Plunderphonics

Like the marauding conquerors from the days of yore, John Oswald loots and pillages indiscriminately from popular song, creating Plunderphonics. In his work, Oswald takes a “plunderphone,” or the smallest familiar fragment of a popular song, a “recognizable sonic quote,”[1] and changes the way people listen to that fragment. He adds drum tracks, chops the song up into pieces or plays a song with another track in the background, sometimes all at once. Still, the plunderphone is recognizable throughout. Western composition is based on continual rearrangement of the scale and Oswald has taken that to the extreme. Oswald’s reorganization is his composition, challenging the idea of composition as the trained musician knows it. Rather than compose from single notes in a scale or key, Oswald uses chunks of existing pop music as if they were those notes. Plunderphonics subverts expectations and questions how far you can take the use of music. Oswald demands that the audience thinks about and listens to songs in an entirely new way, and completely changes the intentions and even image of the original artist.

The most stunning example of an Oswald’s shifting of expectations is his reworking of “The Great Pretender.” Originally recorded by the early rock and roll group The Platters, this classic song has been covered by various artists like Freddie Mercury, Sam Cooke, The Band, and country icon Dolly Parton. In this last entertainer, Oswald finds his muse for the song he titles “Pretender.” The name Dolly Parton conjures up many images and thoughts and I am willing to bet a great deal of money that neither the images or thoughts are subtle. Probably, these images have something to do with big hair, twang, and an extremely exaggerated hourglass figure. This familiar version of Dolly Parton is how “Pretender” begins, but the singer revealed at the end of the song is someone entirely different. Oswald applies a deaccelerando to Dolly’s original track revealing a handsome tenor voice a fourth below Dolly’s original vocals. By suggesting this different aspect of Dolly Parton, Oswald looks at gender expectations and asks how much of what the audience sees and hears is actually true. Someone asked to listen to these two tracks would pick the lower voice as the more natural sounding, begetting the question, who is the real Dolly Parton? Is Dolly Parton the woman she appears to be or is “she” actually a he who has conned the world into believing he is a buxom woman with a chipmunked version of his original voice? This sample has been aptly described as a “sonic sex change.”[2] Oswald challenges gender ideas and the preconceived labels the listener already has, and asks the audience to look at an existing popular artist and idea from a new direction.

John Oswald is completely open about his use of existing recordings of popular entertainers in his Plunderphonics. When his work is based on a song by Elvis Presley, the track he samples in undeniably Elvis Presley. Unfortunately, this is where the art of Plunderphonics runs into a problem. Whereas frequently used musical ideas like the “Dies Irae” are free game, copyrighted works are another story entirely. As is seen in “Pretender,” Oswald alters the fundamental image of a performer. This is famously a point of contention for entertainers whose music has been used and reworked, with the most famous example being Michael Jackson’s strenuous objection to the use of his song, “Bad.” If On the Plunderphponics website, one website heading is an explanation of the litigation that makes several Plunderphonics discs unavailable for purchase. Despite this, Oswald stays true to his commitment to sharing music openly without profit, using the phrase “You may have it but you may not buy it or sell it”[3] in reference to Plunderphonics. John Oswald pairs his unusual way of looking at the sampling of music with his unusual view of music distribution. His work is for those who want to listen to it and explore someone else’s view and reworking of previously recorded music, regardless of prior claims of ownership.

I am not sure that Plunderphonics needs to be added to the canon. I do think that people need to be aware of its existence, if only for the album cover art (which is mind-boggling). Personally, I enjoyed the puzzle aspect of Plunderphonics. The puzzle aspect involves trying to identify that song snippet that you know you know, but you just do not know right now. I also enjoyed how Oswald uses an anagram for everyone’s name, although the ones I have not figured out yet are driving me crazy. Despite the personal enjoyment I derive from Plunderphonics, I would probably not include them in the canon. The main argument against Plunderphonics for me is the recreation of these pieces, which is next to impossible. From a performers’ standpoint, Plunderphonics are problematic. There is little that translates to live performance, leaving a performer to essentially push the play button on the CD. With the inability to connect with a live audience on another level, Plunderphonics takes on the role of another track downloaded from the internet.

[1] Kevin Holm-Hudson, “Quotation and Context: Sampling and John Oswald’s Punderphonics,” Leonardo Music Journal vol. 7, (1997); 21.
[2] Jim Leach, “Sampling and Society: Intellectual Infringement and Digital Folk Music in John Oswald’s Plunderphonics,” in The arts, community, and cultural democracy, ed. Lambert Zuidervaart, Henry Luttikhuizen (New York: Palgrove Macmillan, 2000), 123.
[3] Plunderphonics, “Unavailable…but,” Plunderphonics, http://www.plunderphonics.com/ (accessed April 20, 2009).