An Attempt to Understand dk

Jean-Guy Talbot

I found the following in an email magazine called Touching Extremes by Massimo Ricci:

BE HONEST IN ASSESSING YOUR VALUES.

Don't hide the fact that your music sucks behind political manifestos, idealistic freedom, or typical "I-can't-play-but-I'm-creative" crap . Some folks got it, some folks don't. It's that simple. I want no part of lo-fi cacophonies splattered by some retarded on cheap CDRs, and it is also my wish not to snore with monks, mantras, rainsticks, birds etc. sampled by bank employees and insurance brokers.

This, except for the bit about bankers and insurance brokers, it seems to describe "dk" to a tee. The "I can't play but I am creative" would be dk's motto and lo-fi cacophonies (nice little pun there) is dk's style. However the "retarded" comment seems a little non-PC and somewhat nasty. Do bankers and brokers really prefer monks, mantras and rainsticks?
    Sometimes I wonder if faking an orgasm is almost as good as a real one. A faked orgasm can certainly make the person who is trying to give the orgasm feel the same as if the orgasm was real. I think pretending to have an orgasm might feel pretty good. That's why people were swooning when they watched Harry met Sally. A fake orgasm is a turn-on. Philosophy professor, Geoffrey Payzant (who wrote a great book on Glenn Gould), asked students that took his special seminar on Michael Polanyi, "if you could make a computer analyze and reproduce a famous painting at a digital density beyond the threshold of human vision, would it have the same aesthtetic value as the original?" And this was 1978!

     Around that time F for Fake by Orson Welles came out. It is a documentary about fakes, like the guy who extended Vermeer's ouevre and Irving in his pre-nazi days when he faked the biography of Howard Hughes. The upshot of this is that it doesn't really matter if Vermeer did it or not. A good fake is a good work of art.

     Such thinking can bring down western civilzation! Doesn't the American hegemony depend upon the value of the Mona Lisa? The fake Mona Lisas are actually better than the real thing which is pretty dirty and hard to see through the glass. Or does it depend upon fake authenticity, fake productivity (productivity is not measured by how well you make cars but how much profit each dollar can make, not by how hard workers work but by how much profit can be squeezed out of them), fake value, fake profit (the same money loaned out and leveraged several thousand times).
    dk is a fake, a bad fake. Bad fakery is different than good fakery. It is far less lucrative and has no honour, referencing the honour among thieves. dk did free music in the sense that it had no price, it was given away free because it had absolutely no value. Throw away music.