The Wire interview: Bill Laswell by David Toop (1994)

"...Plagiarism as a cultural tactic should be directed at putrid capitalists," writes Hakim Bey, "not potential comrades... There is no exotic other." Laswell concurs, but offers another angle. "I appropriate music from everywhere. I don't think it's possible to own a piece of music. To me, we're all playing the same stuff. It's just combinations that make it new. And there is such a thing as someone who has a voice, that plays a certain way and has a style. I think everyone does that to a certain degree and to me, it's all available. If I did something and it was a piece of music and it had a beat and a theme and even a word or something and if somebody took the exact same thing and put it out and made a million dollars I know that I wouldn't contact them. I know that I wouldn't try to sue them because I don't believe you can own a sequence. I think we're all trapped into playing sequences unless it's totally experimental and then you're doing something else. And that's where it gets interesting. Only then. The rest of it is we're all playing somebody else's stuff. To me, it's chord-changes music."
@'The Wire'

Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson's) T.A.Z. album coming soon to
(Son of)