(Source: Salon)
August 9, 2003
Destiny’s Child vs. Nirvana! Britney vs. Chic! The Ramones vs. ABBA! How pop’s hottest DJs are creating those wild bootleg remixes — and why they’re so hard to find.
In the 1993 club hit “Rebel Without a Pause,” Chuck D. raps over Herb Alpert’s chirpy trumpet: “A rebel in his own mind/ Supporter of a rhyme/ Designed to scatter a line/ of suckers who claim I do crime.” That incongruous hybrid of hip-hop and bouncy pop, created by the group Evolution Control Committee, sounds as startling and amusing today as it did a decade ago, and still ripe with meaning.
Shocked rats. Contorted faces. Shirtless tribesmen getting their groove on around a campfire… If you’ve seen Red Hat films like “Truth Happens” or “Inevitable,” you’ll know we have a thing for remixing scenes from public domain films.Far more than providing striking footage for Red Hat films, many of these scenes come from one of the largest collections of historically and culturally significant films in existence. And you can download them in high-quality digital format to watch and enjoy. Or remix. Just like we did.
A Conversation between Manovich and Lichty
LM: We live in ‘remix’ culture. Are there limits to remixing? Can
anything be remixed with anything? Shall there be an ethics of remixing?
PL: Actually, I don’t think we live in a ‘remix’ culture, I liken it
more to pastiche or collage, or even object-oriented culture. To remix
is to take cultural elements and transform/repurpose them tot he point
where the source referent is obscured, idsappears, or its signifying
power is backgrounded to the point where the new ‘author’s intent
overrides. This is actually tightly linked to issues of intellectual
control/copyright…
When I was 13, in 1961, I surreptitiously purchased an anthology of Beat writing – sensing, correctly, that my mother wouldn’t approve. Immediately, and to my very great excitement, I discovered Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and one William S. Burroughs – author of something called Naked Lunch, excerpted there in all its coruscating brilliance.Burroughs was then as radical a literary man as the world had to offer, and in my opinion, he still holds the title. Nothing, in all my experience of literature since, has ever been quite as remarkable for me, and nothing has ever had as strong an effect on my sense of the sheer possibilities of writing.Later, attempting to understand this impact, I discovered that Burroughs had incorporated snippets of other writers’ texts into his work, an action I knew my teachers would have called plagiarism. Some of these borrowings had been lifted from American science fiction of the ’40s and ’50s, adding a secondary shock of recognition for me.
“Think back to a book I did in the late 80’s on UUCP – I did it originally as an 80-page pamphlet and I did 10 editions over the next five years, about every 6 months there was a new edition and they were almost entirely driven by user-submitted content. People would say ‘Oh you didn’t cover this-and-this device, and here’s how it works’ and they’d give me 3-4 paragraphs which I’d just drop right into the book. And I think we have a lot more of that ‘book as output of connected conversations’ now, where people are engaged in dialogue…” – Tim O’Reilly Read the rest of this entry »
This is a Youtube video of man presenting a paper in a conference on Remix Culture. Other videos on copyright are also found in this section of Youtube.
“Think back to a book I did in the late 80’s on UUCP – I did it originally as an 80-page pamphlet and I did 10 editions over the next five years, about every 6 months there was a new edition and they were almost entirely driven by user-submitted content. People would say ‘Oh you didn’t cover this-and-this device, and here’s how it works’ and they’d give me 3-4 paragraphs which I’d just drop right into the book. And I think we have a lot more of that ‘book as output of connected conversations’ now, where people are engaged in dialogue…” – 
