Part I. Proposal
Part II. Introduction
Part III. Media
Part IV. References
Part V. Analysis
Part VI. Ethnography
Proposal
Matthew Ziegelbaum
Mash-up cultureMashups, and the culture surrounding them, are a fairly new phenomenon. Stemming from the trend of sampling in Hip Hop in the 80's, mashups take small bits (samples) of a song and using them as components of another song. Mashups take simple sampling to a new level, and truly mix songs together. Artists like Girl Talk, Dan Deacon, and Lucky Strike have taken the vocal tracks from popular songs and juxtaposed them with hundreds of samples from other top 40s hits. Matt BaileyShea in an article about musical recomposition in Music Theory Online wrote that mashups allow us to "actually hear how these songs resonate with one another, comment upon and affect one another...in a way, the music speaks for itself."
Girl Talk live in Paris.
Mashups may have started in a purely musical context, but with the growth of the internet and Web 2.0, mashups are starting to move into all facets of media. Websites take data from twitter and flickr and google maps and give a vivid, real time interaction with live data in away that gives people a whole new perspective on the same old data. Additionally, mashed up works, both musical or otherwise, often use permissive licenses that encourage others to jam on the remix, to respin what has already been respun. Organizations like Students for Free Culture and the Creative Commons are pushing to legitimize mashups and the notion that a mashup is not a crime, but artistic expression. The growing culture surrounding the mashup is absolutely fascinating, and will become more and more important in the years to come.
In exploring the culture that mashups have created, it is important to consider the broad social implications. Mashups have been described as having a "real punk rock attitude" due to the legal questions surrounding much of the genre. Sampling sounds and clipping videos are technically illegal activities, and while most websites allow for (and often encourage) their data to be mashed, rights holders in other arenas often frown upon it. Many of the people involved in this remix culture are young, often still in college or just out of college. As the movement grows, the push back from rights holders, and especially the big record labels, is getting stronger. There is an interesting juxtaposition in the mindsets of these two groups. What does it means that the labels are trying to enforce the notion that they are producers and we, the listeners, are mere consumers, when the listeners themselves want to give back, contribute, and become a producer themselves?
Introduction
Matthew Ziegelbaum
Part II. IntroductionMashups are part of a cultural movement that can be more broadly called "participatory culture." It is, in its essence, the opposite of typical Consumer culture. Where in traditional consumer culture, producers create culture (music, art, etc.) and the Consumer purchases the work. There is no give, just take. In a participatory culture, the public is not only the consumer, but also acts as a contributor, giving back and producing. In this system, the consumers have been, at times, called "prosumers." As mashups, remixes, and participatory culture gain popularity, they are challenging the traditional social norms associated with a Consumer culture. The movement is being met with fierce resistance from the record, film, and print medias. Mashups, and the participatory culture they are a part of, pose a challenge to the comfortable Consumer model these industries thrive in. These companies view culture as something they own, that they can control, but culture is something that belongs to the people who engage in it: the listeners, the viewers. Can companies, through legal threats and onerous "rights management" schemes truly change how our culture is evolving? DJ Spooky, the "father" of the mash-up, was once quoted as saying that "you can think of the whole culture as a shareware update, a software source for the rest of the world to upload." Culture is something for the people, and something that people should be encouraged to engage in.
Mashups supposedly originated with a DJ in Jamaica named DJ Spooky. In celebration of a Reggae record label's 40th anniversary, DJ Spooky was asked to create a mix showcasing that label's artists. Citing the techniques of reggae "dub" remixes and Hip-hop sampling, which both used analog tape loops and cheap mixing boards to create new sounds out of older, well known music, Spooky used inexpensive digital tools to mash reggae together into brand new music. Now, 4 years later, mashups exist in most contexts, but most notably in music and film. In all their forms, mashups have gained traction through the democratization brought by cheap technology and internet access. As consumer technology has gotten more and more sophisticated, so has the content produced by amateur musicians, film makers, and writers. Cheap internet access has allowed these artists to share their works with the world. The internet has created a culture in which people exchange their ideas freely, be those on forums or via posting music. Along with the evolution of amateur musicians jamming on a laptop, so has the notion that information should be free. As we discover the fun of participating in culture, rather than just taking in what producers decide we should pay attention to, the face of media is changing, as is the core of our culture. While mashups are still very novel, participatory culture is slowly creeping into the main stream.
Media
Websites
StoryMashup - Collaborative urban storytelling.SayTweet - Mashes Twitter feeds with Flickr albums.
Heekya - Collaborative, wiki-style storytelling and sharing.
Video
Girl Talk performs with his audience surrounding him in Chicago
Baltimore's Dan Deacon performs. Part of his performances are mass games for his audience.
A mashup of Disney films used to demonstrate proper fair use laws.
The Shining remixed and mashed up into a brand new trailer.
References
Academic
| [1] | Matthew BaileyShea. Filleted mignon: A new recipe for analysis and recomposition. Music Theory Online, 13(4), December 2007 2007. [ bib ] |
| [2] | Sasha Frere-Jone. 1 + 1 + 1 = 1. New Yorker, 80(42):p85, 2005. [ bib | http ] |
| [3] | David J. Gunkel. Rethinking the digital remix: Mash-ups and the metaphysics of sound recording. Popular Music & Society, 31(4):p489, 2008. [ bib | http ] |
| [4] | Lori Kendall. Beyond media producers and consumers: Online multimedia productions as interpersonal communication. Information, Communication & Society, 11(2):p207, 2008. [ bib | http ] |
| [5] | Justin Kleinfeld. All (re)mixed up, February 1, 2007 2007. [ bib ] |
| [6] | Judith Lamont. Mashup essentials. KM World, 17(6):p16, 2008. [ bib | http ] |
| [7] | Lawrence Lessig. Remix. The Penguin Press, 16 Oct 2008 2008. [ bib ] |
| [8] | Lawrence Lessig. Free Culture. 24 March 2004 2004. [ bib ] |
| [9] | Kembrew McLeod. Confessions of an intellectual (property): Danger mouse, mickey mouse, sonny bono, and my long and winding path as a copyright activist- academic. Popular Music & Society, 28(1):p79, 2005. [ bib | http ] |
| [10] | Michael Paoletta. Mash-ups. (cover story). Billboard, 116(50):p3, 2004. [ bib | http ] |
| [11] | Michael Serazio. The apolitical irony of generation mash-up: A cultural case study in popular music. Popular Music & Society, 31(1):p79, 2008. [ bib | http ] |
| [13] | John Shiga. Copy-and-persist: The logic of mash-up culture. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 24(2):p93, 2007. [ bib | http ] |
| [14] | Andrew Zolli. Rip. mix. brand. American Demographics, 26(9):p44, 2004. [ bib | http ] |
Other sources:
Students for Free Culture --
Students for Free Culture is an international chapter-based student
organization that promotes the public interest in intellectual
property and information & communications technology policy.
Illegal Art, a record label
that puts out albums based around sampling and remixing.
An article from
splendid E-Zine explaining Illegal Art's position.
Creative Commons -- provides
free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily
mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You
can use CC to change your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved"
to "Some Rights Reserved."
Documentaries, films, and content
Good Copy, Bad Copy, an incredible documentary about the current state of fair use and remix culture throughout the world.Open Source Cinema, home of the documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto.
Miro, a free, open-source client that aggregates free, user generated internet TV.
Background
People relate to media in different ways. For most of recent history, media and culture were purely consumed. In the 1980s, however, the situation began to change. Old, expensive, difficult to use production equipment began to go digital, and with this change, the price of entry plummeted. What was formerly studio-grade sound equipment and video production software became the consumer level. Cheap, fast personal computers supplanted expensive analog machines, and the Internet made the know-how to utilize all of these systems accessible instantly. As modern technology has democratized production, media consumers are increasingly also becoming media producers. Additionally, the Internet has enabled these professional consumers to share their ideas and innovations, causing a flurry of derivatives that fan out in an ever growing web of production and reproduction. Mashups were born from this boom of the inexpensive. There is something different about mashups versus the bubble gum pop dished out by the large record labels. When asking people about a mashup, there is often something intangible about the experience. There is a feeling of closeness to the medium that is not frequently noted across many groups of people.
As noted in Rethinking the Digital Remix (Gunkel, 2008), there are two sides to this story. Some people consider the works flowing out of the free and participatory culture movements to be wonderfully clever innovations. Others "[revile them] as derivative, inauthentic, and illegal" (Gunkel, 2008). There are many types of mash-ups, most of them digital. The most prolific sort of mashup is one constituting a combination of data freely found on the Internet. ProgrammableWeb, a website that tracks this kind of mashup, currently tracks roughly 3500 mashups. It is growing at a rate of three to five mashups per day. These mashups, seem to be of a different nature than the other two types: video and audio. The data mashups are often a way of facilitating the use of a service via another service. For example, "Wii Seeker" is a mashup that combines retail data with Google Maps to present users with a quick overview of where they can buy a Wii. These rarely have meaning in the same way that other types of mashups do. They're merely representations of facts.
The more popular (albeit less prolific) types of mashups are audio and video remixes. Video and audio mashups tend to be the types that people most connect with. Rather than arrange and animate sets of facts, these mashups comment on the society and culture they are remixing. Moving forward, I will use the word "mashup" to exclusively refer to this sort, rather than the type concerning only data.
Mashups in Music
One instance of a mashup findings its way from obscurity to immense popularity is The Grey Album by DJ Dangermouse, which debuted in 2004. It features the a capella (voice only) version of Jay Z's "Black Album" and combines it with the instrumentals and rhythms from The Beatles' self titled "White Album." The Grey Album was legally a "stillborn" (McLeod, 2005), which is to say that it could not exist in any legitimate fashion as it was produced. Despite attempts to crush the release of the CD, it made its way across the internet. By some accounts, had the mix been sold in stores, it would have most likely been the number one release of 2004 (Good Copy, Bad Copy, 2007).
Another popular artist is a man named Greg Gillis, from Pittsburgh. He performs as Girl Talk, mashing hundreds of samples together to create brand new music. He is probably the most well known DJ who is osley known for creating mashups. Everything that Girl Talk creates, from his musical productions to his live show, begs for audience participation. His latest album, "Feed the Animals" (2008) packs 322 samples into just 53 minutes. They are blended together in such a way that at first, the listener hears perhaps a familiar vocal track or melody, but beyond that, just music. Upon a slightly closer listen, it becomes apparent that every second of music is jam packed with samples from popular songs. Live, unlike on a CD, Gillis has noted that he changes the way he works. Instead of presenting the listener with nuanced, subtle sampling techniques, he keeps things simple. Live, the whole experience is about being able to get into the music without using a fine-toothed comb.
What is it about samples that make people feel so connected? Perhaps it is the fact that in each minute of a Girl Talk set, the listener is bombarded with popular songs. For many people, half of the fun of listening is finding their favorite song growing up. For others, it is about the context shift that occurs once something has been mashed up. Sure, Danger Mouse and Girl Talk create fun, danceable music, but like any other form of music, there is more to it. Mashups are a juxtaposition of one thing against another. The Beatles' under Jay Z is certainly fun, musically, but its also an incredible experience, to hear a pinnacle of rock supporting one of the world's most successful rappers. The completely unexpected nature of the experience is what it is all about.
Methods
In preparing for this ethnography, I have spent a considerable amount of time observing and talking to people who both consume and produce mashed and mashable media, both musically or otherwise. Most of the interactions I have had with participants have been related to group events: concerts, talks on digital mashups, etc. Interviews were informal, and none of the participants were aware that I was "interviewing" them. I found the best responses by simply asking people to tell me about the particular instance of a mashup they were currently engaged in, be it listening to music or pulling together data sources to create info-art.
Findings
People seem to interact with mashups, and especially with the musical sort, in an ultra-personal way. The music, the data, the art, the film is theirs. I have spoken to people about both familiar mashups, like those of Greg Gillis, and unfamiliar, like Booty Balkan remixes, a Balkan techno style akin to Tecno Brega in Brazil. Each and every person takes in the sounds and sights in a different way. No matter what type of mashup played, people still tend to have the same reaction: mashups are just more fun. In response to the question "What draws you to this type of music?" most people responded by describing how the music made them feel: nostalgic, excited, "dancy," and happy. One person went as far as to describe some of the more upbeat mashups as making him feel as if he were gliding on a cushion of air as he moved to the music, squished in with hundreds of other people.
Watching people at a Girl Talk concert is best described as mesmerizing. Other music has the power to mesmerize, but not in the same way. At other shows, the audience is mesmerized. At the Girl Talk concert the audience is the motive. Greg Gillis, Dan Deacon, and other "free culture" artists distinguish their performances from traditional shows in the same way the distinguish their music, by blurring lines. Greg Gillis begins his Girl Talk sets by inviting the charged crowd onto stage with him. Dan Deacon, who eschews the stage in favor of a low table in the center of the crowd, puts on live shows that are famous for featuring constant audience participation, from physical tasks (like races and dance contests) to mass games (like group limbo and "Coke and Pepsi"). These concerts bring people together. By mixing music from seemingly disparate genres, the venues fill up with people who when standing next to each other in any other context would be met with confused stares. The mix of ecclectic 80s instrumentals, popular hip-hop beats and rhymes, and cheesy top-40s pop
In the more general sense, people seem more passionate about participatory culture because, even if they themselves do not participate, they feel a connection to those who do in a different way than, say, a connection to a rock star. Speaking to people at a small show in Baltimore, even though most of them stated they had no intention of ever trying to create a remix, and even more people admitted that despite wanting to they just simply didn't have the time or resources to learn to create, they still felt a more personal connection due to the simple fact that they know they can create. The essence of participatory culture is that culture is for the community, and the community certainly feels this. Logging onto mailing lists and Google Groups, its apparent that those who are creating are also teaching and spreading their craft to others.
Finally, an important aspect of participatory culture is the share-ability. Nearly every person I spoke to about mashups made it clear that they loved to share. Traditional culture channels do not allow for free-for-alls, whereas the open, free licenses used in ubiquity with mashed content encourage it. Organizations like Creative Commons make it easy for users to both share and publish their media, and for others to find that media, and even provide links to examples of what other people have done with the media. People cite the ability to simply burn their friends a copy of a CD, legally, or to snip up the music and make their friends mix tapes as the best feature. It also happens to be the feature of participatory culture that ropes in more people. If artists like Girl Talk did not distribute their work for free in an open manner, its likely that the culture would not spread.