sampling on the internet in the past two years
has put the industry on the defensive.

In this digital era, no expensive studio hardware is required by
would-be bootleggers. Tracks are manipulated by easily accessible software
programmes, such as Acid, which enable pitch and speed to be adjusted and
new beats to be added, the results then being distributed across the same
internet from which original samples are gleaned.

"We get sent hundreds and hundreds of the things at Xfm," says Hyman.
"Most of them are absolutely shocking, just put together by schoolkids.
But I've got a musical Darwinist view: everyone can do it, so you've got
to do that little bit better to survive. Things could start getting really
boring now, but it's bound to throw up some really interesting new
mutations."

The industry's response at the moment seems to be, if you can't beat
'em, join 'em. This week, girl group the Sugababes release Freak Like
Me (on London records), which - pay close attention now - is a newly
recorded cover version of a popular illegal bootleg known as We Don't
Give a Damn About Friends, which combined R&B singer Adina
Howard's Freak Like Me with Tubeway Army's Are Friends
Electric? Sugababes version has been re-produced by the original
bootlegger, Richard X, with properly licensed samples. It is likely to
enter the British charts on Sunday at number one.

If you thought pop couldn't get any more confusing, some enterprising
criminal has been bootlegging the bootleggers by selling a bootleg album
entitled The Best Bootlegs in the World. According to leading
bootleg internet site boomselection.com: "Some people are not very happy
with it. Permissions from the bootleggers were not asked and we assume the
person behind it is making quite a bit."

Haven't the bastards ever heard of irony?

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