Warm Bitch: The Practice of Bootlegging as a Clash of Club Sound Cultures

Abstract

This text deals with a phenomenon called Bastard Pop, Mash-up or Bootlegging as a subversive political and collective practice. Although sampling techniques (e.g. in R’n’B or House Music) have enabled the mixing of different styles of music for the dancefloor this has never been done in such a radical way before. Copyright protected samples of Whitney Houston and Kraftwerk are entangled on a vinyl record (e.g. GIRLS ON TOP’s “I Wanna Dance with Numbers”), and this most famous bastard pop anthem is played in clubs to dance to. The source of this new sound is the internet, where it is digitally produced by anonymous projects. Some of the tracks are then mastered onto vinyl and often released as White Labels. Through their emphasis on projects rather than protagonists, the producers return to the paradigm of the electronic underground: “tracks without stars”. But at the same time there is also a difference from the original house music concept that referred to pop artists such as Warhol as “making music like a machine” (eg Juan Atkins’ Cybotron). The goal of the house music projects was to initiate “the meeting of people and wavelength” as DJ and producer Blake Baxter once put it.