On Analog Mash-Ups

Often I find our conception of "electronic music" to be woefully literalist. This is often taken to mean anything created on a computer, anything using samples or vinyl scratches, anything with bloops and bleeps and remix value and feathered digivocals. This forgets another capacity for which electronic culture -- as exemplified by the Internet -- is useful, namely, information.

Lost in the hype over ambient electro mashup techno ravestep dubhop meta-vibratio spacebeats is the sudden ubiquity of certain simpler, older school music datastreams: namely, lyrics and chords. Go to any of the Net's 8 billion lyric or guitar tab sites and be stunned with how easy it is to get the words and harmonic progressions of any pop song ever written. Go from Modest Mouse to Gladys Knight to Queen to Prince in a matter of mouseclicks: it's not only sampled sounds that the digital age makes ubiquitous, but the older codes of scores and symphonics.

What I'm getting at is this: why is it that sample-monkeys enjoy such prestige as the archons of digital sound? What about ordinary guys with ordinary guitars, plunging the instant depths of humanity's chords and lyrics with a networked laptop resting on their music stand, strum-mixing LIVE improvised pop tunes in real time, using the analog hardware of voice, hands, and wood-string mechanism?

Here's hoping.