Everything is a Remix

in Art, Media, Music | September 15th, 2010 5 Comments

“Remix­ing” has fig­ured cen­tral­ly in the Web 2.0 vocab­u­lary. But, remix­ing isn’t new. It has a long his­to­ry, going back as long as we’ve been mak­ing art. Artists have always been col­lect­ing mate­r­i­al, com­bin­ing it, and trans­form­ing it into some­thing new. Kir­by Fer­gu­son’s new video, Every­thing is a Remix, teas­es this apart as he brings you back to 1960s Paris and Lon­don – to the cut-up lit­er­a­ture of William S. Bur­roughs and the songs writ­ten by Led Zep­pelin with a lib­er­al amount of bor­row­ing. This video, the first in a series of four, appears on Fer­gu­son’s web site in a nice large for­mat. Have a look and con­sid­er donat­ing to his Every­thing is a Remix project.


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Comments (5)
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  • Mike says:
    September 15, 2010 at 8:33 am

    It’s inter­est­ing that Fer­gu­son’s final line is, “In Zep­pelin’s defense, they nev­er sued any­body.” Actu­al­ly they did. Led Zep­pelin sued rap­per School­ly D for unau­tho­rized use of the song “Kash­mir.”

    I don’t know where Fer­gu­son is head­ed with this, but so far I’m not impressed. He fails to draw a mean­ing­ful dis­tinc­tion between influ­ence and theft. Artists have always been influ­enced by the works of oth­ers, but they have not always lift­ed actu­al pieces of those works and used them with­in their own work. There are some seri­ous issues here, and they are not addressed. The glossy title, “Every­thing is a Remix,” seems to say “Every­thing’s Fine,” or “It’s all Good.” Is it?

    One oth­er thing. Fegu­son finds it odd that Jake Holmes would sue Led Zep­pelin 40 years lat­er for lift­ing “Dazed and Con­fused.” Well, it’s not so sur­pris­ing. Holmes has grown old. He is at retire­ment age now, with his most pro­duc­tive days behind him, so no doubt he under­stands the impor­tance of receiv­ing resid­ual com­pen­sa­tion for his own cre­ative work. There are some seri­ous eth­i­cal issues involved in Led Zep­pelin’s behav­ior toward Holmes (and Willie Dixon), but Fer­gu­son gloss­es over them.

    Reply
  • Eric says:
    September 16, 2010 at 9:51 am

    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”.

    Reply
  • IcarusArts says:
    September 26, 2010 at 8:34 pm

    And hey, your video seems like a remix of the Zep­plin scene in last year’s doc­u­men­tary film Rip: A Remix Man­i­festo! I guess claim­ing every­thing is a remix is a way to avoid giv­ing some of this fund-rais­ing to Brett Gay­lor.

    Reply
  • Evan Plaice says:
    September 30, 2010 at 3:04 pm

    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.

    Reply
  • Snr. Pak says:
    February 3, 2011 at 3:24 pm

    “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.”
    This was well deserved and swift diver­sion of my atten­tion.

    Reply

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