What A Load Of Shit
4.5.14 by Mike Haley
Internet comments are the heart of the world wide web. Reading the articles then moving on? Watching the videos and enjoying the rest of your day? Ha! I laugh directly into your face, because you, my friend, are a grade A empty head. The comments, you sad fool! The comments is where the honey is. That sweet, golden nectar of the anonymous gods. One of the only places left on this Earth where you can be called a faggot AND a Nazi by the same person for the high crime of posting “I remember this movie when I was a kid” under a Muppets Take Manhattan clip. Oh, the comments. Your rules don’t apply there. No, sir. In the comments the “N” word is currency. The allegation of being sheeple float about like leaves in a spring breeze. Yes. The comments.
It is from that literary utopia that Charles Barabé mined 126 gems left under a video for John Cage’s 62 year old composition 4′33″. He then converted those comments to audio with text-to-speech software and pasted it over ambiance that morphs into churning progressive electronics for his latest track Insultes (hommage à John Cage). The 19 minute piece (that’s, like, 4x more than Cage pulled off. Suck it, dude) was released late last month on Barabé’s own La Cohu imprint on a split tape with Black Givre in an edition of 24 now sold out copies. If you didn’t have the fast draw necessary to snag a copy of the cassette, the cut is now on bandcamp.
Like all comments left on the net these are great. Some are very basic reactions to Cage’s silence like “Whatever was that, he is an idiot. Fuck you!” and “This is not music” and “What the fuck is this crap” while other commentators spent a little more time and brain power on the subject. Case in point: “This is so fucking gay, what kind of dumb pretentious nerd would like this video. Faggots!”
Ya burnt!
Here is a list of all the comments included on the track. Enjoy!
This is retarded, if I wanted to listen to nothing I would stay home.
Pseudo intellectual hipsters tell me it’s just art with some deep meaning that I don’t comprehend.
People pay money for this?
If you think this is art, you are beyond help.
Complete silence? This is so fucking stupid. I can’t believe people consider this to be masterpiece. LOL.
The same people who revere this stupid shit are the same people who think a blue circle on a yellow background is an Art Masterpiece.
If there really was a God, at 4 :32 he would have killed every single person in that room.
It’s an insult to composers who actually did have their shit together, such as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, as well as contemporary composers like Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff.
Whatever was that, he is an idiot. Fuck you!
I got the concept in 33 seconds and the rest wasted 4 minutes of life.
This is the most pretentious and stupid thing I’ve ever seen.
Pseudo-intellectual masturbation!
Learning about John Cage at my $30,000+ per-year college, and how the professors just loved his “thinking”, made me seriously question the value of my chosen liberal-arts degree path. Now, being older and wiser, I still feel exactly the same way. Better to learn how to fix air-conditioners than to become this type of “intellectual” navel-gazer, reusing cheap tricks like “listen to the silence” as if he were the first to have the idea.
ANYONE could have created this without training.
FUCK YOU.
Mother of stupidity!
They should boo him.
This is not music; it is a disrespect to all the people who actually love music.
What a real fucking disgraceful piece of shit.
I cant believe people pay to watch this
You sound like a huge pretentious hipster, hope you are proud.
Guess people like you will kiss the butt of any famous faggot out there.
This isn’t art, it’s crap, he just decided to cop out of doing any actual work and crap out some silence on stage and call it a ‘piece’. It’s a piece alright, a piece of crap.
What the fuck is this shit?
Everywhere you go there’s some pretentious bitch trying to defend everything as art.
That felt like modern art… stupid as fuck
The word “pretentious” gets tossed around a lot but this is, without a doubt, the most arrogant, pointless contribution to the 20th century.
Artistic hipster bullshit !
Pretentious bullshit.
People get suckered into all sorts of crap like this and abstract art.
Compose a good piece of music and paint me a picture you avant-garde con men.
The more people accept things like this as artistic, the more crap and money they will make.
This is Shit.
I have nothing but hatred for this man and his so called music.
Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse.
He had no talent so he resorted to gimmicks like this.
John Cage is laughing in his grave right now that people are taking this seriously
Pretentious faggot !
This is dumb ! It is not music !
This is bullshit !
This is fucking retarded.
All this is unnecessary and pretentious
This is just shit.
The only thing it has going for it is originality and that’s because everyone who thought of it before realised it’s a fucking moronic idea and didn’t do it.
If you think this is good you are a pretentious nood.
The stupidest thing I’ve ever seen
This is one of the most retarded things I’ve ever seen.
This is the worst thing ever composed.
Anyone can do it.
You can say whatever you want, this is just fucking ridiculous.
This is pretentious garbage at it’s worst. This is like someone putting up a blank canvas and calling it art, or a book of 1000 empty pages and calling it poetry.
This is one of the most RIDICULOUS thing I have ever seen in my entire life.
Anyone complimenting this piece of crap is just eating up the BULLSHIT of this performance.
This is pretentious crap.
Worst piece of modern art ever.
4 minutes and 33 seconds of my life wasted.
Fuck this shit, it doesn’t have any sense. Who the fuck would do that?
How this can be considered a piece of art? Anyone can make this.
Fuck this shit.
Did they have to pay to watch this shit ?
This is not music, this is not a composition.
If you think this has any merit whatsoever, you should not be able to breed.
What a waste of fucking time.
This is total crap.
A lack of art is simply not art. Anyone could put there name to silence.
It is shit like this which gives a bad name to modern art and makes people unwilling to explore the good stuff which is hidden under mountains of uninspired nonsense.
I know that, ultimately, these ridiculous creations are supposed to raise the question of what Art is, but whatever it is, it is not this. I don’t expect all music to be along the lines of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ overture, nor do I expect all paintings to be in the same vein of Picasso, but this just pisses me off. The audience is applauding nothing!
Stupidest thing I have every seen.
Hope the audience didn’t have to pay to hear silence.
This was shit.
I’d rather watch grass grow.
Even I could’ve played that.
John Cage was the greatest troll in the history of man.
What a pretentious douche.
Fuck it. Waste of time.
Dude. Fuck you
This is not music.
That’s America. It’s all about reputation. They destroy the integrity and authenticity of art.
If I did a song like that it would be “crap”, “boring” and “sums you up”.
One of the points of the composition is telling that music is sound, and sound has nothing to do with art.
What a waste of fucking time.
John Cage: The troll of the classical world.
This is not music, c’mon !
I’ve taken shits with more meaning than this.
I won’t try to give this a meaning. To me it’s totally bullshit.
What the fuck is this crap.
It’s definitely not music.
Fuck me, I have wasted precious minutes just to watch this shit!
This is not music that is cultural poverty.
What a load of shit.
Just self indulgence
This is a man sitting at a piano doing nothing for 4 1/2 minutes. Him trying to justify his pretention by saying that music is all around us we just have to listen is insulting to peoples intelligence, he pretended he was the only person on planet earth to have that thought.
Anyone could do this.
I’m pretty sure you’re one of those types of hipster that would consider a lump of steaming shit ‘art’ if John Cage took one in front of you.
And of course YOUR intelligence is automatically correct simply because someone convinced you of bullshit. Meanwhile, I’m sitting here watching you say that DOING NOTHING is a sign of intelligence, asking myself exactly what kind of brain damage you must have to come to that stellar conclusion. Don’t expect to convince me you’re anything MORE than some dumb cultist with that kind of “logic”. I don’t have to doubt my intelligence when I have fuckwits like you to compare it to.
What’s offensive to me is the navel-gazing full-of-themselves-itude that’s driving these art snobs to jerk each other off and call the absence of something to be art.
Now bow down and suck my dick in the face of that artistic application of pure Logic.
He’s basically ‘challenging’ the idea of art by not doing shit, because he knows that people will kiss his ass for doing so.
This is so fucking gay, what kind of dumb pretentious nerd would like this video. Faggots!
John cage is an ass hole.
Artists decide what art is, and if you disagree, you don’t understand art. Perfect incestuous circular argumentation. The solution is to break the circle: self-proclaimed artists don’t decide what art is.
This shit is RIDICILOUS there are people on this planet who have nothing and are starving and then there is people like this weirdo claiming that this is music or art.
We are just as sad as him for wasting precious minutes watching and commenting on this crap when those minutes could be spent appreciating what we have or enjoying every second of this privileged life that we have. Life is worth so much more than 4 minutes and 33 seconds of utter fucking shit.
Pretentious motherfuckers.
I am a fairly open minded guy but in my opinion this is just bullshit.
Seriously, this is total crap.
Probably the most retarded thing I’ve ever came across.
The emperor has no clothes. You’re telling me that the emperor’s wonderful new attire, visible only by connoisseurs of Art, is sparking a debate. The guy is fucking NAKED. It isn’t cynicism, it’s me reacting correctly and justifiably in the face of outright stupidity. No music is not music. Not collecting stamps isn’t a goddamn hobby. Defending this guy’s do-nothing composition is just art snobs jerking each other off. Which part of this is too difficult to understand?
What the fuck is this?
I’ve wasted 5 minutes of my life.
Tell me, how is it art?
Nothing cannot equal something. Mathematically, logically, not-being-a-pretentious-fuckwit-cultist-ally: four and a half minutes of silence is not art, and the universe doesn’t bend over backwards and sodomize itself with its tongue merely because some guy called John Cage won some prizes. You guys are drunk on bullshit.
What a pretentious prick.
This is no music you fucking retard; its the worst shit I’ve ever listened to.
What the fuck is this. Is it serious? This is NOT music; this is “recording the ambient noise”. In no way this is a song. You can use those sounds to create a song, but this guy is not. It’s noise, not music.
It is simply a test to see how freaking pretentious you are.
Big piece of Crap. Nonsense.
Guys like this and Jackson Pollock are a bunch of posers who get gratification from the fact that idiots will fawn over what ever crap they pull out of their asses.
This is so retarded. And the worst part is that they teach this in colleges around the country. If john cage was in front of me, I’d punch his hipster-pioneering face in.
Is this supposed to be funny?
Nihilist garbage.
This is for dumb people who think they’re smart.
I am a fan of classical music, but this piece sucks balls.
Clearly a case for the asylum.
When did silence become art? Don’t you have to actually have some skill to be an artist?
What is the point?
Absolutely pathetic load of rubbish.
Am I missing something?
Yes you are asshole!
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