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Digital Culture: Napster and the Birth of Remix Culture
- 1. 1999: NAPSTER AND THE BIRTH OF REMIX CULTURE
- 2. NAPSTER: HISTORY + HOW DID IT WORK? [YT 0:25]
- 5. YOUTUBE COMPILATIONS [BRAD PITT EATING, THE SHINING AS A ROMANTIC FAMILY FILM WITH A HAPPY ENDING ]
- 8. CREATOR CULTURE Makers, builders, and entrepreneurs have joined artists, writers, and musicians in the creative arena. They’re actively blurring the lines between work and personal passions, reimagining the day job, and pushing creativity into mainstream culture.
Editor's Notes
- Source: The Digital Plenitude: The Decline of Elite Culture and the Rise of New Media (The MIT Press)by Jay David Bolter Napster was not a remix site; instead, whole song files were being shared. But the essence of Napster was copying, and without copying there can be no sampling. We can see the changed definitions of “creativity” and “originality” in the much more recent “manifesto” of Right2Remix, a group of producers and artists: “We live in an age of remix. Creativity and culture have always drawn from previous works, but with the Internet and digital technologies, the creative re-use of works has been taken to a whole new level. More people are able to edit and share a greater range of works than ever before. More than ever, it has become clear that “everything is a remix!” (Right2Remix.org 2017). The manifesto takes the denial of originality as its aesthetic and legal foundation. It adds: “Since creative copying has become commonplace, the right to remix is a fundamental requirement for freedom of expression and free speech. a fundamental requirement for freedom of expression and free speech. (Right2Remix.org 2017; Sonvilla-Weiss 2015, 64)
- + https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/dy79nb/oc_global_recorded_music_industry_revenues_2000/
- Source: The Digital Plenitude: The Decline of Elite Culture and the Rise of New Media (The MIT Press)by Jay David Bolter the musical foundation of rap, that is, remix, has been anything but exclusive. By its very nature, remix was open to influence from other popular forms. Rappers were often “featured” in other rappers’ songs, and rap combined with or was absorbed into other mainstream musical genres. As early as 1980, the punk group Blondie’s “Rapture” incorporated rap elements. From 1995 on, the pop diva Mariah Carey began to work with hip-hop artists to remix songs such as “Fantasy.” After about 2000, the distinctions between the reigning mainstream styles of R&B became increasingly difficult to separate from hip-hop. Pop singers and rappers collaborated, appeared in each other’s songs, and changed their styles from record to record. Gangsta rap gradually gave way to less raw, controversial forms from performers such as Kanye West, who could more easily assimilate into the pop mainstream. Female singers such as Rihanna combined rap with pop and performed with dozens of other singers inside and outside the rap tradition. It became increasingly difficult to define either hip-hop or remix as isolated practices. The musical and legal marriage of JAY-Z and Beyoncé in 2008 symbolized the fusion of R&B and hip-hop Rap music was the earliest and most influential form of remix, but the practice of using digital technology to sample and recombine elements from earlier productions now extends to a variety of media (and multimedia) forms, including music, video, static images, and text (Navas 2012; Navas, Gallagher, and burrough 2015a). As Larry Lessig (2008) pointed out, remix—especially the mixing of borrowed video with recorded music—has now become a means of expression for a large population of (generally) young amateur digital producers. By now YouTube must contain millions of remixes, in which excerpts from animated and live-action films, news, and other broadcasts are combined or edited for humor, political comment, or simply as a show of skill. The easy availability of music and video editing software on Macs and PCs mean that, as Lessig (2007) has put it, “anybody with access to a $1500 computer … can take sounds and images from the culture around us and use it to say things differently.” Hence, Lessig claims, we are living in a remix culture, and he is only one of many who hold that remix is the cultural dominant of our times. Already in 2005, Wired magazine claimed that ours was a remix planet (Wired Staff 2005). It is certainly true that sampling, cutting and pasting, borrowing by various digital means, is part of communication and representation across a broad swath of professional and amateur activities—especially if we consider social media platforms as such Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and YouTube, where there are literally hundreds of millions of remixers (Manovich 2015). The social media remixers are generally limited to copying and pasting images, audio, and videos into their streams for their networked public.
- Source: The Digital Plenitude: The Decline of Elite Culture and the Rise of New Media (The MIT Press)by Jay David Bolter trailers. Compilation videos of seemingly every Hollywood star (Tom Cruise running; Brad Pitt eating; Jennifer Lawrence being funny; Jennifer Lawrence, Angelina Jolie, Scarlett Johansson or virtually any A-list actress being “hot,” and so on) or super cuts from popular, long-running television series (Friends, The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones) fill the datasphere on video-sharing sites. One practice is to transform a film from one genre to another—to make a trailer for, say, the classic romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle into what appears to be a stalker film with the romantic lead Meg Ryan as the stalker (Lyall-Wilson 2006). In the same vein is Pretty Woman as a horror film (Jenkins 2010), and there are many others: for instance, Stanley Kubrick’s horror film The Shining as a romantic family film with a happy ending (Yang 2008); or a trailer of Spectre cut so that Sean Connery, Roger Moore, or Pierce Brosnan is Bond instead of Daniel Craig (e.g., The Unusual Suspect 2015). Such videos are not typically meant to make a social comment (although some may, for example, implicitly critique the sexism of Bond films or the violence of action-adventure films). Most of these remixes are meant simply to impress the viewer with the inventiveness and skill they demonstrate in editing. To appreciate the remix properly, the viewer has to have a sense of the original films.
- Source: The Digital Plenitude: The Decline of Elite Culture and the Rise of New Media (The MIT Press)by Jay David Bolter In 2004, a German film Downfall (2004) became part of the available film archive. A few years later, it became the source for hundreds of parodies, requiring less skill in editing than the trailer remix and a different kind of background knowledge for the audience. The parodies are based on a scene in which Hitler in his bunker screams at his generals for the failure of a German counteroffensive as the Russians close in on Berlin (Wikipedia contributors, “Downfall (2004 Film)”; Rohrer 2010). Each remix consists of the approximately four-minute scene with the original German dialogue; the remixer changes the subtitles so that Hitler is angry at something else. The humor comes from the anachronism and, often, from the relatively trivial character of what enrages Hitler.
- The Media Industry: Having had its lunch eaten, its lunch money taken, and its person shoved into a toilet and a locker by Big Tech, the media industry has begun to fight back. Across the board, the longtime frenemy relationship that most publishers tried to maintain with the Big Tech companies has soured. One thing to watch: With the Facebook wave receding and Google solidifying its control over traffic, the media industry might start to find some love in its heart for Google, while maintaining its open season on Facebook.
- Creative currency
- Creative currency
- Source: The Digital Plenitude: The Decline of Elite Culture and the Rise of New Media (The MIT Press)by Jay David Bolter The fact that so much music and video material of all kinds is now available in digital form gives remixers more freedom than before. Digital formats, along with the connectivity of the Internet, expand the field of remix almost infinitely. Digital networking flattens out our media culture. The assertion of copyright is an attempt to maintain hierarchies, to fence off materials and remove them from the remixer’s palette. Everything that counts as remix speaks to a rejection of notions of hierarchy, propriety, and ownership.