shift.com
interview with David Bowie, an artist who Gets It (tm):
I know all the sites that have my bootlegs and all my
MP3s. Actually, I don't give a flying fuck. I like the
internet and I like the community. I think, to understand
your presence on the net, you have to be a part of it and
work within it. I thought it just looked so reactionary, for
instance, of someone like Prince to clamp down on everything
in terms of the lawsuits. You can't stop the sea from coming
forward.
Frankly, this new school of technology is just a faster-rising
version of what I've always done. I mean, cutting up and taking
and sampling--even ideas--and rematching and making
hybrids of what is already out there is what I have always done.
Wouldn't it be interesting to take a folk song and put it against
an R&B drum? That's the kind of approach we had to albums like
Heroes [1977]. There is nothing pure in that music; its ideas come
from everywhere. That is the basis of post-modernism--;not
attaching a back-text to history, but retrieving things from
history in their most pure and pristine state.