Everything is a Remix

As part of the cam­paign to ques­tion the state­ment “In Zep­pelin’s defense, they nev­er sued any­body”, regur­gi­tat­ed Wikipedia:

Lit­tle Roger and the Goose­bumps is a pop/rock band from San Fran­cis­co active dur­ing the 1970s and ear­ly 1980s and res­ur­rect­ed in 2006. It has been led through­out its his­to­ry by Roger Clark and Dick Bright, with var­i­ous side­men.

The band is best known for its sin­gle “Gilli­gan’s Island (Stairway)”,[1] a song com­bin­ing the lyrics to the theme song of the tele­vi­sion show Gilli­gan’s Island with the music of “Stair­way to Heav­en” by Led Zep­pelin. The band wrote the song in 1977 as “mate­r­i­al to pad the last set of the gru­el­ing 5 nights a week/4 sets a night rou­tine,” record­ed it in March 1978, and released it as a sin­gle in May 1978 on their own Splash Records label. With­in five weeks, Led Zep­pelin’s lawyers threat­ened to sue them and demand­ed that any remain­ing copies of the record­ing be destroyed.[citation need­ed]

Dur­ing a 2005 inter­view on Nation­al Pub­lic Radio, Robert Plant referred to the tune as his favorite cov­er of “Stair­way to Heaven.”[2]

I for one appre­ci­ate attempts to ana­lyze the extent to which “every­thing old is new again” or “there is noth­ing new under the Sun [label]”. My two cents on the mat­ter is that the issue of “remix­ing” or “appro­pri­a­tion” seems to be qual­i­ta­tive­ly dif­fer­ent than in cen­turies or decades past because it can also be quan­ti­ta­tive­ly dif­fer­ent — the mate­r­i­al pay­offs can be enor­mous, par­tic­u­lar­ly with the push to treat vir­tu­al­ly every­thing said or writ­ten as “intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty”. To use the cliche (and song title), “Mon­ey changes every­thing”.

Intrigu­ing speech but there are much bet­ter exam­ples of cre­ative remix­es to be found on the web. See http://thru-you.com/. And, even artis­tic exten­sions of exist­ing work like those brought to us by http://www.youtube.com/user/theRSAorg could be con­sid­ered remix­es. Remix­ing is real­ly noth­ing but com­po­si­tion but, done at a high­er lev­el and pos­si­bly exper­i­ment­ing with many diverse medi­ums as opposed to per­fect­ing one.