circa77 wrote:admonkey wrote:Now, taking a particular artist's style and appropriating it wholecloth is something else altogether ... JB didn't appropriate an image, he appropriated a style for his most recent work.
Thanks for pointing that out. It makes sense. Then guess the question would then be: "is appropriating ones style
worse than appropriating ones work/images/etc." I cannot see how that would be true, after all, are we not all influenced by everything we see/read/hear etc. We appropraite style everyday when we cloth ourselves. Is this not true?
I think the difference there (clothing) is in use vs. creation.
I'm not
creating fashion when I throw on ("appropriate") OG-style clothing, I'm
wearing it.
Now, were I to sit down with a sewing machine and some screens and
create my own clothing line... that just happens to appropriate OG style... that would be biting.
And of course we're influenced by everything we see, read and hear. There are ways to approach using styles in a blended way that won't "bite" someone else's work. Here's a real-world example:
Several years ago I was given an assignment to develop a radio campaign for a super-regional Tex-Mex restaurant chain. My idea to separate them from the pack of other Tex-Mex joints (this is back when Tex-Mex was just starting to lift off into the stratosphere) was to play up the Tex side of their menu.
So I developed a sound for the spots I called "cowboy vaudeville." In imagining the sound, what I heard in my head was a 'talking' singer (think Johnny Cash) meeting
Don Rich's tick-tock guitar work meeting Johnny Gimble's fiddle playing meeting The Carter Family's "call and answer" style... but that broke down the wall between the lead singer and the backup vocalists that would allow them to interact with a funny results.
So I was working with a lot of influences: Johnny Cash, Buck Owens (through his guitar player), Bob Wills (through a fiddle player who has a knack of sounding like him) and the Carter Family (to make no mention of vaudeville comedy influences).
But when you listen to the spots (
ONE --- TWO --- THREE) I don't think anyone would say "that's a Johnny Cash song," or "that's a Buck Owens" song or anything of the sort because I took those influences and filtered them through my own lense in order to create a new style.
That's how you avoid biting.
