Subverting Corrupt Culture One MF'er at a time

Does anyone else do what I do with music? I download music and there's something about it I just don't like sometimes...say, for example, thirty-nine seconds of applause and goofballs yelling WOOOOOOO! at the end of a track. I don't need to hear that; a few polite seconds of applause and then a fadeout will serve to remind me of the Dynamic Energy and Vibrant Intimacy of the Concert Setting, thank you, sirs.

Or say you download some techno/ dance track based on a thirty second preview on iTunes that sounds pretty good, and you get it and discover that it's two minutes of actual drumbeat preceded by five minutes of ambient electronic warbling before the beat kicks in. I don't know why that's the norm in that kind of music, but it is, and I don't like it. Maybe it sounds totally tubular when you're hallucinating on ecstasy and meth at a rave in a suburban industrial park under a strobe light, grinding against a face-pierced fourteen-year old of indeterminate gender, but come on: I don't want to have to do that every single time I listen to this song in order to enjoy it. Once a week is enough, thank you very much.

So I open the tracks up in Audacity and edit them. Audacity is a free program (you can download it here) that does for sound files what photoshop does for images. Even if you play a "protected file", it can record the output your computer sends to its speakers and make an unprotected, editable mp3 out of it. And if you practice a little bit, you can learn to make seamless--or close enough-- edits to files.

Used to not bother me much when there were bad words in a song, but now I've got two little sponges running around who like music and soak up new words. So when I downloaded Crystal Method's Name of the Game, I listened and ran smack dab into the first words of the song: LISTEN ALL YOU MOTHERF'ERS! That's repeated twice more in the song. That's not a song I want to play around the kids. Or the preacher when he comes over, you know? But it's a good song (you can listen to it here, obvious content warning), and it's not like the whole thing is some 2 Live Crew protracted meditation on hittin' that booty and slappin' a bitch; it's just a couple of bad words.

What to do? Do I keep it in rotation and run to the stereo to fast forward every time this track comes up? Delete the whole thing? Keep it in a special file where I have the parental-advisory-explicit-lyrics songs that I only play in my headphones? Or dare I, DARE I, open up the problem and fix it, thereby irreparably altering the limpid artistic vision whispered to Crystal Method by their gentle (LISTEN ALL YOU MOTHERF*****S!) muse?

The choice was pretty easy. I bowdlerized the SOB. Open it up, highlight the naughty words, use the "reverse" effect, and now it sounds like he's saying LISTEN ALL YOU MUVERZWPTHRZ! Which, if little See-Dub repeats at Sunday school, is going to be a little easier to explain. I'll just say we speak Uzbek at home. We're kinda weird; they'll believe that.

It's a shame it's come to this. I'd like to be able to buy music that I can play in front of the family without having to cut it up on the computer first. This seems an acceptable compromise, though, and if I get any complaints from the Crystal Method's lawyers, I'll just talk to them in Uzbek. YEO FZRRRZKF, MUVERZWPTHRZ!

But here's why I asked whether anyone else does this: if my sort of Audacity-editing catches on, it has the potential to change the way we listen to music. Used to be, the record companies sell you a record literally scratched unalterably into the vinyl. But now, it's Burger King: you can have it your way. I can disagree with the artists and the sound engineers--I can improve it, at least by my standards. I can change the volume and the tempo. I can pump up the bass or chop out an annoying verse. I don't need a recording studio to do it; one dude with a laptop and free software can just call it up and crank it on out.

In other words, if Audacity catches on, it can do for music what blogs have done for the "deciders" of the MSM. If the news is inaccurate, leaves out some context, or is full of noise and distortion, I can rewrite it better here on the JYB. If a song sucks, I can improve it, right here on the very same four year old laptop.

Not only that, but I can make my own. Remember FUNK HILL? Exactly. Remember how the zone was flooded with remixes of the Howard Dean Scream in 2004 almost as soon as he's given his candidacy-ending yelp? Exactly.

The interesting thing is that we're not going to be listening to the same music anymore. Little See-Dub will learn a unique version of Name of the Game, and when she hears the real thing she'll be in for a surprise (and probably a discussion of why our family does things differently.) We can customize anything these days; pretty soon, we'll be able to put our own faces into movies and our boss's on the bad guy who we throw into a jet engine. We can sex-select our children and clone our dead pets. There are all sorts of creepy permutations of the power to customize things. And of course, if you can customize something, you can twist words. You can lie with it, just like Stalin's photographers lied with their airbrushes when inconvenient party members needed to be erased from official portraits.

But there are some good sides as well: we can fight back against bad music and bad sound engineering. And we can enforce standards in our homes and cars and the areas under our control a little better, and maybe blunt the most corrupt aspects of our common culture. We don't have to take what they give us, in the news or on our stereo.

UPDATE: Looks like GVdL is thinking along similar lines:

Purposely manipulated photography was once the fiefdom of professional portraitists and propaganda mills. This is no longer so. The past 20 years since advent of Photoshop has let amateur manipulation come into its own as a tool of amateur satire, partisan politics, asymmetrical warfare and online dating. Through Photoshop "Photography" has met "Fauxtography" and has not benefitted from the introduction.

Of course, even before the age of Photoshop we knew that if a picture was worth 1,000 words, many of them were likely to be lies. Still, it is a hardwired aspect of the human brain that seeing remains believing. This is why obviously manipulated or constructed images of impossible situations amuse, intrigue, and grab at our attention. Advertising depends on this in order to get you to look at the product. Propaganda, manipulating images in subtler ways, also depends on this to make you believe that the lie behind the image is the truth. In looking at photographs we need to be constantly ready to practice a willing suspension of belief.