dain saint

I’m calling it “Proper Gander,” and it ‘s going to melt your faces off. Trying to get the debut track done in time for my show with SKGB, Trey Frey, and Pixel Seed on November 17th at PhilaMOCA, so if you want a taste you’ll have to wait till then, or ply me with sexual favors.

Or maybe just like me on Facebook. I’ll post something when it’s ready :p.

So I’ve been having an alarming number of nightmares recently. My nightmares don’t tend to be of the obvious pain-of-death variety; more of the slow, horrifying realization type. Last night’s was particularly crushing, and I would like to share it with you.

A different place, a different time. I lived in a house, with my wife, in a world overrun with vicious predators, who sought nothing more than to rend us limb from limb. For reasons not known to me, our house was not safe at night. So every night was spent running through the wilderness, not staying in one place for very long, leaving our scent with small groups of prey so the predators would consume them and not us. Every day was spent resting in the house; each day one of us would say to the other, “When we rest, we rest together,” and she would make a bottle for the baby. Every night, we’d run.

After a few nights, I realized there were no other humans.

And one day, weeks later, she was making the bottle, quietly sobbing, saying to me, “When we rest, we rest together,” and I realized there was no baby either.

Not exactly how I wanted to wake up, and it certainly kept me from sleeping for about the rest of the night. So I lay in bed, thinking about the dream, thinking about how I could communicate to someone just how crushing that realization was. There are obviously many ways that story could be communicated; I could write it, as I just did. I could turn it into a proper short story, with characters; I could illustrate it as a comic; I could do a short film. But all of these are viewing forms — even with a first person perspective, if you came to the realization, it wouldn’t be yours — you would be watching someone else come to the realization. You may feel for them, you may empathize, but it still isn’t your realization.

I realized the only way to fully communicate my experience to someone else would be to turn it into a game.

The reason, of course, is that there is a very specific set of criteria and stimuli you need to experience in order to grasp the full weight of the situation:

• You need to be you, but as someone else. This strange dissociation isn’t a particularly difficult concept; we do it all the time in dreams, and we do it all the time in games.
• You need to not know everything about yourself, but know enough to function in your new world. This strange not-amnesia isn’t really that weird; again, we do it all the time in dreams, and we do it all the time in games.
• You need to be able to take in information at your own pace, information needs to be available to you at only the moments you look for them, and gaps need to be present to allow you draw your own conclusions. Movies try to do this, but they can only show you information; as clever as a director may be, he can’t truly allow you to discover information. But we do it all the time in dreams, and we certainly do it in games.

The realization that there was no baby, and hadn’t been for some time, only came at the moment I saw her crying, because every instance before that, after she made the bottle, we would sleep, and when we ran, she ran behind me. This allowed the assumption that she carried and cared for the baby. But when I had that realization, the rest of the dream came into the focus — I had never seen the baby, I had never heard the baby. The only evidence that the baby had ever existed was in my wife’s actions. 

These sort of cognitions, realizations, and epiphanies are only possible in a medium where you are given a certain amount of author-provided information and a certain amount of autonomy of discovery. And so I discovered this truth about games:

Games can cause the participant to have author-guided realizations.

and even more importantly

Games can cause the participant to have author-guided realizations that the participant owns.

I humbly submit that no other art form could as effectively communicate my dream, as I experienced it. And before you tell me it wouldn’t be a game because there are no goals, the goals are obvious: avoid getting killed by predators, for as many days as possible. 

A game can be the strongest medium with which to express a dream. If that doesn’t qualify it as art, then you clearly don’t know how to dream.

A few weeks ago, I was in Jersey with my mother. We often end up talking about music, with her playing the 14-year-old pop lover to my cranky old man. In any event, she tells me, “Hey, there’s this great new Rihanna track you should hear, you’ll love it!” The song in question was “Cheers (Drink To That)” — not a bad song, really, and certainly appropriate for the situations in which you’d most likely hear it, i.e. drunk on a Friday night. The thing that really stuck out to me in the song though was the Avril Lavigne sample that drives the hook, so I naturally pointed this out. My mother, naturally, neither knew that it was an Avril Lavigne sample, nor cared — it was simply a fun Rihanna track.

I point this out because I feel her attitude is largely indicative of the way most people view art nowadays — who cares where it came from if the final product is awesome? And I can’t really blame her, especially since her attitude isn’t one of malice. She’s not exactly sitting there saying, “Man, fuck Avril Lavigne.”

Another example that sticks with me is Jason Derülo’s “Whatcha Say.” Again, I’m sure this isn’t a bad track — reasonably catchy, at least. But the entire song is driven by Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek,” a song I loved so much I couldn’t hear the two tracks as separate entities. The hook is taken from the absolute climax of the song, a melodic break she takes the entire song building towards, but in Derülo’s rendition all of that impact is lost. When I heard the track, I was upset — so much so that I forced my mother to listen to the original so she could understand why I was so angry.

To her credit, she now likes both versions.

Now the impact of Derülo’s appropriation was dulled a bit for me when I found out that he explicitly asked Heap for permission to use the sample. Many people — most people — don’t really understand that a record label can simply ask the other record label for permission without ever involving the artist, so that act alone shows quite a bit of respect. And I think that on the artist side of things, we’re seeing less blatant stealing without attribution. But the consumers, the people that allow career artists to have careers, are largely unaware of the whole process. I do think that because of Derülo’s use of Heap’s sample Heap got a bit more attention from an audience that may well have ignored her, but how much more attention would she have gotten if she was explicitly attributed? If she had sung on the track, it would have been “Jason Derülo ft. Imogen Heap” for sure, but as a sample? She gets none of that credit.

My point here is not that appropriation is evil or should be stopped; indeed, the entire genre of hip-hop as we know it today would not exist if sampling were not allowed. And god knows I love me some mash-up artists — people just doing phenomenal re-interpretations of songs, changing context and creating juxtaposition, etc. But I do think that if you are going to sample someone, to the point where they practically have a guest spot on the song, then it’s your job to educate your fans. As of now, attribution is regulated to the liner notes, and let’s be honest — hardly anyone read the liner notes even before music sales went digital.

So I’m proposing a new attribution marker for songs: “tt.” It’s pretty simple — if you’ve sampled an artist to a point where they are pretty much making a guest appearance, give them one. So for instance:

• Rihanna - “Cheers (tt. Avril Lavigne)”
• Jason Derülo - “Whatcha Say (tt. Imogen Heap)”

What I like about it is that it’s not only a nice abbreviation for “attribution”, but can easily be interpreted as “Thanks to.”

I feel that, if we start proper attribution on the music side of things, it may well cross over into other areas — like, god forbid, games. Wouldn’t it be nice to see something like this?

• Angry Birds (tt. Crush The Castle)
• I Must Run (tt. Canabalt)
• Ninja Fishing (tt. Radical Fishing)
• Genesis (tt. Auditorium)

Food for thought.