The Sound of Rebel Funk: 35 Years of The Clash’s CUT THE CRAP
On (Approximately) 20 Years of THE DISINTEGRATION LOOPS
“Meaning-making in art is an extraordinarily personal thing, but music in particular seems to have a habit of finding itself attached to tragic metanarratives. Often, this happens unintentionally, and at the expense of the artist’s actual intent—take Belong’s OCTOBER LANGUAGE, an album often discussed as “THE DISINTEGRATION LOOPS of Hurricane Katrina” despite the New Orleans-based band’s insistent explanation that it was recorded before the storm, or Daniel Johnston’s straightforwardly appealing music being inseparable from the story of his mental health challenges that makes him an “outsider” artist rather than simply an artist. Basinski has created this narrative association on purpose, deliberately dispelling with any ambiguity in the piece while tacitly admitting its forged nature. If the title of THE DISINTEGRATION LOOPS offers instructions for the piece’s creation, the aesthetic pageantry surrounding it offers explicit instructions for its interpretation—Basinski has hitched his art to the wake of a terrorist attack (one which he believes was a controlled demolition, no less) and seemingly declared himself the event’s poet laureate.”