History repeats itself. That’s the one thing I remember from high school history (that and “Et, tu, Brute?”). In RIP: a remix manifesto, filmmaker Bret Gaylor puts his authorial spin on the ethics of sampling in music. It’s a little hard from the get-go for me to accept what I’m fed: when he asks who the author of a song is, and it’s clearly Michael Jackson’s voice I hear, and he says “it’s not the Jackson Five,” I feel a little bit of resentment. But then, I’m a huge Michael Jackson fan. I wore his “Thriller” t-shirt to my second-grade class picture. So is sampling in music ethical? An author in the movie (is it Lessig?) tells us that “the answer will always be ‘it depends,’ and it depends on who it is and how upset they are.” But I don’t think that’s really the issue for the “kids,” as Lessig puts it. I think it’s simply an issue of cool factor.
Lessig tells us that an entire generation has been criminalized. He tells us all the kids are doing it: creating their own spliced songs and movies via they’re computer. But for this to be true, three other things have to be true: 1) that the kids have the technology, 2) that they know how to use it, and 3) that a cooler counter-movement doesn’t exist. For let’s face it: I know one person who works with samples (you know who you are). I still have students who need help logging into Blackboard and Campus Connection and navigating their way through those systems. And the “my computer messed up my homework” excuse? Well it’s used so much that maybe they are all criminals. But I don’t think so. I think that technology is simply a different form of hierarchy. Quite obviously, I am on a pretty low end of this hierarchy. The kids don’t all have the technology and they don’t all know how to use it. Or is it less of a hierarchy and more of a pendulum? Interestingly, Gaylor points out that Girl Talk’s parents were “back-to-the-earth” types. I bet a lot more of us know people that are unplugging than are plugging in, at the moment. This all says nothing about the music; how much knowledge and practice (20,000 hours, right?) it takes to become proficient at something could be the same for a cello or a laptop as far as I know.
Lessig mentions Bob Dylan several times in part one of Remix. I kept waiting for him to talk about Dylan’s history in music, and how he was the criminal. Oh wait—everyone was a criminal. Because Dylan was a folk artist at first. Folk songs are traditional; passed on to keep the old stories alive, and a lot of these stories were about underdogs who were unfairly prosecuted. Sounds familiar. Gaylor and Lessig are saying the same thing about remix culture. And the scenes from the movie would seem to support that. When Dylan started putting his own spin on folk songs, people were upset. You don’t mess with a person’s story. You don’t rewrite their words or change their melodies. When Dylan’s technology changed and he started playing the electric guitar, people were more than upset. Dylan, in effect, remixed and then morphed into his own artist. Though he made those concerned with tradition mad, his cool factor went up. So it doesn’t matter so much after all who gets upset; as long as someone is upsetting tradition, they are participants in the trajectory of the conversation of culture, and, god help us all if that ever ends.
Questions:
If the author is the collector, why does Gaylor put credits at the end of his movie?
This movie is highly stylized and politicized. What does that do in the Burkean Parlor?
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