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I have a friend that, to hear him tell it, lived my life more effectively than I ever got the opportunity to. He is what’s known as an appropriator.

A medium to large sized human being who actively cultivates enough deep, hollow spaces to suck in other people’s stories, reinterpret them and saturate his own space with these new, baseless but brilliantly inflated experiences.

I love loading his eager skull up with the details of my most recent breakup over instant messenger, waiting two months to hang out with him again, and finding him regaling a crowd of slightly younger women I hadn’t met yet with the tale of the household appliances my ex-girlfriend apparently decided to throw at him from her mother’s bathroom window, including a brand new toaster oven.

Now, in reality she’d only successfully tried to bang my elbow with the microwave door with some swift fingered lower right button shoving action, but he made that part of my life sound epic, while making it his all at the same time.

To my knowledge, he’s never actually had a girlfriend, a significant relationship of any sort, or even had anything really happen to him, on any level.

He spends all his time gathering truths to lie about, just for how the new, freshly gussied up story sounds in his head, feels in his mouth.

Frankly, I really dig this guy, because of the effort he puts into reinterpreting something that already was.

He doesn’t just make it bigger, or better, or more memorable, he makes a pre-existing idea absolutely his.

Conceit

It takes effort, consideration, a deep understanding of the fundamental conceit of what’s being appropriated.

It’s really more smart than I believe I understand. To be honest, I also think he lifted this concept from hip-hop’s original remix philosophy, although you wouldn’t be able to tell that based on any current observations.

Hip-hop remixes used to be very similar to this dude’s method of stacking imagination on the surface of already established cred.

They were true to the source idea in that there was always a clear, leggy effort to tell the story in a different voice, with a new set of instincts and patterns. Pete Rock, Large Professor, Q Tip, Dilla, Primo, et. al filtered songs through their hands and ears until they were scrubbed raw, and spent three minutes and thirty seconds spreading and healing the wounds all at once, until the noise hurt in a brand new way.

Lately though, remixes seem to just be tacking on a guest rapper or singer or adlibber, with no real attempt to build something on top, rather, attach something to the back.

I haven’t spoken to my appropriator friend for about half a year, and I have a few doozies for him to lengthen and shorten and redevelop at his leisure, in his own language.

If only hip-hop producers were still such weird people, I think I’d have something far better to listen to while relocating his screen name.[[In-content Ad]]

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