quoted 1 line i think moby is a total idiot.>i think moby is a total idiot.
agreed, and "Play" is an embarrassment.
quoted 4 lines i think it is apalling that white men like>i think it is apalling that white men like
>moby and fatboy slim and others bastardize black
>standards/spirituals/classics to make their
>"electronica" shite.quoted 3 lines moby, et al> moby, et al
>seem content to toss all sense of morals et al
>out the window
is there really a moral priciple that could be followed about who can be sampled by who, and could it really be defined by race? I don't think so; you'd wind up with some sort of musical Jim Crow law (or a "protected species act"), albeit spurred by an empathy for a class/economic underdog.
perhaps the problem is aesthetic, not moral. Moby managed to make a sow's ear out of a silk purse. His collages were too heavily reliant on the strength of somebody else's material, his creative contribution was to "personalize" something better heard on its own terms. had the result been truly creative and interesting, I don't think "moral" questions would arise about Moby.
another issue lies in the old dialog about what constitutes a legitimate use of someone else's music vis a vis sampling. using little snippets or riffs to give color to a truly original piece of music is not problematic. using someone's entire song (as Moby does) without their consent becomes problematic, and that has nothing to do with class or race.
as far as the black/white thing in music goes, there's just been such an enormous amount of borrowing/stealing of ideas, and more recently, direct samples, across "color lines" that I think it's really off base to get upset about some white guy using samples of music by a black person. think of all the hip hop acts that sampled white acts (rock bands, Kraftwerk, etc), think of the profound influence the white Tin Pan Alley songwriters had on jazz, etc. etc. It is pointless --and utterly untenable -- to expect musicians to rely only on musical resources by their racial/economic/whatever peers.
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