R. Luke Dubois and Billboard

Billboard

In the contemporary, many artists began to use electronics to create art and exhibit it to the masses in an unprecedented manner which prompted the New Media influx of artists and musicians. Of these came the artist R. Luke Dubois in 2005 with his musical piece “Billboard”.  Now, this piece demonstrates time-lapse phonography of Billboard Number 1 songs since 1958 where the separate instruments, melodies and other sounds in a musical piece are meshed into a single sound or note. With this, one can assume that this New Age artist may fall under the Fluxus movement in regards to the Conceptual.

In Fluxism, this piece blends the songs into one long, 30 minute piece that flows through a progression of standard notes. In the conceptual movements, the person who listens to the piece will have a unique interpretation to the songs that were “zoomed out”. Of the many that have experienced this have reported to have heard the evolution of recording technologies along with the evolution of music genres from Rock to Hip Hop. In the artist’s perspective, Dubois wanted to expose how the Billboard Company has been corrupted for the past 20 years in the aspect of its listing process. Dubois mentions that record labels release “air play only” songs and then releasing albums to improve that particular song’s chart status; with this occurring since 1991.

To me, this piece appealed to my musical side in ways that I wasn’t expecting. Firstly, I expected to see many of my favorite musicians to be on there, though to my surprise only a small handful have actually topped the Billboard charts. I also found out that there is a certain musical note that is considered “chart topper material” as the years and decades went by, and most of my favorite songs were off key in certain spots along with their play times. Some songs just whizzed by as others stayed for longer periods of time (which were only a few seconds). According to Dubois, the length of each song depended on the number of weeks that particular piece was topping the charts, which meant that a majority of the dwindling number of remaining songs that I liked disappeared in the blink of an eye. I found this part to be the most moving since the quick songs were the ones that I listened to quite often.

When this piece was on exhibit, it was loaded onto an iPod and displayed in a bland room with two sets of high quality headphones for the listeners. The way this piece was created is taken from another style used for moving pictures called time-lapse photography. This method is basically “zooming out” the camera lens to show the entire film in a broader perspective. How I see it, this type of way to display and create the piece is a bit unorthodox to my palette although the piece was excellent.