Musicians Infiltrate Industry’s Mega-Stores
Watch out! No (corporate) record store is safe from the latest
weapon in the culture-jammer’s arsenal: droplifting.
In an article in the October/November issue of
Adbusters magazine Paul Schmelzer profiles the
Droplift Project, an underground collaboration of 29 audio collage
artists, who put together a CD mixing top 40, commercial sounds,
B-movies and instructional films to create a unique sound. Then, in
late July, members in cities from Los Angeles to Calgary,
Minneapolis to Orlando, covertly ‘droplifted’ (a spin on
‘shoplift’) thousands of shrink-wrapped copies onto the shelves of
Tower, Sam Goody, and other corporate music store chains.
The project has drawn praise from members of Negativland, ‘possibly
the only found-sound artists to legitimately appear in Tower
Records’ inventory,’ writes Schmelzer. Negativland’s Don Joyce
points out the beautiful irony of the Droplift prank: a CD
constructed from borrowed clips gets slipped into the corporate bin
only to be commodified by the very industry that had previously
refused to promote it. Says Joyce, ‘It’s an almost perfect
integration of content, medium, and point made.’ — Leif
Utne
Go there>>
The music can be downloaded at www.droplift.org
