Sampling is an important and controversial art form. Not everyone considers it an art form at all. To some, sampling is theft. It was reported a while back that Polygram Records employed someone full-time to screen every hip-hop track they could get their hands on for unauthorized samples of James Brown's voice. To others, sampling is just a lazy way to poach and rely on someone else's work instead of creating your own. Is plucking someone else's creation from it's original context - to leave it naked, or twist its meaning - a legitimate way to communicate? In an age where it gets harder and harder to tell where the cartoon ends and real life begins, the answer is a billboard-sized YES.

We live in a hi-tech robber-baron era as toxic and vicious as the rise of the industrial revolution in the late 19th century. The relentless bombardment of tabloid anti-news and advertising overkill numbs and isolates us from each other and our own humanity. We are told we are not a community, but a marketplace; where "competitiveness" is more important than caring or basic human respect.

The former communist countries controlled society through fear of not keeping up with the state. We are controlled by fear of not keeping up with the Joneses. We toil on a never-ending treadmill, desperate to buy comfort and happiness that is always just out of reach. This keeps us literally governed by fads.

As kids, we pledged allegiance to the flag. Now we pledge allegiance to Pepsi and Mickey Mouse. Sports heroes are branded with the Nike logo as if they all came from the same toy factory. People remember Brady Bunch episodes better than they remember their own childhoods. To see and recapture the big picture, we must break through the illusions - torpedo the icons and cartoons themselves. The urge simmers in us all. Taking the wholesome role-models and illusions forced on us and casting them in a wickedly different light makes us laugh. It makes us see and learn. It makes us think. These are the sparks of mind-opening inspiration that help make life bearable in this age of corporate New Feudalism.

At its best, art constructed using someone else's found elements as building blocks can illuminate what the builder is trying to say in ways that words might never do on their own. Many a familiar icon has deep meaning to us even if we can't put that meaning into words. The Beatles... Marilyn Monroe... classic cars... G.I. Joe. Splice a sample of a well-known song into a new track and the older song is updated. What we feel from the original is expanded, or even turned on its head into something new - and possibly a revelation. Plant an icon where it doesn't belong and its original, symbolic meaning can be explosively transformed.

The same with pictures. As Winston Smith shows, sometimes an atomic-age propaganda piece is surreal and frightening enough without any collage alterations at all. Even his montages on war and cruelty are often done in a way that we can't help but laugh. Other collages are works of great beauty and space, and more than a little psychedelic. At times they almost seem to move.

I started making collages sometime around the ninth grade, without even knowing what they were. Me and my friend John Greenway (co-author of California Öber Alles) plastered the walls of our bedrooms with the most absurd pictures we could find of pompous and powerful figures we refused to respect. A gleeful Richard Nixon playing piano, wearing a chef's hat. Gerald Ford doing the limbo with Imelda Marcos. The mere existance of cattle mutilations and Guru Maharaj Ji. Monty Python is nowhere near as out-there as real life. It never has been.

I noticed that people who looked at my bedroom walls would start cross-referencing one picture with another nearby. Then another, and another. Before long, the dovetailing images and reflections couldn't help but inspire in ways that can't necessarily be put into words - a sort of brainspin that fires one's own thoughts and creative impulses in unexpected new directions.

I love art that makes me think - especially when it unleashes genuine brainspin. Intricate updated versions of my old bedroom walls often turn up as inserts in my music and spoken word albums.

It was almost inevitable that Winston and I would collide and join forces as subversive thought-terrorists and art criminals.

His art is more organized than mine but works in the same way. Many of his pieces are far from random. I was surprised when he told me, years after we met, that he often dreams up his collages in advance, sometimes searching for years to find just the right components. It amazes me how he can cut something out of a picture perfectly with an X-acto knife in seconds, then use it in a way that would make our masters wish paper dolls were never invented.

When Winston first showed me his "Idol" sculpture - a bowling-trophy jesus nailed to a cross of dollar bills - I thought it was so powerful that I conceived a record just so I could put it on the cover. That was Dead Kennedys' In God We Trust, Inc. E.P.

We then collaborated on the insert booklet for the Plastic Surgery Disasters album, painstakingly assembling it by the light of kerosene lamps in Winston's mountain cabin in Northern Cailfornia.

Dead Kennedys' "DK" logo went from a rough chicken-scratch to the powerful graphic symbol seen on T-shirts around the world - not to mention on walls, arms, legs, and even spray-painted by thoughtful vandals onto military tanks!

Hopefully one day Winston will allow more of his drawings to be published, too. He draws very well, but doesn't seem to want people to know that. For an example, check out the one I coaxed out of him for the final Dead Kennedys' album: Bedtime for Democracy, shown on page 47 and 48 of the book.

So now we begin Voyage II into Winston's wild kingdom of state-of-the-art visual sampling: images that don't belong with each other brought together in a way that can't help but spin and stimulate the brain. The medieval and 50's imagery Winston prefers shows the frustrating degree to which "the more things change, the more they stay the same."

History is sanitized in our schools for a reason. As the sign that hung over Jim Jones' dead body said, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Winston's work lifts the mask off how this is being done, and how we can and must do better.

Back