Revisiting Roger Waters' Radio KAOS

There's new Pink Floyd boxset coming out. One of its selling points is a remix/rerecording of the David Gilmour's 1987 solo album A Momentary Lapse of Reason which exists because audience liked David Bowie's Never Let Me Down reimagining enough. So now AMLOR sounds less 80s bullshit and more sterile 10s shit.

So why not get back and revisit the other 1987 Pink Floyd solo album - Roger Waters' Radio KAOS.

For one reason or another, Roger Waters' solo career never really got much appreciation. Which is a damn shame because his 1984-1992 run was a worthy continuation of latter day Pink Floyd vibe with intrinsic concept albums and biting social commentary.

His official solo debut, 1984 The Pros and Cons of Hitch-Hiking suffered from the comparison with Pink Floyd's The Wall (just like The Final Cut the year prior). The other strike against P&CHH is that it was originally pitched to the band with the Wall and the band passed on it - this fact created a general perception that the album just wasn't good enough. Which is not true.
P&CHH is very different from The Wall and can stand on its own. This album is much more self-aware and tongue-in-cheek affair than its more celebrated relative. It is cheerfully stupid and embracing the camp of its vaudevillian overcomplicated "it is a dream" plot.
The older i get the more i can relate to its haphazard narrative and decidedly glorious lack of coherence.

Then there is 1992 Amused to Death which is Roger Waters blasting out the lost Pink Floyd album he had in himself. The Bravery of Being Out of Range and It's A Miracle stand as all-time greats. It is weirdly prophetic album about media reality warping and information oversaturation that messes the lives of simple men.

In between these two albums is 1987 Radio KAOS. The best way to explain Radio KAOS worth is by comparing it to AMLOR.

Released at the same time as David Gilmour's A Momentary Lapse of Reason, it had a strategic disadvantage of not being labelled a Pink Floyd album (unlike David Gilmour's). This resulted in lower sales, biased reviews and low tour attendance which seriously damaged Waters' career prospects.

The other problematic point of Radio KAOS is its overproduced 80s sound. Just like David Gilmour's 1987 effort, Roger Waters tried to modernize his sound with then-fancy fairlight synth aesthetic. However, Waters leaned too hard on it and instead of augmenting his sound, he made it tacky and dubious at times.

At its worst, the album production sounds like a generic boilerplate synthesizer schlock - far cry from Waters' extravagant soundscapes of The Final Cut or Pros and Cons of Hitch-Hiking. But the production is just one of the facets of the creative work - it is the songs that make the wheel turning.

In contast, the biggest problem with David Gilmour's A Momentary Lapse of Reason (or his other solo efforts) is its abysmal songwriting. The man can play guitar, but songwriting is far from his strengths. He can write a terrific song once in a while, but he can't carry the load all the way through.

Even though the music is mostly fine with some exceptional moments (Yet Another Movie is a great song despite some lyrical hiccups), the lyrics make your ears bleed grey goo. The Dogs of War might have been a great song by the Bad Company ten years prior, but the band called Pink Floyd could have done better any day of the week. Even album highlights like Sorrow or One Slip suffer from being littered with the most generic lyrical cliche imaginable. As if there were no cliche David Gilmour didn't liked.

On the other hand, Roger Waters knows a thing or two about writing songs and making them work on their own terms and within an album context. Radio KAOS shows Roger Waters trying to make an accessible record with a message and for the most part he succeeds.

The album is a great showcase of Waters' narrative skills. He tells a simple story about dealing with global bullshit with some extreme prejudice. Each song explores different aspect of the narrative and progresses the story. It builds to a culmination and concludes with a message of hope with so much cheese and tongue-in-cheek - you can't help but smile in the end.

Story-wise, the album is rather mean dig on The Who's Tommy. Except this time "the shit is real". It also revolves around paralyzed wheelchair-bound protagonist. But this time, his name is Billy and the boy can hear Radio Waves. And he is Welsh. He has a brother Benny, who works as a miner during the Thatcher years, so you know he's screwed into backside netherrealm.

After another pub crawl Benny gets into trouble for dropping a concrete block to an overpass which resulted in a driver's death. Benny's sent to prison while Billy goes to their uncle Dave who lives in California.

Uncle Dave is an interesting fella. Back in the 40s he worked on The Manhattan Project, and this experience made him quite matter-of-fact about life and stuff. Billy is miserable in California (probably because he happened to hear LL Cool J "Going back to Cali". This thing is a serious PTSD generator) and he is generally upset by the state the world is currently in. In other words, Billy's world weary with ennui and nonesuch sehnsucht.

During his stay at the uncle's place, Billy learns how to use a cordless phones and contacts local Radio KAOS DJ Jim Ladd who plays himself. They start to talk and Billy shares his thoughts regarding the modern world and where it is going. He is really upset about happened to Benny and what is going on in Wales. And he is really pissed off at the politicians who just go sweet fuck-all about it.

The accumulation of frustration results in Billy decided to teach a world a lesson in humility. With his new skills in manipulating cordless phones, he orchestrates a simulation of a nuclear attack. At the same time he disables all the retaliation mechanisms of the opposing forces leaving them defenseless helpless chums - so that "this time" it will be one and done waltz. Given the build-up and knowing what is going to happen, everybody shit their pants. Billy's "operation" results in a global blackout which apparently brings the world to senses and creates a semblance of hope.

That's quite a story, right?

On the other hand, the songs work well as a standalone pieces. While the production is deeply rooted in the 80s synth-laced mainstream rock, it benefits the songs with clear-cut structures with punchy rhythms and catchy hooks.

Radio Waves is punchy album opener. The story opens in medias res with Billy meeting with Jim Ladd. The song wastes no time to get to the point and its hook is really infectious. Radio Waves sets the scene and setting of the whole story. On the other hand, its sound shows how Billy perceives radio waves and what kind of excitement it brings to him.

Who needs information slows things down and starts to flesh out the narrative. It is an anthem of a working man cornered by the absence of future prospects. It gives you a sneak peek into the world Billy lives in. Narrative-wise it is a flashback to the inciting incident of the story - Benny's getting into trouble.

Me or Him is about the consequences of Benny's act. At first there is an attempt to justify his actions, then to comprehend what happened and then somber coming to terms with the state of things.

The Powers That Be is another high octane rock piece. Unlike cheeful Radio Waves, it is a rather dark song about those in power and the way they apply it to everybody. Verses of the song are constructed out of generic marketing cliche wrapped into hard boiled twang. It is like an optical illusion. Chorus goes in reverse exposes the absurdity of this mirage.   

Sunset Strip tells about Billy's stay at Uncle Dave's. It combines shiny imagery of the California with the longing for home. Billy does not belong there and he is very uncomfortable. He is trying to get a glimpse of home via radio but it is futile.

Home is an album's centerpiece. This song marks the breakdown of Billy and his decision to take action. He can't take this anymore. It starts off relatively calm mid-tempo but soon enough it starts to unravel until in the end it goes out of control and spuns into the despair of the next song.

Four Minutes depicts Billy's fit of rage and desire to right the wrongs of the world. It is less of a song and more of a happening - it ebbs and flows with the impeding doom getting closer. The highlight of the song is the end part where Claire Torry sings "Goodbye, little spy in the sky". It is really tearjerking despite being an eulogy for spy satellite.

Despite the promise of burning the world down in flames, the story ends with the fake out. The Tide is Turning was born out of Waters' change of heart after he saw the social impact of Live Aid. For a moment even such cynic as him started to believe there is still some good left in the world. In the context of an album this song works a sticking out tongue and saying "nyah nyah".

Radio KAOS is a product of its time. The production values are somewhat detrimental to its perception, but the songwriting is solid and the tunes are catchy to get through the 80s plastic dirge.

If anything, Radio KAOS encapsulates the tone of the 1980s with its fear of nuclear war, fascination with computers, overproduced sound and celebrities trying to save the world while marketing themselves.

Random notes on DNA songs

Back in the day i used to take extensive notes while listening to music. The thing is - my brain generates a lot of thoughts and when they just float around my head starts to boil and having it hot is no good.
And when you write it down - the pressure's off and you can keep your head fresh.

I stopped doing that due to work-related burnout. But why not try it again?

Here are some of my notes on songs by seminal New York No Wave band DNA.

The thing you need to know about DNA is that this was the band that wasn't in the whole music thing. They were doing a thing of their own that just happened to be expressed with sounds. Also - this is how Sonic Youth would have sounded like if all the articles about them were accurate.

Christian Morgenstern - BIM BAM BUM poem

Heavy emphasis on the images is one of the great things symbolist poetry brought back to the spotlight in the latter half of XIX century. After years of being buried in the verbosity of romantic poetry, symbolism cut the fat and tried to get straight to the point. 

Despite that, symbolist approach managed to overstay its welcome and become a passe by the time XX century rolled in. Part of the problem was plain and simple misuse of images, they became nothing more than a mere garnish of the text, an outlet for the flowery language, the one used for furbishing instead of actually serving a thematic or narrative purpose in the text.

But it wasn't necessary a bad thing. Case in point - BIM BAM BUM.

Why procedural text generation is the best?

Here's an article from LIFE magazine from March 3 1961 about a text generator that does some form of beatnik poetry and it is almost as good as a real thing. At least for the disinterested and uninitiated. 

The tone of the piece is a mix of tongue-in-cheek amazement and goodhearted irony. But nevertheless it is really curious piece of history. 1961 was the very infancy of the Natural Language Processing - but even then there was this semi-mocking tone regarding what NLP is capable of.  And the poem is decent enough. 

I think Lew Welch would have been a fan of this thing - there is this smoky blur of similarity of his cadences and of the generated poem.

Anyway. As a writer, text generation is one of my areas of interest. It is a tool worth exploring. And not because it can do job for you. 

The poem itself is the representative of the procedural text generation variety. In essence, it is a cookie-cutter template-based way of producing text out of available elements without taking context or semantics into consideration. It is as blunt and unelegant as it gets. Usually, the results are clumsy and borderline demented. But only if you expect it to do text writing the right way. If not - it can be incredibly efficient at its job if you know how to use it.

I can go even further and claim that of all its types, procedural text generation is probably the greatest application of natural language processing ever.

Here's why - it is a simulacrum1 operating with a simulacrum2 based on a simulacrum3 to do simulacrum4.

Cue Inception BRAAAAAM.

Let's unpack this.

3 Procedural Text Generation is based on an assumption that grammar rules and vocabulary is all there is for language. Such vital parts of the language as onthological and aesthetic contexts or semantics are left out of the picture for sake of keeping things simple. In other words, PTG assumes that "map IS territory". 

1 Then there the generative infrastructure - it is more or less a Rube Goldberg machine. Eerily futile, blunt instrument. 

It is a structure marked by placeholders and there is an inventory out of which the result is constructed. In fact, this structure is the text, except it is not, but it shapes the result. 

There can also be some rules that affect the choice of words, but it is optional. It can run at random just fine.

2 Traditionally, the formation of text is bound by narrative. Its intention is to transmit some sort of information.

On the other hand, the intention of PTG is to generate a text entity, not narrative or evoke imagery. Thus, the central element of PTG mechanism is more or less doing snapshots of the indeterminacy.

From the existential standpoint, the choice is rooted in numerous factors. But what if we take out factors completely and leave it blank - what kind of choice it will be? It won't be because it is a completely different thing now. It just operates similarly. That's where procedural text generation magic kicks in.

4 Basically, what happens is - a bunch of stuff is being thrown together and by accident it generates sense to the reader because the reader bears the baggage of experience and context and is able to embalm a piece of text with meaning. The text itself remains empty. It was made to be made.

This is substantially different approach that explores other facets of perception and cognition. 

On the other hand, because the text in this set-up is not actually the text but the template and its inventory - it turns the creative process the inside out.  Instead of conveying meaning - the spotlight is on the framework and its potential to generate combinations. 

The sum of parts generates new entity that contains information shaped in a certain way that is not really saying anything but can be interpreted if necessary. 

As a result, procedural text generation allows us to peek at the strange parallel dimension where things look mostly the same but function differently. The whole method opens up different creative possibilities in terms of interaction with the text and constructing narratives.

FreddieMeter - Queen + voice recognition bullshit

Here's a little singing contest variation dedicated to one and only Freddie Mercury. It is called "FreddieMeter" because you know - it meters the Freddieness.

Why? Because he was sooooo great, you know? And he had such a great voice, do you know about that? Can you sing like Freddie Mercury? How close is your timbre and melody? Let's find out!

Give me a break.

While Freddie Mercury was great-ish (probably) and stuff (for sure), i don't think this posthumous celebration of his talent is all that necessary. The man has a body of work and it is literally everywhere and if you want to celebrate him - just listen to his music and stop looking for a reason to shove it down the throats under some new pretense via marketing effort. It doesn't add anything substantial to the conversation

Seriously, it is dumb experience marketing gimmick cringe. You take a hyped-up topic like Machine Learning and combine it with mildly promising idea of voice comparison. Then you need to make it broadly available so you regress it to the simplest form. And then you tack your brand on it so that it would "matter" more and generate that special kind of "engagement".

The reality is a bit different. Here's what FreddieMeter really is - it is a throwaway piece used to momentarily spike the interest in the brand and then go away without notice because no one will care about it beyond the inital splash. There is just nothingness all around.

Also - with this service you can compare Freddie's voice with Paul Rodgers via some audio input tweaks. Paul Rodgers is cool too (and he's probably a Chtulhu who got Doug-Quaid'd with some plastic surgery, hypnosis and Revolver Ocelot-level of mindrewiring), and did a Queen album too. It is probably the most useful thing you can do with it.

The other part of the problem is that it was created by the Google aka "the big tech company". Which is a kind of a red flag, you know? The thing about big tech is that they are infovore - they feed on information, and they want their information diverse and they will go a distance to get it. Case in point - this thing. It is a ploy to get more data. And brands go for it because of "whatever works" mentality.

I mean - this service will likely generate some audio-visual data of people singing or lipsyncing. This data will likely go down into some facial and voice recognition and transcription research stuff - and at some point down the line it will be commodified as some service.

The fact that there is a statement "Your audio doesn’t get uploaded to servers to be analyzed, so your vocals stay private" doesn't really mean anything - you need to know what to check in order to find out whether it is really true, and most of the people just don't care and follow the impulse. It is foolproof because it seems harmless.

Then there is a problem of purpose - what kind of endgame this project expects? What is the end goal? Just to have some fun and "celebrate the icon"? So, you can record your voice singing some Queen songs and compare with the way Freddie Mercury sang it. And that's it. This use case is flimsy to say the least.

What kind of insight does it really offer? That your voice is more or less reminiscent of Freddie Mercury's according to some broad criteria and lots of hidden parameters? OK, what is the benefit of having this kind of information? What it is good for? It's not a white elephant artistic technical achievement, so why bother spending resources on that? Because Queen brand paid for it so that they can raise awareness and celebrate? Do you really need to do it that way? There are so many questions left and somebody got paid for this.

The idea itself is fine. But that's not how you can use it and find out something interesting. One of the problems with these kinds of projects is that their mechanics allows much more than the business need requires. Which makes the case for the thing known as "the waste of effort". And this begs the question "why bother?". And the answer is - 'cause it generates data that can be used elsewhere. Period.

But how you can use it more productively?

One of the ways this idea can be applied for the common good is language learning. Speaking practice is one of the integral elements of the process and it is not really available for everyone. This kind of service can bridge gap and help people learn foreign languages in a less complicated way.

On the other hand, this kind of approach can be used to study the chrological changes of the way people speak througout the years and time periods. You can trace the evolution of speech patterns, tone, timbre of the voice of a specific individual or a group or community. And that is going to tell you a lot of things about how the way of verbal communication permutates and adapts to the surrounding world.

You can also singalong with Chuck Shuldiner. He's dead too and deserves to be celebrated.

How OpenAI sells GPT-2 as NLP killer app?

So, the thing we've been waiting for a better half of the year just happened - OpenAI had released a full unabridged version of their infamous Natural Language Processing model GPT-2. 

You know, the one known for being capable of generating texts that look and read just like the ones written by actual human beings. The one OpenAI deemed to be "too dangerous" for the public release. The "Pandora's Box" that, if misused, would probably flood the world with fake news and otherwise manipulative synthetic content. The one that would make regular copywriters and journalists utterly obsolete. The one that birthed AI Weirdness blog, after all. You know, that one. 

Well, it is back again and it is a good reason to talk about one of its lesser-known aspects. 

One of OpenAI's competitive advantages is that it is "capped-profit" limited partnership, which means that OpenAI doesn't have to generate profit per se, but their sponsors (in limited partnership - folks like Microsoft) can use OpenAI's research for their own purposes (products or solutions within products). At the same time, OpenAI's primary performance indicators are more or less spread of their technological solution and maintaining its notoriety. 

Let's talk about the latter. 

The thing you need to know about OpenAI GPT-2 is that its marketing campaign was pitch-perfect. This is how you market the technological product to the unwitting masses. This is how you present a value proposition to those in the know. 

The secret is that you mostly don't really talk about the product itself but instead concentrate on its impending impact, the way it will shake things up, "make a difference," and so on. Hence "too dangerous" narrative. 

This approach creates a mild case of hysteria perpetuated by an eerie mystery, which is mostly based on a bunch of "um"'s and "uh"'s and whole lotta sweet technobabble. The goal is to exemplify what the thing is capable of subtly - leaving enough space for speculation. On the one hand, this approach created a stir in the media, thus guaranteed a higher degree of visibility than competing products. On the other hand, it signaled to the right people that there is a multi-faceted solution waiting for proper implementation.

Just look at the launch sequence and how it establishes the product. It kicked off with the press release that stated, "oh well, we guess we just made some kind of doomsday device. And we are really concerned about it. And we're definitely not going to do anything with it, because it would be ridiculous to put it out in the open just like that. So we are just going to keep under wraps for now". 

What happened next is the tortsunadomi of news pieces that retold the story over and over again and also added a few meandering thoughts full of piss and vinegar to the conversation. It is then quickly incorporated into the "fake news" and "deep fake" narratives and firmly contextualized as something definitely "threatening." As a result, the burning mystery is perpetuated and elaborated. 

The next step was to provide a proper showcase of the model capabilities while avoiding spoiling the big thing. It is a great sleight of hand. The whole thing is out in the open, but you claim it isn't. The showcase is made by an abridged version of the product presented as a technical paper and a tool for researchers. 

It played out perfectly - the presentation of expanded and diversified by multiple points of view on the model. As a result, - more opportunities became apparent.

There were a couple of NLP projects that provided GPT-2 a lot of publicity. For example, Talk to Transformer presented the original use case of GPT-2 - text prediction. The way it was presented neutralized any emerging criticism regarding its clumsiness (for example, it couldn't predict Austin 3:16). It was simply freestyling a bunch of stuff - sometimes it was more coherent, sometimes it wasn't. 

Then there was the Giant Language Testing Room that visualized the text analytics and showed the mechanics behind computer-generated and human-generated texts. And then there was Allen Institute's Grover than was designed to expose deepfake texts and also showcase how easily the model can recreate the text with a couple of settings tweaked (except when you ask it to write an essay on Tawny Kitaen for some reason). 

Also, there were numerous blogs that applied GPT-2 for creative purposes, like writing unicorn fiction or generating incongruous names. Blogs like AI Weirdness that basically celebrated model's bumbling nature.

In a way, this kind of presentation operates on a similar framework to Marvel Comics' built-up the arrival of Galactus back in 1966. First, The Watcher shows up and warns about the coming "doom." And everybody go "ah, we've gotta do something!" Then you get a harbinger in the form of Silver Surfer, who wreaks havoc but at the same time continually reminds us that "the worst is yet to come." The heat is right around the corner now. 

And then we get the main event - Galactus, who was just another supervillain in the long line of "ultimate threats" just ten times bigger and because of that characterized as ten times more imposing and menacing and dangerous because authors of the comic said so. 

And that's what happened. After months of build-up and speculations, in early November, the big 40GB 1,5 billion parameters version of GPT-2 was released to the public. And it was exactly what it said on the tin from the very start, just ten times bigger. However, the momentum generated by the build-up made it seem less apparent. But there is a catch which makes things even more interesting.

The thing is that "ten times bigger" doesn't translate into "ten times better" because the technology doesn't really work that way. What matters is how it manages to accomplish specific use cases and how does it correlate with the solutions for actual practical needs. 

GPT-2 is presented as a tool that generates texts that seem natural as if an actual human being wrote it. It is cool, but you need to understand that the model operates on the finite dataset, and all it really does is derives the text out of probabilities and context approximations. Text generation is not really generation. It is more of regurgitation in sophisticated combinations. GPT-2 output looks and reads just like a real thing in a way that the real thing can be bland and passable and not really saying anything, just like loads and loads of content on the internet, especially, its corporate parts. 

What GPT-2 really does is creating a serviceable text product that serves a specific well-defined function. But you can't really market that because it is not really unappealing beyond those in the know (say hi to BERT). However, that's the absolute peak of practical NLP. 

A perfect example is a conversational interface. You say "hi," and it says, "hello, how are you?" because that how conversations usually go. The other example is a verbal interpretation of data like stats in Mailchimp where you can get reports like "22% opened your newsletter, 5% of which clicked on the link, and 1% gave it a thumbs up", but it is beyond current GPT-2 use case. 

That's why the "fake news" narrative is so beneficial for GPT-2. 

On the surface, fake news seems to be a natural avenue for that kind of thing. That game is all about quantity, not quality, and the NLP generator can help with that. It was hammered over and over again in the press releases and subsequent news pieces. And the use case seems legit. Technically, the goal is to generate derivative content that will reinforce and possibly perpetuate prerequisite beliefs of the target audience. Just what GPT-2 is good at.

Except, that's not really the message of the narrative. The real message all along was, "this thing can be used like that if YOU won't use it." And that leaves an intriguing mystery of what is going to happen next, which in turn engages the target audience more than the product itself.  

Count off, sampling and Kirk Pearson's unpersoned "Going Up"

Last Sunday, I was talking with my friend about De La Soul intense sampling style and at some point the conversation veered further into conceptual art territory of supercuts and Youtube Poop. In particular, I was asked whether there were any pieces that combined counting and sampling that weren't DJ Shadow's "The Number Song". And I remembered one - i saw it a few years back. I just couldn't remember its title.

So i've spent over 5 hours trying to find this particular plunderphonic mashup. What a nice way of spending Sunday evening. For some reason it was way harder than i thought. 

Here's what i remembered: the piece featured a countdown from one to one hundred culled together from various songs. Plain, simple and to the point. The best supercuts are always like that - they just blast through and leave you contemplating.

I first saw this piece mentioned in one of the Rate Your Music lists back in the early 2010s. After that, i saw it featured on one of the topical wikipedia pages, either Sampling or Mashup. I also vaguely remember it being on Free Music Archive. The only things i couldn't pin down was who made it and what was the title.

At first, i checked rate your music and couldn't find anything resembling that particular piece. But i have found a list with many-many unusual types of count off in pop songs. It was insightful and ultmately pointless.

Then i have checked whether the piece was still referenced on the aforementioned "sampling" and "mashup" wikipedia pages. None. I also checked "plunderphonics" page. If there were any mentions of this composition - they were long gone. Or they were still there and i just couldn't identify it correctly due to my recollection of the piece being incorrect or misrepresentative.

Then i went further down the wiki wormhole and checked pages like "Count Off" and "Counting (Music)". Once again - nothing. 

Then i went all guns blazing on google and typed every imaginable description of the composition i could think of - "plunderphonic counting off/count off/countdown composition", "countdown out of samples from different songs", "count off sound collage" and so on. There were three types of search results: 1 - DJ Shadow "The Number Song" (obviously); 2 - every children counting song ever (predictable outcome); 3 - general references to respective concepts (because there was nothing else relevant).

It felt really awkward - i was certain that i heard that piece but i just could not find any trace of it. At some point i even thought that it was some kind of Mandela effect thing or that i just imagined that piece and then forgot about it and now thought about it again but as something else. It was really confusing.

Then it hit me - if i can't find anything on the current web - why not peek at the past? After a thorough raid on Wayback Machine on every available lead - i was able to identify the track.

The name of the composition was "Going Up". It was made by Kirk Pearson. The composition was released in 2011 on an album "Please Don't Sue Me". "Going up" is made out of unaltered soundbite samples from different songs that together create a count from one to ninety-nine. The selection of samples is eclectic - among other things you get obvious Doors reference and less obvious Zager and Evans reference.

Here's what is interesting - it is scrubbed from existence. I've looked through every available Kirk Pearson release and couldn't find it. Not even the slightest mention. There were lots of stuff but not "Going Up". Why? Guess what - there is only a few things that can make things un-exist on the internet. In case creative works - it is mostly commonly a copyright violation.

The thing is - the whole "Please Don't Sue Me" album was a giant lament configuration of plunderphonics - it was a detournement of other people's stuff - culture jamming in action. The thing that propels the culture forwards and opens up new possibilities and explores new aesthetics. 

And naturally at some point the representatives of these people took action. Because we can't have conceptual art that transforms other pieces and recontextualizes them to explore certain themes and ideas - it is disrespectful and detrimental to the sources. 

It is very sad, but i'm glad i took this journey. It made me think about how unsafe and fleeting is culture jamming. But at the same, it encouraged me to move on. It is an act of defiance, and that's what art is all about.

Now, let's perpetuate the legend of "Going Up".