Table Of ContentThis is Not a
Remix
ii
This is Not a
Remix
Piracy, Authenticity and Popular Music
MARGIE BORSCHKE
Bloomsbury Academic
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© Margie Borschke, 2017
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Borschke, Margie.
Title: This is not a remix : piracy, authenticity and popular music / Margie
Borschke.
Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017003346 (print) | LCCN 2017013333 (ebook) | ISBN
9781501318931 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501318948 (ePUB) | ISBN 9781501318924
(pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Remixes--History and criticism. | Sound recordings--Social
aspects. | Popular music--Social aspects. | Music and the Internet.
Classification: LCC ML3918.P67 (ebook) | LCC ML3918.P67 B69 2017 (print) |
DDC 781.64--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017003346
ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-1891-7
PB: 978-1-5013-1892-4
ePub: 978-1-5013-1894-8
ePDF: 978-1-5013-1893-1
Cover design by Clare Turner
Cover image © iStock
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
CONTENTS
1 This is not a remix 1
1.1 Introduction 1
1.2 Critical approach 3
2 Copy, a brief history 11
2.1 The ghost in the digital machine 11
2.2 The trouble with media history 23
2.3 “Again, back”: Repetition and music’s materiality 27
3 The rhetoric of remix 33
3.1 Remix as trope 33
3.2 The extended remix: In the press 40
3.3 The extended remix: Scholarly use 48
3.4 Lawrence Lessig’s “Remix Culture” 51
3.5 Remix as resistance 65
3.6 Why the history of remix matters 69
4 Disco edits: Analog antecedents and network bias 71
4.1 What a difference a record makes 71
4.2 Interrupting the rhetoric of remix 73
4.3 Disco edits, a technical distinction 76
4.4 Hang the DJ 78
4.5 Walter Gibbons, the break, and the edits that made disco 82
4.6 Let your body talk 86
4.7 Are samples copies? 91
4.8 Parasites, pirates, and permission 101
4.9 Digital revival and an analog persistence 103
4.10 Credit to the edit 110
vi CONTENTS
5 The new romantics 113
5.1 Piracy’s long history 113
5.2 MP3 blogs as social media 116
5.3 Material media: MP3 blogs as artifacts and practices 123
5.4 Provenance as metadata 127
5.5 Rethinking participation and the folk aesthetic 135
5.6 Countercultures and anticommercialism 140
5.7 Networking authenticity 143
5.8 Analog antecedents: Harry Smith’s mystical collection 147
5.9 Copies, networks, and a poetics of encounter 155
6 Copies and the aesthetics of circulation 159
Acknowledgments 167
Bibliography 169
Index 183
CHAPTER ONE
This is not a remix
1.1 Introduction
Kim Dotcom’s arrest in 2012 was just like a movie: helicopters swooped in;
hounds were unleashed; and semi-automatic weapons were waved in the
air, wielded by the New Zealand police who stormed into the rural mansion
where the Megaupload billionaire, his wife, three children, and house
guests were sleeping. On the day before his thirty-eighth birthday, Dotcom
was charged with numerous offences including copyright infringement,
racketeering, money laundering, and piracy.
A few hours before the raid, the American Federal Bureau of
Investigation, who orchestrated the police operation, seized MegaUpload’s
servers at a data center in Europe. Precisely what was on these servers is
unknown—at the time the cloud-based file hosting service had approxi-
mately 180,000,000 registered members—but in the aftermath, there were
anecdotal reports from users claiming that several significant and admired
American MP3 bloggers, aficionados of the obscure and forgotten, were
among those who lost access to their data. Just like that, their collections
were wiped clean.
Internet outrage ensued. Fans held up the bloggers as latter day Alan
Lomaxes, people who collected and harvested songs in the name of
posterity and cultural knowledge, in some cases working in tandem with
the overlooked and rediscovered artistic geniuses that they loved. Posting
on WFMU’s Beware the Blog that week, Jason Sigal (2012) wrote, “The
best music blogs aren’t pirates. They are libraries, sound archivists and
music preservationists sharing recordings that would not otherwise be
available. And now sites like Global Groove, Mutant Sounds and Holy
Warbles have lost large swaths of the material they’d salvaged from
obscurity.” After tweets of outrage and posts of fury, listeners from around
the world swiftly began the work of reassembling the collections, relying
on the very action that made them exist in the first place: they posted their
copies to the Internet and the copying began anew.
Same as it ever was.
2 THIS IS NOT A REMIX
Even so, the influence of the MP3 blog on popular music culture began
to fade and the enthusiasm of its most enthusiastic participants waned. The
chilling effect of the Dotcom raids and other antipiracy efforts took its toll.
Simultaneously, streaming sites like Spotify and Apple Music produced yet
another change in listening habits, away from the downloading, collecting,
and the virtual hoarding that characterized the first decade of the twenty-first
century, towards on-demand streaming and “social” listening; vinyl made its
notorious comeback in the mainstream media; and even the most ardent free
culture evangelists began to wonder about the human cost of the so-called
“sharing economy.” And yet, while more industry-friendly practices and
technologies may seem to shift priorities away from the copy, copying remains
functionally essential, one of the central practices of digital culture. Likewise,
recordings (qua copies) are still the animating artifact in popular music
cultures. The sea of big data is fed by a river of copies and, to paraphrase
Heraclitus’s ancient paradox, you still cannot step twice into the same stream.
Again and again, we see culture transformed and sustained by repro-
duction and repetition. This book considers the relationship between media
and culture, by focusing on the social and material histories of copies and their
circulation. As Jussi Parikka (2008: 73) has noted, “The material processes of
copy routines have often been neglected in cultural analysis, but the juridical
issue of copyright has had its fair share of attention.” In this monograph, I
offer an argument not about the regulation of copies and copying, but about
their poetics, highlighting the material, rhetorical, social, and cultural dimen-
sions of copies and aesthetic dimension of distribution and circulation, both
now and in the past. Copy is concept that requires critical investigation. We
must simultaneously consider “copy” as a relational property of objects, but
also as a concept and practice that has a history, one that is intermingled
with the particular histories of different technologies of representation,
reproduction, and exchange. Particular cultural histories offer answers to
questions about the role of media technology in cultural change, and in this
book I recount and resurrect neglected material histories to consider what a
study of copies can tell us about the relatively recent transition from analog
to digital reproduction in music culture and the intersection of this shift with
the rise of network culture and the ability to distribute, discuss, and connect
musical artifacts, knowledge, and communities of listeners. I argue that
we can better understand this transition if we focus not only on regulatory
questions pertaining to copyright, but also on aesthetic questions related
to the status of sound recordings as copies and the materiality of media
technologies and formats as well as their rhetorical weight.
To ask questions about the present, I look to media’s recent past and
ask, in turn:
M Why copies now?
M Why remix now?
THIS IS NOT A REMIX 3
M Why vinyl now?
M Why redistribution now?
Some of my answers to these questions, I hope, will help carve out a space
for talking about the aesthetics of circulation within media studies and in
our wider history of ideas.
1.2 Critical approach
This study approaches questions about media technology and cultural change
through a focus on media artifacts as copies, and thus takes an interest in
similarities and continuities as well as difference. I believe a focus on copies
can do two things: It can help us understand media artifacts as objects that
have material, social, and cultural histories, and it can help expand how we
use them to understand our world and express our place within it. I begin
with the assumption that since the twentieth century, cultures of popular
music were also recorded music cultures (Hennion 2001, 2008; Toynbee
2000), and that, within these popular cultures, copying practices were
often more common than they were controversial. Yet, we also know that
in discussions about copyright and use, digital replication, sampling, and
the distribution of sound files via peer-to-peer technologies or websites are
flash points for debate. Many critiques of copyright raise concerns about
the policy’s possible overreach in an era of digital technologies. These
concerns are well documented and discussed across disciplines (e.g., Berry
2008; Berry and Moss 2008; Coombe 1998; Lessig 2002, 2004, 2008;
McLeod 2007; McLeod and DiCola 2011; Vaidhyanathan 2003), and such
scholarship often cites the history and importance of musical borrowings
and reuse in many of the twentieth century’s most cherished innovations
in popular music, and uses these histories in the service of arguments
about the possible effects that the expansion of copyright can have on free
expression and competition. Stories about the collaborative origins of blues
and folk music, as well as potted histories about the origins of Jamaican
dub and New York hip-hop, are now on heavy rotation in scholarship that
aims to defend digital copying practices and remix culture.
This repetition of a canon of birth narratives serves a rhetorical function
as well as an explanatory, or descriptive, one. My concern is that our
discussions about what one ought to do with copies and reproduction
technologies may be overshadowing our understanding of what people are
actually doing now, or what they have done in the past. “Remix,” a term
borrowed from audio production and dance music, is now used rhetorically
to describe and defend digital practices of copying and recombination. This
metaphorical usage, however, in its zeal to defend current networked media
