Kippleization

Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up there is twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.

No one can win against kipple, except temporarily and maybe in one spot.

-- Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

The paradoxical pun at the core of Blade Runner’s retrofitted machinery is the cannibalizing of old devices to improve upon new ones that were designed as superior models to the very machines on which they now rely to function properly. Replicants are supposed to be impervious to human frailty. A replicant won’t take issue with mining on a dead planet because it lacks the emotional framework that makes humans need companionship and fulfillment. But of course, the replicants aren’t functioning properly; so, Tyrell’s solution is to retrofit them with the exact human shortcomings that they were designed to overcome.

From a musical standpoint, it’s all kipple. A score is just junk in a drawer until it’s performed. A song like “You Belong To Me” lies dormant and mostly forgotten in its original form or even its million-selling cover version until it shows up on the Shrek soundtrack or the new Kate Rusby album, and after its temporary victory against obscurity it folds back into the tapestry of dim memory.

On this blog, we post from the great ash heap of history without much of a distinction between eras or genres, because they’re utterly meaningless. The illusion of classification persists, though, nowhere quite as powerfully as in the symphony halls. Baroque music is almost entirely ignored by American orchestras because in the middle part of the last century an admirable trend towards period authenticity became enshrined as orthodoxy. So, again we come to the nihilistically funny kipple paradox, wherein the concept of authenticity is used to ghettoize one genre but is wholely abandoned in other genres where it would be just as appropriate. Mozart wasn’t writing for valved trumpets (nor was Beethoven), to take one potshot at an iceberg of contradiction.

The simple fact is that when the New York Philharmonic, or any orchestra, takes up any score from any era, it immediately becomes an arrangement, a new realization of some scratches on parchment. The jerry-rigged pact that orchestras have made with history is as arbitrary as the definition of humanity in Dick’s dystopia. Deckard’s struggle is no less noble or confused than Roy Batty’s, and there’s scant point in placing ANALOG’s aesthetic into competition with an orchestra’s. We’re all just waging our temporary battles against encroaching obscurity.