The Trickster

In the myth the trickster moves between the worlds passing knowledge to humans and taking payment for it, sometimes to annoy the gods and sometimes to test the humans.

I use and teach the cutup technique for song writing and for the uninitiated it looks like cheating but this was the technique used by the greatest songwriters in pop music from Lennon to Bowie from Bolan to Cobain.

I am interested in the idea of the trickster musicians like Bowie and Mark Bolan in fact many of the great guitar players had techniques that you could look at some form of trickery. In fact if you look at technology and what it can do creating an illusion of sound and vision that in itself is a form of trickery as it is certainly not reality.

I have pondered that we get trapped by thinking and that some form of deceit needs to happen to fool us out of that into another mode of thinking and cutup is a good example of this. We often see this as a series of phrases taken out of context from magazines and newspapers and put together in a random form which then weirdly makes sense poetically however William S Burroughs did more.

In fact any form of non-linear irrational thinking can be termed as cutup for instance going outside and recording the sounds that you hear in the street in fact snatches of conversation that are put together out of time was one of Burroughs’s techniques. Also just flipping between TV channels or radio stations, taking parts of blogs and putting them together any these techniques will be the basis of cutup.

When I was explaining this technique once at a blues camp summer school somebody actually made the remark that I had burst his bubble that the illusion of all these wonderful songs that somebody had listened to over the years have actually been some form of fraud. This is one of the elements of the trickster in myth and in reality. There is a strange phenomenon when something unusual happens that there is an element of fraud that seems to go with it even when it is not necessary because the event is weird enough in itself. An interesting case in point was that the Enfield poltergeist the event was well documented but the woman involved who lived in the house told some untruths which make the whole situation seem unreal. What is interesting about this story is that years later she tried to explain why she had actually lied about certain elements as if the strangeness of what was happening affected her mind. And this is quite common in fact there is a book written about the trickster effect which states that truth in these situations becomes very malleable.

Because of this often Fortean type events are often thought of as frauds when in actual fact the event itself was real but some other sort of fraud or economic use of the facts accompany the event.

My use of cutup has been really creative in my experience and I suggest that you try these and see what results you get. When I work with this it does seem to put you in to a dream experience of thinking and maybe because of the way that the unconscious is unlocked gives rise to these very strange effects. Whether we look at the artists who have used this technique very successfully as being frauds, cheats and tricksters or not they often lived lives that seem very unreal to us in the mundane world but I think that this is one of the true areas of artistic consciousness that we can easily obtain by using this simple technique.

Vic www.bluescampuk.co.uk be creative for three days