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.
DO YOU KNOW….?
How soon TV-chair will be available in most museums?
How soon artists will have their own TV channels?
How soon wall to wall TV for video art will be installed in most homes?
–Nam June Paik, A New Design for TV Chair, 1973
THE CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE of Nam June Paik–who died at his home in Miami Beach on January 29–is clear in the expressions commonly used to describe his unique role in transforming the nascent medium of video into a contemporary art form, from the “father of video art” to the “George Washington of video.” It is incredible to think that an entire decade before Paik predicted the ubiquity of video technology in A New Design for TV Chair, he was featuring his “prepared,” or altered, televisions in solo exhibitions. And as we become the media culture he envisioned in his artwork and writings, we can see how the range of Paik’s creative accomplishments and both the prescience and breadth of his thinking–in a practice unlike anything that preceded him–are all the more astonishing. From his early performances to his work in music, television, video, and film, Paik was constantly in action, exploring and expanding the horizons of art.
Popular music has a long history of aural innovators, from Brian Wilson and his downward spiral to Phil Spector’s wall of sound. They are often romanticized as shadowy knob-twiddling visionaries who through mixing boards and miles of cable added new worlds to stereophonic sound. Reggae music, with an admittedly limited rhythm structure, has been propelled forward by it’s own pioneers, with Lee “Scratch” Perry and the Mad Professor holding top rank. In their own unique ways, both have created indelible catalogs of hit reggae albums, sonic experiments, and plenty of wicked bass heavy dub, traditionally the instrumental B-side or “version” of a popular song spliced and diced into a teeth-rattling art form all its own.
The two are from different generations and continents, yet both Professor and Perry walk the same twisted line. Both are passionate for electronics (Professor built his own mixing board as a teenager while Perry pushed four track recorders beyond comprehension), both built their own record company from the ground up (Ariwa / Black Ark), and both have produced music for a surprising range of artists including Massive Attack, U-Roy and the
Orb (Professor) to The Skatalites, The Clash and the Beastie Boys (Perry).
I’ve completed Diary of a Star, a blog project that appropriates the Warhol Diaries. Even though I did not initially contextualize this project as a remix, it certainly is one. Here’s an excerpt of my definition of Remix as a cultural practice:
The remix will always rely on the authority of the original song. When this activity is extended to culture at large, the remix is in the end a re-mix—that is a rearrangement of something already recognizable; it functions at a second level: a meta-level. This implies that the originality of the remix is non-existent, therefore it must acknowledge its source of validation self-reflexively. In brief, the remix when extended as a cultural practice is a second mix of something pre-existent; the material that is mixed at least for a second time must be recognized otherwise it could be misunderstood as something new, and it would become plagiarism. Without a history, the remix cannot be Remix.
Similar to sampling in music remixes, I selected diary entries from Warhol’s Diaries. The way they are recontextualized as a blog allows for the online user to recognize the aura of Warhol, as well as the autonomy of the work as an allegorical piece of art. To accentuate this autonomy, the comments I made are separated from Warhol’s entries, thus the user can come to terms with allegory as a naturalized strategy of the everyday.
Read more about my definitions in this site’s section Remix Defined.
Below is an excerpt of the initial ideas behind the blog:
I use selections of the Andy Warhol Diaries in the form of a blog to comment on diary entries, the private and public, the idea of a celebrity and her life as a public persona, and the activity of web-surfing as part of a new social space. The way the project works is I select an entry from Warhol’s diary and type it verbatim on the blog to the right called “diary.” I create links of people and places that Warhol mentions. I then comment on the people and/or the entry itself on the blog to the left called “meta diary.” What I write always depends on how I relate to Warhol’s entry as well as what I learn while surfing the links his entry provided. The entries correspond by date. I will often take more than half a day to post my own entry, so chances are that when the reader visits this website the “meta-diary” will be a day behind.
I recently saw No Country for Old Men, which I highly recommend, and when looking for reviews and critical analysis, I ran into No Country for Old Men/Creeper Remix in Ebaum’s World. The remix video takes the sound from one of the movie’s trailers and combines it with footage from Scooby Doo. The author/remixer, whose name does not appear in the post, explains that s/he found a resemblance between Scooby Doo’s Creeper and Javier Bardem’s character, Anton Chigurh.
No Country for Old Men/Creeper Remix exposes the importance of sound in film-making (or any other time based project), something which most viewers don’t think about once they become immersed in a film. For a remix such as this one to be successful, the viewers need to already be familiar with the film’s soundtrack; they need to recognize almost naturally Chigurh’s voice, just like they are also expected to know about Scooby Doo–at least in terms of popular culture. Scooby Doo’s footage, on the other hand, becomes supplemental, or subverted by the sound. Even if viewers don’t know about the Scooby Doo TV show and its characters, they are likely to see the Creeper’s resemblance to Bardem’s character–which is largely marked by the haircut. In this way the conventional roles of image and sound are reversed: the sound becomes the main point of reference, while the image supports the message carried by the sound. Filmmakers obviously know that there is a fine balance between image and sound to tell a good story, so this gesture is designed for popular consumption. In the end, that’s were most remixes are expected to find their audience.
A version of this piece originally appeared in 21C, issue 24, 1997
Having abandoned the Jamaican tropics for the snowy peaks of Switzerland, the legendary reggae producer Lee Perry—aka Scratch, the Upsetter, the Super-Ape, Pipecock Jackson, Inspector Gadget, the Firmament Computer, and a cornucopia of other monikers and aliases—now makes his home in one of the quietest corners of Europe. It’s an odd but somehow fitting environment for Perry—not because precision clocks and banks have much to do with the intense, spooky, and profoundly playful records he’s known for, but because Lee Perry had always been something of a stranger in a strange land.
Though still capable of turning out brilliant tunes like “I Am a Madman” and “Secret Laboratory (Scientific Dancehall),” Perry’s current output pales next to the pivotal music he made in the 1960s and 70s, especially the Rastafarian psychedelia he cooked up at his Black Ark studios in the mid 1970s. During that incredibly prolific period (he produced over 1000 sides in ten years), Perry fused his eccentric spiritual vision with powerful protest music, made some of the most surreal experiments with dub reggae, and sculpted the first (and arguably greatest) records by Bob Marley and the Wailers. Utilizing low-tech studio equipment with a brilliance and panache that continues to astound record producers and music fans today, Perry earned a place alongside Phil Spector and Brian Wilson as a visionary studio wizard who transformed pop music production into an art form all its own.
One of my favourite blogs over the last year has been Remix Theory, a writing project quarterbacked by media theorist and artist Eduardo Navas. Eduardo is also the author of Remediative and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture, a fantastic essay that beat-juggles a variety of paradigms that range from remix history through to data mashups. Eduardo and I have been firing questions back and forth over email for a few weeks and he has provided a compelling window into his research.
How did you get started researching the remix as a critical paradigm?
It was more a matter of bringing together activities that I had been exploring throughout my life. At the age of 12, during the early eighties, I became a break-dancer and at the age of 18, or so, I bought my own turntables and sound system. Then I began to DJ in the Los Angeles area, something I would do until 2001 or so. During this time I also played percussion in a couple of Salsa cover bands. I was also very involved in the visual arts since I was a kid, and when I reached my mid-twenties I decided to focus in art as a profession and enrolled in art school in the mid-1990’s.
I eventually got a BFA from Otis College of Art, followed by a residency at Skowhegan School of Art, and then I received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. It was during my Graduate studies at Cal Arts when I became heavily invested in New Media. While at Cal Arts, I also played percussion with the Cal Arts Latin Jazz Band, and I also developed various music projects with another visual artist, Justin Peloian. Obviously, being part of a visual arts program meant that I would make “art†and so I was also heavily invested in studio based art. I was very influenced by Conceptualism. I simply loved (and still love) ideas, and I embraced my time at Cal Arts because the school has very good critical thinkers teaching.
Originally published on February 4, 2005
Socially and culturally aware, this DJ is the harbinger of change, writes Ashley Crawford.
He travels to Trinidad and Istanbul, Paris and Jakarta, Moscow and New Orleans. He hangs out with Yoko Ono, Merce Cunningham, Sonic Youth and Wu-Tang Clan. He tosses off cultural references from James Joyce to Gertrude Stein, Jean Baudrillard to Mikhail Bakhtin, and he writes for a range of journals and magazines from Artforum to The Village Voice.
He is in Australia to promote his new book, Rhythm Science (published by the prestigious MIT Press) – a meditation on the “flow of patterns in sound and culture”, and he has just screened Rebirth of a Nation, his re-mix of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film classic, Birth of a Nation, at the Sydney Festival.
Update as of 8/13/10. The revised version of this text is now available online as Remix Theory post 444.
Update as of 4/29/10: This text has been revised for the book publication Mashup Cultures. In the revised print version, I introduce a series of new terms along with a diagram. The 2007 draft is shared below in the tradition of online sharing. The final argument while it has not necessarily changed is more precise in the revised print version, which I encourage those interested to read.
Today, sampling is practiced in new media culture when any software users including creative industry professionals as well as average consumers apply cut/copy & paste in diverse software applications; for professionals this could mean 3-D modeling software like Maya (used to develop animations in films like Spiderman or Lord of the Rings );[1] and for average persons it could mean Microsoft Word, often used to write texts like this one. Cut/copy & paste is a vital new media feature in the development of Remix. In Web 2.0 applications cut/copy & paste is a necessary element to develop mashups; yet the cultural model of mashups is not limited to software, but spans across media. Mashups actually have roots in sampling principles that were first initiated in music culture around the seventies with the growing popularity of music remixes in disco and hip hop culture; and even though mashups are founded on principles initially explored in music they are not always remixes if we think of remixes as allegories. This is important to entertain because, at first, Remix appears to extend repetition of forms in media, in repressive fashion; but the argument in this paper is that when mashups move beyond basic remix principles a constructive rupture develops that shows possibilities for new forms of cultural production that question standard commercial practice.
