Comment by ANTSANTS | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ANTSANTS | Hacker News Reader

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I've got little to add to the larger discussion, but you know, this is kind of funny: I can ignore all kinds of crap that people on the internet get riled up over, and even the occasional personal insult, no sweat, but your assessment of Kind of Bloop and the chiptune scene in general actually made me angry.

There's an interesting (albeit tired -- we've been having the same conversation since at least the dawn of the sampler) question in there about where the line between "remixing" and "ripping someone off" gets drawn, but you didn't have to shit all over a subculture and genre of music to pose it.

EDIT: I'll add that there is a pretty direct parallel to be drawn here to the long-running controversy around hip-hop's heavy usage of sampling. Your article, then, read a bit like someone attempting to begin a thoughtful debate about this old "remix culture vs. copyright law" issue with a characterization like "hiphop is a primitive and culturally bankrupt musical 'genre' consisting of a sad excuse for poetry shouted on top of other people's music, and its creators are crooks who appropriate the hard work of others for a less sophisticated audience."

There are people out there that actually believe things like that (maybe even you?), but most of them have the good sense not to say so in public under their true identity. I'd like to think that has something to do with the common decency of not demeaning cultures that one is completely unfamiliar with, and not just fear of appearing to be a racist.

What was it specifically that made you angry? I enjoy chiptune music and listened to some of the linked samples thinking they were pretty good, but I still found the level of boldness in his "assessment of Kind of Bloop and the chiptune scene in general" quite refreshing and rather entertaining, even though I don't exactly agree with his opinion.

I enjoy a good articulate rant from someone who is making it in good faith, as I believe the author was. That "most of them have the good sense not to say so in public under their true identity" only makes it all the better - the argument is usually of such passion and ferocity that it must be confronted rather than sidestepped. If your reaction is one of anger then perhaps something he said was a little close to true and you're defaulting to an emotional response in defense.

I had the same reaction to Philips' blog post. I agree with his main argument, but not how he supports it.

Basically, Philips dismisses a broad range of 8-bit media without knowing how it is made. He says all you do is run some existing art through "a little bit of filtering", and like Instagram, there you have it. Basically, it's just a nasty-looking (or sounding) ripoff of existing artwork.

Problem is, that's not how chip music is produced. At all. Most songs are original compositions, and even cover versions are not simple "degradations". Think of covering a Miles Davis song on classical guitar, and you'll be closer. You have to recompose the material from the ground up, and stretch both yourself and your hardware platform to make things begin to work. It's both an artistic and technological feat. Now think of composing an original song this way. Some people have spent decades perfecting chip music, just as others perfect jazz or photography. Philips says the entire body of work is worth less than one good picture.

http://www.linusakesson.net/hardware/chiptune.php (NOTE: This is not me.)

http://ay-riders.speccy.cz/

Worst, the criticism of chip music is tangential to his main argument -- that Baio screwed up by trying to sell a work without thoroughly licensing it. Philips went out of his way to be an ass about it, for no good reason. That's what bothers me.

Thanks, that's a great demonstration of confronting the argument head on, and well-explained to boot.

One comment I would make on what you have said is that I think Phillips does understand how chip music is made and you have misunderstood when you write "He says all you do is run some existing art through "a little bit of filtering", and like Instagram, there you have it". The phrase "a little bit of filtering" is right at the end of the article and I believe is a reference to what Baio did with the photograph rather than to the process of creating the music.

Vitriolic as it is, I think what Phillips writes in the first two paragraphs - I would draw your attention especially to the use of the word "re-performance" - shows that he does at least understand that chip music isn't simply an existing work put through a filter and is something created more or less from scratch. He just really really hates it, and says so, in a way I find hilarious. However, now having read the piece several times, and recontextualised by your and ANTSANTS comments here, I do think it's a bit undermining to the main point for him to piggyback that rant onto the front-end of the article.

'He says all you do is run some existing art through "a little bit of filtering"'

I didn't say that, at least not about the chiptune music. I said "He [Baio] was fully aware that he needed to pay license fees in order to distribute his versions, even though they were radically transformed and reinterpreted."

I am aware that the music was a re-performance in a different medium, not just filtering of source material. I happened not to like it. I don't see why my personal aesthetic judgments should upset anyone. If I'm not getting chiptune then it's my loss; I'll keep listening, and maybe one day it will click for me. When I first picked up Joyce's Ulysses I thought it was gibberish; now I think it's a great work of art. When I hear people claiming that Ulysses is gibberish, I don't get mad, I just smile.

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