A Year of Blind Spots: Since I Left You

Joe is working through an arbitrary and unpublished list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

Since I Left You

The Avalanches

2000

Okay, I'm sold. The idea of "plunderphonics" is a good one. I'm completely on board. Sign me up.

What's that? Plunderphonics is dead? The over-litigation of pop music killed it? Well damn.

Backing up: what is "plunderphonics"? Like most genres, it is a made-up term that somehow caught on and was thus applied actively and retroactively to a whole host of albums and artists. The basic idea is that you are "plundering" the vast archive of music and taking bits and pieces of those various songs and snippets to form completely new music. "Plunder" implies a crime of theft. Technically, as the law is written now, this is true. Many of the sounds on Since I Left You were not cleared before release. They were, by the letter of the law, stolen and then repurposed.

I don't care about that. What I think doesn't matter at all in this situation, but I'll tell you what I think anyway—I think it should be okay to take music that already exists and use it for your own music. People who use the term "free market" on the internet are by and large morons, but I'm gonna use it here: we should trust the free market when it comes to taking and repurposing music. If you wanna be like Nicki Minaj and basically take a song and reuse it wholesale while adding three bars of D+-grade lyrics to it, then she should be able to do that for free, and without punishment, and in a just world she would be punished with negative reviews and negative profit margins. 

If that were the case, then, yeah, we'd be stuck with an unbearable Nicki Minaj, but that means we'd also have beautiful works of art like the Avalanches' Since I Left You. This is not the first time we've run across an album like this in Year of Blind Spots, not even this year—there was Entroducing..... and Donuts. Way before that, I blundered through a dopey write-up for 3 Feet High and Rising. Separate from this column, I've recently been listening to Paul's Boutique. These are all rap-centric, and I suppose Since I Left You doesn't really care about that aspect to it. Subsequent Avalanches releases would shift more toward hip hop, and the shift makes sense, but the discussion on plunderphonics feels adjacent to a discussion about rap.

And that shift only happened because the Avalanches literally couldn't do this anymore. It's too easy to get sued in the 21st century, and too costly to pile this many samples onto an album. I recognized exactly one sample throughout this entire album—proof more of my own shortcomings than Avalanches', obviously—and it ends up being relevant to this discussion too. There is a Jens Lekman song called "Maple Leaves" that samples the string section from the song "Do You Wanna Dance" by the Mamas and the Papas (as noted here). That same string section shows up again on this album, specifically 0:47 of "Extra Kings" (though the loop is a little tighter).

Now, Jens Lekman had his own issues with sampling, and within the past few years released brand new versions of his first two albums for streaming services, omitting the samples he couldn't clear. I don't know if "Maple Leaves" was affected, since I still have the original versions on my iPod. And I'm told that there are multiple different versions of Since I Left You out there, due to sampling issues. It all just seems a little too complicated, ya know? "Do You Wanna Dance" wasn't even a fucking Mamas and Papas original! It was a Bobby Freeman cover! So if Mama Cass were to rise from her crypt and decline to clear this sample for Avalanches or for Lekman, what right would she have? I mean, it just seems so much easier to focus on the freedom of art than the restrictions of money.

But we all know that's not how it works, and so all we can do is appreciate that this kinda album exists at all, even in the past, even in legal limbo. Because it's really good, y'all. It somehow manages to pull in a thousand different samples and little clips from other songs and from other media and turn it into a coherent party album. Only a week in, and there are so many little lines that stick with me, against all odds. Like, the single "Frontier Psychiatrist" is basically a collection of samples from comedy duo Wayne and Shuster and their comedy routine from who knows when, 1950s or '60s maybe? One of them yells "You're a nut! You're crazy in the coconut!" in the chorus, and it's one of those lines that is annoying the first ten times you listen to the song, but on the eleventh, somehow becomes a lyric that I will never forget for as long as I live.

Pretty weird shit, I guess! But that's the wonder of plunderphonics, how all this joy can come from all these disparate places. I wish the Avalanches could do this again. I wish younger bands and artists could try to repeat its artistic success. I mean, they could, but if they made any money off of it, then they'd immediate be sued or whatever. Remember when Car Seat Headrest tried sampling the Cars, and there was a mixup, and the sample wasn't cleared, but they only found out about it after all the wax had been pressed? Shit's fucked up. The funny part is that my copy of "Just What I Needed/Not Just What I Needed" still has the sample, and it's FUCKING GREAT. Ric Ocasek can fuck off!!! Art wins over commerce in this house!!!

If you wanna spent a full hour grooving to cool beats made like art collages, and commit a felony in the process, then this is your jam.