INVENTING REALITY
During the following years, I would occasionally google "the Overdub Tampering Committee" to see if anything else had ever come of the idea. There were often new references to it on message boards and music blogs. We took great pride in learning that it had made its way to become part of a class at the University of Liverpool. Looking at the class syllabus, we noticed one lecture in particular was titled "The Overdub Tampering Committee and Plunderphonics: Popular Music and Resistance in the Postmodern Age."
Author Terence McKenna had a theory that "the world is made of language." He suggested that we can't enter a new reality until we can describe it first. I wanted a new reality in a small, tiny pocket of the world, so I wrote about one and placed it online as if it were real. I'm certainly not saying the OTC was earth-shattering but I was genuinely surprised by the amount of attention it did receive and how my spoken reality seemed to take on real-world attributes so quickly.
I will conclude this by story by strongly suggesting that you do not trust this account of these stories at all. I certainly wouldn't if I had read the same 50 paragraphs that you just did. The only way for me to put this story out into the world without coming off as completely hypocritical is to encourage you to do absolutely whatever you want with it. Dispute it, re-edit it, rewrite it, repost it with your name attached as the author, quote it out of context, utilize if it for your own means, use my own words to confront my own stance and opinions, start overdubbing and uploading on your own, report us to the RIAA, scour your downloads for out-of-place solos, begin a smear campaign against me, or even click this tab closed and never think about it again.
Ryan Walsh can be reached at ryan@hallelujahthehills.com.
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