Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 88

80

Popular Culture Review

noise and combat sounds from computer games and cinema soundtracks produces
gendered meanings in the construction of masculine representations. The dominant
model of culture in Western society is based upon the notion of the creative artist:
a work is “authentic” because created by an authorial human subject. However,
the sampling techniques upon which this music relies are potentially undermining
of masculine notions of authorial identity: the use of literally pre-existent materials
threatens to render notions of authorial authenticity, historically aligned with
masculine identities, redundant (Hebdige, 1987; Langlois, 1992).
An example of a track which uses sampling techniques in this way is “Synthetic
Fury” (1998) by DJ Spooky, a New York jungle DJ. “Synthetic Fury” samples a
diverse range of sources and styles (drum’n ’bass, rap, horror film, science fiction,
robots, alarms, machine noise), and structures them as a collage held together and
bridged by scratching. Although this track includes the sounds of violence, as did
both the previous examples, as the title suggests, this is less a representation of
human combat and is instead a machine war: the samples used in the opening of
the track are reminiscent of the sound of the light sabre from the Star Wars series
of films {Star Wars 1977) and a lumbering robot akin to the robot-machine Ripley
uses to fight and kill the Alien in the film Aliens (1986).
“Synthetic Fury” problematises the notion of the author in two primary ways.
First, this track takes cut’n ’mix culture to an extreme, sampling from a wide variety
of sources (video games, films, real world sounds, various pop music styles) and
juxtaposing them in a collage. When the music is all samples, and when they are
so diverse, there would seem to be little basis on which to claim the presence of an
“authentic” voice. A possible counter-argument to this position is that rather than
being a new technique with radical implications for music production and reception,
sampling techniques are simply an extension of a more general technique in which
popular music makes meaning by referencing other musical styles5. However in
“Synthetic Fury” the multiplicity and diversity of samples are such that no clear
narrative emerges. Whereas the absence of a clear narrative in the Photek track
discussed above was accompanied by a privileging of an autonomous listening
mode, this does not seem to be the case here: juxtaposition of diverse samples may
discourage the emergence of a clear narrative in “Synthetic Fury”, but the meanings
of the sounds remain. The consequence is a listening experience which refuses a
clear narrative or privileging of a single subjectivity but similarly refuses an easy
assimilation to an autonomous mode of listening.
The second way in which the track problematises the role of the “author” is
that it represents loss of human agency musically. Whereas the rest of the track is
pervaded by a drum ‘n’ bass beat and punctuated by scratching, the middle section
lacks both (4:19-5:18). The absence of scratching is foregrounded by the sound
of rapidly looping white noise akin to a needle looping on vinyl. What this sound