In following a link on Marieke’s post in the forum I watched Kirby Ferguson’s TED talk on remixing and was struck by the above quote from Blind Willie McTell. In a time when copyright wasn’t such a huge industry (yes, I’ll call it that), Willie spoke it as it was and basically admitted to copying from other’s work. But in this day and age, if not in his day and age, who couldn’t be called a copyright infringer? A couple of points…
1) Ever sat in a movie and thought – I’ve seen this before? Can you find parallels between movies – like isn’t Avatar a new and (CGI) improved version of Aliens? Are there parallels between Tintin and Indiana Jones? Or The Mummy for that matter? Okay, I’m speaking in generalizations, but it is a commonly debated idea that there is very little new content out there in the movies anymore. A ‘new’ story comes along only once in a blue moon and we are actually continually remaking old movies or telling stories that have already been told (over and over again) in order to fill seats in theatres.
2) Music – no surprise that my 14 year old daughter is way more cutting edge on the music industry right now than I am. She comes home with some pretty cool songs which I’ve never heard….except then I start to sing the words and she’s blown away that I would have heard it before her. Not exactly heard it in this version, but yeah, every new rap song seems to have a chorus from an 80’s song or even older…..(what really sucks is that I can still remember when I thought I was all that finding new music and my dad would do the exact same thing to me…’oh, this is a remix of an old song from my day!’). Point being that old songs are continually used and remixed in new songs and artists are often being sued for copying a riff or melody from a previous (and largely unknown) artist and profiting hugely from it.
3) Fashion – as I mentioned in my response to Marieke, all that is old is new again and fashion is no exception. How many times have bell bottoms been around now? I saw shorts the other day that looked like they came right off the boardwalk in the 1930’s. And don’t get me started on the neon thing (hello 80’s Madonna – you were better then).
My point is, as Kirby Ferguson so aptly stated, ‘everything is a remix’. Everything that we create is a better version of something that came before. Everything that is produced or built or designed is done so using our knowledge of how things worked, or didn’t work, in the past and making it work for today. Everything we do today is only possible because of the experiences we had prior to this day and how they shaped us into who we now are. Heck, even you and I are remixes – a new, improved and more viable version of our parents (okay, let’s not broach evolutionary theory here…). The key point to remember is this – we take amazing things from our past and make them better in our own ways. We build upon our experiences to create new ones. We understand our world based on taking things and making them our own.
Remixing….it’s just what we do.
picture from: commons.wikimedia.org (safe to share)