KLF: “Don’t worry about being accused of being a thief.”

By sheer chance as far as I can remember I came across the KLF as the inspiration for the fictional problem (scroll down and look at the right hand column) based on real songs I constructed once for a legal writing class I taught. It seems fate in that the guys who constituted the KLF turned out to be remarkably aware of and articulate about the realities underlying the issues the problem involved — copyright and fair use. Their book, The Manual (How to have a Number One the Easy Way), published after their own rise to the top of the British pop charts, is by turns satiric, insightful, and sarcastic, but it isn’t what many of my students took it as: a cynical effort to give people an easy way to cash in. It isn’t. It’s thoughtful, funny, and honest, and it makes a lot of sense.

So how do you create a number 1 pop hit?

It is going to be a construction job, fitting bits together. You will have to find the Frankenstein in you to make it work. Your magpie instincts must come to the fore. If you think this just sounds like a recipe for some horrific monster, be reassured by us, all music can only be the sum or part total of what has gone before. Every Number One song ever written is only made up from bits from other songs. There is no lost chord. No changes untried. No extra notes to the scale or hidden beats to the bar. There is no point in searching for originality. In the past, most writers of songs spent months in their lonely rooms strumming their guitars or bands in rehearsals have ground their way through endless riffs before arriving at the song that takes them to the very top. Of course, most of them would be mortally upset to be told that all they were doing was leaving it to chance before they stumbled across the tried and tested. They have to believe it is through this sojourn they arrive at the grail; the great and original song that the world will be unable to resist.

But don’t leap to the conclusion the KLF believed that there was no such thing as genuine creativity:

So why don’t all songs sound the same? Why are some artists great, write dozens of classics that move you to tears, say it like it’s never been said before, make you laugh, dance, blow your mind, fall in love, take to the streets and riot? Well, it’s because although the chords, notes, harmonies, beats and words have all been used before their own soul shines through; their personality demands attention. This doesn’t just come via the great vocalist or virtuoso instrumentalist. The Techno sound of Detroit, the most totally linear programmed music ever, lacking any human musicianship in its execution reeks of sweat, sex and desire. The creators of that music just press a few buttons and out comes – a million years of pain and lust.

. . .

What we are basically saying is, if you have anything in you, anything unique, what others might term as originality, it will come through whatever the component parts used in your future Number One are made up from.

Just fifteen minutes ago I was listening to an interview with John Mellencamp. Asked about his sonwriting, he said something along these lines: “If it’s out there, it’s mine. Whether it was written by Shakespeare or Dylan, if I hear it, it becomes mine and I can use it . . . ”

J.D. Salinger does not get it at all. Is there anything he’s done since 1964 that could be said to promote creation?

The KLF’s composition method for their first hit, “Doctorin’ the Tardis”?

The complete history of the blues is based on one chord structure, hundreds of thousands of songs using the same three basic chords in the same pattern. Through this seemingly rigid formula has come some of the twentieth century’s greatest music. In our case we used parts from thrcc very famous songs, Gary Glitter’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll”, “The Doctor Who Theme” and the Sweet’s “Blockbuster” and pasted them together, neither of us playing a note on the record. We know that the finished record contains as much of us in it as if we had spent three months locked away somewhere trying to create our master-work. The people who bought the record and who probably do not give a blot about the inner souls of Rockman Rock or King Boy D knew they were getting a record of supreme originality.