The same address will also let you download the two most amazing music collages you cannot buy but must possess: John Oswald’s “Plunderphonics,” a monumental collection of pastiches of pop, classical, jazz and beyond from the Toronto-based pioneer and theorist of recombinant music; and Negativland’s “U2,” the most notorious celebrity-subversion prank to date in this new field.

The form of the music available from Detritus.net and the mode of its marketing dovetail. Recombinant tunes — taken from anyone you choose and distributed through the last unregulated channel — are the only outlaw sound left.

Detritus.net is one project of Steev Hise, sometime student of experimental-music pioneer Morton Subotnick, Web designer, media hound and self-described “computer geek.” Besides the essential music downloads, the site includes a spiffy multimedia bibliography and linkhouse (get the lowdown on Chumbawamba’s suppressed liner notes), gateways to a sneak peek at several kinds of digitally “Distorted Barbie” (including the original, attacked by Mattel) with a distort-her-yourself kit and the usual communication channels to build a virtual community of art pirates.

Detritus.net is exactly the kind of information wellspring the Internet supports best. The Net is the only way to distribute banned music without incurring shipping and handling costs and setting up a physical plant that can be easily shut down. Forget the legally or illegally downloaded regular recordings music corporations and retailers fret about now; underground albums like “Deconstructing Beck” will be the quintessential Internet sound product.

Hise is gutsy and on-target to set up Detritus.net. But the site’s impudent tone of the bad boy who broke the copyright window (as a fighter in the “intellectual property wars”) is not the most interesting justification for recombinant art on the Web. The really exciting promise is that the outlaw sound system may reopen the aesthetic territories that hip-hop and sampling originally surveyed — and extend them in new directions.

Still, the copyright-is-theft crowd does have one salient
point: Copyright restricts artworks most when the material is a corporate
gold mine of some kind — copyright-holders don’t devote the same energy to
protecting the castoffs or detritus left behind the refrigerator of
culture. In other words, copyright-is-theft has more to do with Barbie than
Beck.

When a copyrighted item is not so much a pseudopopulist property like Barbie, the morality of sampled art is no more easily resolved than the propriety of bootlegs of concerts and unreleased material. Funk overlord George Clinton became so annoyed with rappers’ sampling his beat science that he released a series of CDs composed of snippets he invited folks to borrow if they paid him. It did not take off as a solution to sampling. Current rapper-with-the-Midas-tongue Puff Daddy’s blatantly unreconstituted samples all over his hit tunes have thrown the piggyback aspect of the practice into high relief — but all his borrowings were paid for and legit. Should recombinant art belong only to those who can afford to buy nearly any snippet they want, if they don’t do anything too scandalous with it?

There is an art to recombinant music that’s often neglected in discussions of its trangressions. Negativland’s “U2″ savages Bono’s pomposity in its first section — but it cuts far deeper in its second half by letting “sewer mouth” Casey Kasem hang himself with his own recklessly taped four-letter words. The band chronicled its troubles and offered some worthy thoughts on the use of copyrighted material in 1995′s combined book and CD “Fair Use: the Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2.” But brilliantly scampish as Negativland can be, the principals’ concern with undermining consumerist culture can only carry the sounds so far. There has been zero legal flurry from cola conglomerates over Negativland’s new “Dispepsi” — at least partly because this time, unlike on “U2,” the polemics overwhelm the artistry of the sound mosaic.

Music, of course, may be the last thing on litigants’ minds. The legal buzzards at Island Records swooped down on the “U2″ EP at least in part because they claimed the cover art — with the U2 name and a U-2 spy plane far more prominent than the Negativland credit — might confuse consumers who thought they were buying music by Bono and company. Sometimes it doesn’t matter if the recombinant art is not even for sale. One suspects that in the case of Oswald’s “Plunderphonics,” Michael Jackson was more incensed by the cover art — his head and the black leather jacket from “Bad” superimposed over a full frontal nude white woman’s body — than he was by the 10,000 sampled Michaels singing “bad-bad-bad” on the track “Dab.”

As music, is “Deconstructing Beck” worth half a sawbuck? Oh, hell yes. Is it the life-enhancing sound maelstrom hopeful John Oswald fans dream of? Not even close. Three of the 13 cuts are fabulous toys, to be wound up over and over. Jane Dowe’s “Puzzles & Pagans” inverts and knots “Jackass” from “Odelay,” highlighting the delightful chiming-guitar sample from Them’s “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue” (itself a Dylan cover — piling up layers of re-versions is half the fun here). Dowe’s other track, “Bust a Move,” takes over Beckian notions of rhythm and words for her own (gently satirical) purposes. Nicely enough, Steev Hise’s contribution, “Stuck Together, Falling Apart,” shows meticulous attention to, if not total respect for, Beck’s ways. If I wanted to show what “Deconstructing Beck” was all about, J Teller’s “Fat Zone” and the Evolution Control Committee’s “One Beck in the Grave” would be useful additions.

The rest amounts to filler. Some cuts are distracting enough shards falling through space, but with no discernible relation to the source material. What good is outlaw art if it doesn’t matter where it was swiped from? Whether recombiners like it or not, they must have some fruitful relation to the object of their appropriation. They have to obsess on their source material as fervently as Mattel obsesses on Barbie — but in a different way.

The desirable target of recombinant music is not to pry away the grip of copyright as an end in itself, but to allow any schlub in his basement with the proper equipment to cut, paste and manipulate whatever sounds he needs into his dream. You listen to certain snatches of music so much, you own them with your interpretation, whether you can afford to legally sample them or not. At an earlier stage of technology, the Jamaican reggae industry named this process “version.” And of course similar appropriations infused hip-hop from the moment the Sugarhill Gang used Chic’s “Good Times” as the foundation of “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979. “Version” is potent because the skeleton of the old music is given new flesh, which in turn can be re-stripped by others.

Author Dick Hebdige explained the esthetic rationale of “version” in his 1987 book “Cut ‘n’ Mix”: “In order to e-voke you have to be able to in-voke. And every time the other voice is borrowed in this way, it is turned away slightly from what it was the original author or singer or musician thought they were saying, singing, playing … It’s a democratic principle because it implies that no one has the final say. Everybody has a chance to make a contribution. And no one’s version is treated as Holy Writ.”

If private control of art is to be overthrown, it must be done in the name of creativity. Beck and Michael Jackson, and even Casey Kasem’s cuss words, belong to the community — but only to those in the community who have the skills to change them into something rich and strange and new.

One snicker led to another, and soon photos and literal cartoons of the cartoonish Mr. T were declaring his insistent passion for male gonads on a Web page. Tasteless? Sure. But I pity the fool who considers it more offensive than dadaist.

It’s the unstoppable proliferation of Ate-My-Balls (AMB) pages that strikes most observers as “disturbing.” The Yahoo! AMB listing (the very existence of which is mind-boggling) includes more than 230 sites at the time of this writing. There are at least a half dozen other straight lists of AMBs, including one in Japan. The most sumptuous launch pad to all places AMB, as well as a host of info about munched testicles, is the Ate My Balls! Mega-Page. All we can say about the Ate My Balls Web Ring is that the operator’s parents don’t know about his little project and he intends to keep it that way.

Ate-My-Balls is a thoroughly modern meme: As soon as anything is thrown up on the popular-culture screen, it’s munching balls before you can do a hernia exam. There are already three Mike Tyson-Evander Holyfield pages and three Beanie Babies pages. Although the mass media from the ’60s onward are thoroughly picked over, there’s isn’t much in the way of “Louis XIV A Mangi My Balls” or “Prester John Explored My Balls.” There is one about Colossal Olmec Heads, though. One chap went so far as to include pictures and unkind comments about (purportedly) actual fellow MIT students.

Of course, irony is the fuse that drives these genital flowerings: The less likely one is to be associated with gonad gourmandizing, the more certain one is to get an AMB site. Every rich, famous and ball-starved person qualifies as well. Sadly, among the AMB pages that have disappeared are “Elmo Ate My Balls” (the winner of a popularity contest on the Mega Page), “Bob Dole Ate My Balls” (only those who win elections go on to eat another day — Clinton’s is still around) and “Martha Stewart Baked My Balls” (she’s too efficient to let that stay in sight for long).

Scrutinizing far too many AMB pages confirms that sheer idiocy and camp value can provoke cheap laughs even if true comedians remain rare as ever. And, sigh, there are a very few, very predictable, very unfunny homophobes who have picked up the obvious cues of AMB. The hee-hee racial tension lurking around the original Mr. T inspiration also stirs in the subconscious, unresolved. According to Aaron Yost of the AMB Mega Page, the AMB sites that draw the most hate mail are those that take on hot, sensitive headline topics like Heaven’s Gate (two pages) and are encountered by accident by those who do not expect to find their topic engaged in a testicle festival.

For those who need to amuse the childish doofus within, I would recommend: Maggie Simpson AMB, with its imaginative graphics, Yoda AMB, with its aptly dumb story line, Balls Thou Shalt Be Consumeth, for inspirational blasphemy, Mother Teresa Prayed for My Balls, for irreverence-on-a-stick and Bill Gates Bought Our Balls, providing a whisper of bizarro political truth.

After rolling around like a corpse-crazed hound in the silliness of Ate-My-Balls, we should note that AMB is invariably cited as a prominent example of so-called Useless Pages on the Web. Besides the always mildly ugly invitation to make fun of other people’s pathetic interests and putrid taste, the very definition of “useless” bandied about here seems narrow and smug. The whole Useless Pages index began with the discovery of one guy’s complete list of his music collection. But instead of being useless, this list has a vivid personality, reflecting a gay/dance sensibility that’s rarely given enough credence in conventional music culture. So it’s an “I am” that’s worth saying.

Finally, consider the Zen debunking of everyday notions of “useful” and “useless.” If a tree with many knots is useless to build houses or a bull with a white spot on its forehead is useless to sacrifice to the spirits, who’s to decide the “uselessness” — people, or the tree and the bull? The non-people involved certainly consider those “defects” useful. When Ate-My-Balls pages are declared useless, it must be just the testicles talking.

Pop cynics would predict an update of the utter corn pone of Abba or Boney M. — in other words, the anguish, tragedy and fury of Barbie and Ken dolls with a pop-house beat. And let it not be imagined that O-Jay (is he sure that nickname is a good idea?) is unaware of the charms of wind-up camp or that said charms do not appeal to pop cynics in measured doses. Because despite all the hesitations, Real McCoy works almost nonstop on both “Another Night” and the new “One More Time.” The tunes do suggest hipper forerunners, too. The lean sound and dry delivery recall the sadly forgotten ’80s trio InDeep, which had the same makeup. And the breakthrough Real McCoy hits, “Another Night” and “Run Away,” as well as the new potential follow-ups, “Love Save Me” and the twinkling “Tomorrow,” incorporate swank Philly-soul melodies in the manner of M People.

O-Jay, Mason and Cork know that just a little extra depth of
feeling works wonders on pretty, romantic platitudes like “Give a
Little Love” and “Look at Me,” though all the passion in the
world wouldn’t redeem the trite social activism of “Take a Look
at Your Life” or turn “One More Time” into more than “Another
Night” another time around. For the second album in a row,
O-Jay delivers a smooth, electrofunk meditation on free-floating
paranoia, “Love Is a Stranger” (ominoso opening line: “Even
though you don’t know me, I’m not a stranger to you”). The
inspired choice of cover tune on the debut was “Come and Get
Your Love”; here, it’s Shania Twain’s “(If You’re Not In It for
Love) I’m Outta Here.” And there’s no denying that Cork was an
astute switch, fitting tighter, richer harmonies in with Mason.
Even O-Jay sounds looser — check his swinging chorus syllables
on “Tonight.” The Real McCoy best-of may be the indispensable
disc in the end, but while the licks and beats are slightly thinner
on “One More Time,” the mood is happier — funny how
million-selling singles can do that.

Clark has said silly things about the new recording, such as that it wouldn’t be “a big studio record,” as though intrusive producers had spoiled his early albums — his most “overproduced” ’70s records sound like field recordings next to, say, U2′s “Pop.” His true problem is that he writes very slowly, and since putting out a single every two or three years will not sustain a career, he has released bales of sketchy or maudlin filler tunes. That is not an issue with “Keepers.” All the material hangs tough, and with a relaxed yet spry quintet behind him (including dobro, accordion, and son Travis on bass and vocals), Clark can highlight his voice, richer with dry, dusty creaks than ever.

Now he’s back with some of the old crew, including journeyman soul vocalist Sweet Pea Atkinson and ex-MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer, and some new hired hands like Herbie Hancock, Terence Blanchard and the suspiciously named David “McMurray.” The Wilson project must have inspired Was to mess around with the fundamentals, because the high concept summary of “Forever’s a Long, Long Time” is “the songs of Hank Williams meet downhearted soul and lighthearted jams in the noir streets of Motor City.” Yep, the material consists of five transformed Williams honky-tonkers (one
already reworked by Hank Williams Jr.) and five Was post-mod workouts.

The metamorphoses of songs like the title cut and “Lost on the River” are equal parts enchanting and perverse. Besides a couple pedal steel groans, no country atmosphere remains at all (Merle Haggard’s cameo vocal on the final track, “I’m So Tired of It All” is a meaningless incongruity). But Williams’ numbers give Atkinson some rugged melodies to caress, and with hep inflection sprinkled on them, the weary, lovelorn hillbilly lyrics rub nicely against the Digital Age arrangements. One particular chortle-inducer is “Never Again (Will I Knock on Your Door),”
with vocal by Portia Griffin, which sends up the glossy, sexy-mama style of Babyface. His angriest tunes are squishy in the middle — “Never Again” is
rejection all the way through.

Was only jokes a little bit here, though. He’s become such a deft arranger, what with all his production work, that the seamless unfolding of his songs provides the album’s chief entertainment. The 13-minute “Lost on the River” begins as a slinky blowing session in medium tempo with Blanchard and
“McMurray” stretching out — for once with Blanchard the more choppy, dissonant phrasemaker. Then, with the coiling bass figure holding the
transition, the tune becomes a dubby space flight that slowly dwindles into arcade bleeps. Sure it’s just a sequence of scenes, but the timing and
rehearsed moves are spot on. This is inspired indie jazz-funk from an unclassifiable who wears his years lightly.

Incidentally, those who play this disc with more computer muscle than I can muster will witness the enhanced-CD short film of “Forever’s a Long, Long
Time,” directed by Was and starring Atkinson and Kris Kristofferson (who doesn’t sing on the regular CD at all — I told you Was is smart).