VERSION:
November 20, 2008.
Please note that this version has not been proofread yet, and it is also missing illustrations.
Length: 82,071 Words (including footnotes).
ABOUT THE VERSIONS:
One of the advantages of online distribution which I can control is that I don’t have to permanently fix the book’s contents. Like contemporary software and web services, the book can change as often as I like, with new “features” and “big fixes” added periodically. I plan to take advantage of these possibilities. From time to time, I will be adding new material and making changes and corrections to the text.
Lessig’s book on Remix was just released. Like his previous books, the emphasis is on the future of intellectual property. Unlike his other books, Lessig appears to focus on the act of “rip, mix and burn” that he often used to discuss different aspects of online culture. In “Remix” this act is the critical framework to discuss the future of creativity.
People heavily invested in the fine arts might find the use of the term “art” misleading, though. Lessig appears to use the term in broad terms to refer to creative acts that are becoming more common due to the spread of Remix principles.
I’m looking forward to this book making the rounds in networked culture. I hope it proves itself to be Lessig’s most popular publication of them all. Sadly, he claims that it will be his last on the issue:
This is (I expect) the last book I’ll write in this field. Dedicated to Lyman Ray Patterson and Jack Valenti, it pushes three ideas — (1) that this war on our kids has got to stop, (2) that we need to celebrate (and support) the rebirth of a remix culture, and (3) that a new form of business (what I call the “hybrid”) will flourish as we better enable this remix creativity.
I wrote this book last year. Many of the themes were described in 18 minutes in my TED talk. I am very eager to have it out.
Paul D. Miller, AKA DJ Spooky is a multitasker. He is known for his music productions, as well as his art and film projects. He also has been writing about art and culture for many years. In the last few years, Miller has worked with Trojan Records to develop compilations about Reggae and Dub with a critical yet playful take on the complexities of Jamaica. Most recently, he edited Sound Unbound for MIT Press, a book which comprises a set of texts about the influence of sound in media and culture at large. In the following interview, DJ Spooky, discusses his current projects in a global context, and motivates us to move beyond basic binaries onto a more productive and creative state.
Eduardo Navas: In your most recent Recording Project “Creation Rebel” as well as “DJ Spooky Presents In Fine Style 50,000 Volts of Trojan Records!!!” you write short historical essays about the culture of Reggae, Dub and the Big Sound System. You are also very careful to present your position as a cultural insider, given that you used to visit Jamaica as a kid; and you also state that you were approached by Trojan Records, rather than the other way around, which would otherwise place you, regardless of ethnicity, in a position of “explorer” or Neo-colonial. Based on all this can you explain how you see colonial ideology at play in Jamaica today?
DJ Spooky: The situation Jamaica faces today is part of a global cycle of hyper capitalism – even the Cayman Islands used to be part of Jamaica… anyway, yeah, the whole system is based on production models that privilege the “developed” economies over the “developing” ones. From Mugabe in Zimbabwe to Thabo Mbeki in South Africa, Kim Jong Il in North Korea, or Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and Ahmadinejad in Iran, people in “developing” economies are faced with rulers just as flawed as anything the U.S. can summon up with people like Bush or Reagan. I tend to think that everything is connected. My Trojan records project is an exploration of the archives of one of my favorite record labels during a time of intense political upheaval. But it’s also about showing how people make music out of their circumstances.
Image note: My partner, Annie, swiftly caught Gilberto Gil’s concert song list as this one was about to be thrown by one of the roadies at the end of the show.
I attended Gilberto Gil’s concert at the 4th & B in San Diego this past Monday. The turnout was quite impressive. I did not take my digital camera as I thought the audience was not allowed to take footage, but upon arriving, I noticed cameras everywhere; people were not hiding them and were using them freely, from cell-phones to small digital video-cams.
I later learned when reading an article in the Union Tribune that Gil actually promotes the recording of his concerts by the audience for later upload to video websites such as Youtube. Gil embraces new technologies as a way to communicate and spread his message, which as Brazil’s Minister of Culture includes a sense of responsibility for Brazil’s music history. It seems that Gil is fully in tune with Remix Culture.
Image taken by Annie Mendoza
He delivered a two hour strong set which included original material as well as covers. The songs that stood out are three of perhaps the most recognizable songs in the world: “Three Little Birds” by Bob Marley, “Girl from Ipanema” by Antonio Carlos Jobim, and “Something” by the Beatles. He did a little twist on these songs to show the complexity of current global culture. “Three Little Birds” was played in Bossa Nova Style, “Girl from Ipanema” in Reggae, and “Something” was a fusion of both music genres.
Image taken by Annie Mendoza
Below are a number of links to Gilberto Gil’s concert in San Diego, so you can judge for yourself what a great performer Brazil’s Minister of Culture is.
More video material has been uploaded to YouTube in the past six months than has ever been aired on all major networks combined, according to cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch. About 88 percent is new and original content, most of which has been created by people formerly known as “the audience.”
Wesch will discuss the three-year-old video-sharing Web site in a lecture titled “The Anthropology of YouTube” at 4 p.m. on Monday, June 23, in the Montpelier Room on the sixth floor of the Library of Congress’ James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C.
Sponsored by the Library’s John W. Kluge Center, the event is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required. The lecture will be available at a later date as a webcast at www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/.
CONGRESS is considering a major reform of copyright law intended to solve the problem of “orphan works” — those works whose owner cannot be found. This “reform” would be an amazingly onerous and inefficient change, which would unfairly and unnecessarily burden copyright holders with little return to the public.
Looking for material on Remix Culture, I recently ran into this two hour lecture by DJ Spooky at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Spooky beat juggles history to argue his position on sampling. From the Phonograph to the Jamaican Sound System, one gets a good sense of the potential creativity that Spooky and other promoters of Remix Culture believe in. Some of the questions at the end are quite interesting, and challenging. Definitely worth the 100 minutes of your time.
The following is a set of links I prepared for one of my classes on film and video language. I repost them here for later use, and to share with the online community. The list is not by any means exhaustive, and is not linear in any way. The top links are mashups and the bottom links are early hip hop and rock videos. They were chosen in part because of the different approaches to video making, this was necessary for the class, because the students need to understand how music video language evolved throughout the eighties and nineties on to today.
Some of the videos also show early traces of sampling, for example, Trans Europe Express was sampled by Afrika Bambaataa for Planet Rock. Also, the remix of Tour de France juxtaposed with the early version shows how electronic music has evolved while acknowledging the important paradigms set by early electrofunk compositions. The now well known mashups of Christina Aguilera and the Strokes, Madonna and the Sex Pistols, as well as Michael Jackson, Britney Spears the White Stripes and Rick James are some of the most successful remixes in this genre. Part of me admittedly rejects them for their popularity, but the creativity that has gone into the audio remix as well as the video editing have to be noted, because they have at this point set a standard in Remix Culture.
At the age of 40, King Gillette was a frustrated inventor, a bitter anticapitalist, and a salesman of cork-lined bottle caps. It was 1895, and despite ideas, energy, and wealthy parents, he had little to show for his work. He blamed the evils of market competition. Indeed, the previous year he had published a book, The Human Drift, which argued that all industry should be taken over by a single corporation owned by the public and that millions of Americans should live in a giant city called Metropolis powered by Niagara Falls. His boss at the bottle cap company, meanwhile, had just one piece of advice: Invent something people use and throw away.
One day, while he was shaving with a straight razor that was so worn it could no longer be sharpened, the idea came to him. What if the blade could be made of a thin metal strip? Rather than spending time maintaining the blades, men could simply discard them when they became dull. A few years of metallurgy experimentation later, the disposable-blade safety razor was born. But it didn’t take off immediately. In its first year, 1903, Gillette sold a total of 51 razors and 168 blades. Over the next two decades, he tried every marketing gimmick he could think of. He put his own face on the package, making him both legendary and, some people believed, fictional. He sold millions of razors to the Army at a steep discount, hoping the habits soldiers developed at war would carry over to peacetime. He sold razors in bulk to banks so they could give them away with new deposits (“shave and save” campaigns). Razors were bundled with everything from Wrigley’s gum to packets of coffee, tea, spices, and marshmallows. The freebies helped to sell those products, but the tactic helped Gillette even more. By giving away the razors, which were useless by themselves, he was creating demand for disposable blades. A few billion blades later, this business model is now the foundation of entire industries: Give away the cell phone, sell the monthly plan; make the videogame console cheap and sell expensive games; install fancy coffeemakers in offices at no charge so you can sell managers expensive coffee sachets.
I recently found a video of Lessig discussing his position on Free Culture at the 23C3 in Berlin in December 2006. In this video Lessig refers to Remix Culture/Free Culture as Read/Write Culture. This video shows his thinking process in the development of his latest term. Some of his propositions found in his three major books are revisited briefly. One good thing about Lessig is that he does not repeat his book examples; instead, he uses more recent material and discusses the history of radio, BMI vs. ASCAP. Lessig’s last book, Code 2.0, was published in 2006, so this video serves as a decent update about his position, given that he lectured at the end of the same year. Worth spending 1:15 on google video.
