This extra-long (but you’re getting used to that) post was provoked into existence by the comment James Copeland left on the post featuring his amazing remix of the Hillbilly Moon Explosion’s My Love Forevermore.
Thanks for the kind words. They`re very welcome as some fans of the original song didnt quite appreciate my particular take on the track and i started feeling sad about it because i really did my best to be respectful to the original. This makes me feel a whole lot better.
There’s a certain attitude out there, largely in established artists, but also found in those who use “analogue*” equipment to craft their music, that remixing isn’t creativity. If provoked, these artists will go even further than simply suggesting a lack of artistic merit, calling for these remixers and mashup artists to create their own “original” music. This carries over to some music fans as well. It’s generally found in older fans, ones who are averse to electronic witchery in all its forms (including rap, which is a.] most electronic and b.] “not singing”), finding something distasteful about those who use machinery to shit all over their preferred genres.
*Guitar/bass/drums
Beyond the casual disdain, there’s a strain of complete ignorance driving these statements. I’ve run down several of the ridiculous objections to quote/unquote remix culture previously, specifically in regards to the complaints about mashup artists. It always boils down to one simple, but thoroughly ridiculous claim: that these derivative works are not truly creative works simply because they are not “original.” Since there’s nothing quite as moronic as a hive mind with a superiority complex, let’s go ahead and start demolishing these arguments starting with the big one: originality.
[Some demolishing music for your ears whilst your eyes do the heavy lifting. This is Heaven’s Gate by the mysterious Stalker, which believe it or not, is Lady Gaga’s Pokerface pitch-shifted and run backwards, with some additional tweakage applied for maximum holy/unholy otherwordliness. (The “holy/unholy” thing with the abused forward slash means that this track teeters on the precipice of good and evil, like the devoted hymnal of a church that dabbles in black majicks to increase its congregation’s tithing percentage.)]
Stalker – Heaven’s Gate.mp3
ORIGINALITY
Apparently, if you don’t craft your music from the ground up (with standard instruments like guitar/bass/drums or regional equivalents [mouth harp/accordion/bagpipes/throat singing]), it’s not “original” and as such is (again, apparently) not “creative.” I’m not sure which claim is more offensive: the fact that only certain instruments are capable of producing “original” music or the fact that only “original” works are creative.
First off, placing arbitrary limitations on your creative toolset is your problem. Don’t project your issues on the rest of the creative community simply because you feel machines and software have no place in creating music. This is legacy bullshit that has zero basis in reality. Electric guitars, so often deployed by “original” artists, were once as unwelcome as Ableton. Thousands of years of music creation has moved us to a point where nearly any non-electronic instrument can be reproduced electronically. Not only that, but the resulting tones can be looped, reversed, reverbed, distorted, layered, stretched, sped up or simply used as a capable replacement for the oft-impractical need to have an entire band in one place at one time in order to lay down a track.
Secondly, who the fuck do you think you are? Honestly. Have you forgotten the thousands of years of music history already? Are you and your band of honest musicians truly trafficking in only “original” works and bristling every time you see me place quotes around that word? Do you seriously think that your “original” music stands alone, free from outside influences and your own personal music history?
No one creates in a vacuum.
We are all the massive beneficiaries of millennia of accumulated human scientific knowledge and cultural output, and not one of us did anything do deserve a jot of it. We’re all just extremely lucky not to have been born cavemen. The greatest creative genius alive would be hard pressed to create a smiley faced smeared in dung on a tree trunk without that huge and completely undeserved inheritance.
Oh. I see. That’s not the same thing. So… it’s one thing to have influences and produce music that shows this and yet another to simply remix it?
Once again, we’re back to arguing about the legitimacy of certain instruments and pieces of software. It has nothing to do with “ripping off” the artists. It’s just that you’ve decided what you do is “creative” and the producer morphing your quotidian rock into a dance floor monster is simply offering up a simplistic variation. (So simple you couldn’t reproduce it if you tried, but still…)
[Speaking of remixes… Here’s the original version of Spiritualized’s ode to love, drugs and druggy love, I Think I’m in Love. Beautiful in its own lethargic just-home-from-the-methadone-clinic way.
And here’s the Chemical Brothers doing some “mere” remixing, taking the warmest parts of the “junk running down my spine” feeling and adding their own electronica-via-rocknf’nroll touches, including an amazing section of drums/bass/spiraling noises that sound very much ChemBros without completely eradicating J. Spaceman’s spacey rock.]
Spiritualized – I Think I’m in Love (Chemical Brothers Remix).mp3
[And as an added bonus in the the-best-artists-steal department, here’s Spiritualized quoting Elvis Presley in a new context, but not new enough apparently, as Elvis’ estate forced this track’s removal from subsequent pressings.]
Spiritualized – Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space (Deleted Version).mp3
These people you’re bashing? The remixers? The “derivative artists?” They craft their own originals as well. There are very few remixers out there who DON’T produce their own tracks. Even mashup artists, the ultimate derivative artists, have gone on to produce original albums, form bands and do production work for other original artists.
At some point, your music will be used to soundtrack something you don’t care for or condone, like furry porn or a pagan marriage ceremony. You CAN’T stop this from happening. The only thing you can do is choose how to react. Remember, just because they’ve got bizarre habits doesn’t mean they don’t venture out into the public to purchase music, attend concerts, etc., often without the colorful costumes and visible erections. Do you really want to cut off a potential source of income just so you can keep control of your “artistic legacy” or whatever you choose to justify hard-assian overreaction?
There’s only one way to control use of your artwork. Keep it unreleased and locked up. Not a great way to make income and an even worse way to express yourself creatively. This lack of control is understandably scary, but on the bright side, an internet’s worth of feedback is readily available. Most artists want their art to be seen, heard and experienced. But some want to control these interactions, and in this day and age, especially if your art can be converted to 1s and 0s, there’s no way to do this. So you have to decide how you’re going to react, keeping in mind that your reaction to “misuse” can often mean the difference between gaining fans and sales and being relegated to obscurity (or worse, infamy).
I’ve said before I think using other peoples’ recordings to make your own records is lame and lazy. It’s a cheap way into the game and it’s for suckers. That said, when I turn something loose into the world, the world will do with it what it pleases, despite my preferences. If a business gets involved, it has a footprint in a jurisdiction and I could raise a fuss if I wanted, but I don’t.
If you don’t want anybody riding your horses, keep them in the barn.
Some artists treat this interaction with all the care of a cigarette-smoking driver piloting a leaking fuel truck across the only bridge in town. After their carelessness sets the bridge on fire, they find themselves with little more than an empty fuel truck and no road out of a town filled with enraged citizens.
EXPANSION
Here’s one thing remixers, samplers and mashup artists are willing to do that many “original” artists simply won’t: expose your music to new listeners. While these artists sit around, preaching to the converted and decrying various “ripoff” artists, these derivationists (BRAND NEW TODAY — THIS WORD!) are bringing (like James Copeland) swing to the dancefloor or (Hood Internet), the Black Keys’ garage rock to the hip hop crowd (and vice versa).
The next time you’re wondering why your album sales have plateaued or ticket sales have slumped, perhaps you should consider the limits you’ve placed on yourself by limiting your creative output to the same static set of fans using the same static arrangements and instrumentation.
THE HELL IS WITH THE FANS?
It’s patronizing enough when artists decide their work is unfuckwithable, but it’s even more appalling when fans attempt to claim secondhand ownership of these creations. I’m already reeling in disbelief at the fact that some artists believe their work in completely unapproachable and guard it with the tenacity of a pit bull on Adderall, but I’m completely baffled by fans who decide (with or without a statement from the band in question) that they are somehow “protecting” the band’s “integrity” by piling a whole lot of hate on some remixer.
Even if the band has stated that they are unhappy with remix of song X, your “job” as a fan is not to simply repeat the company line. If you don’t care for the remix either, so be it. But to take a personal tack is to presume that remixer X crafted his or her version SOLELY to piss off the band and its fans. Remixes are usually done because the remixer digs the source material, not because he wanted to shit on someone’s creative output.
But most frustrating of all is the survivors of legacies who guard the former artist’s output with the same ferocious tenacity, swollen with secondhand entitlement and a staggering amount of presumptiveness. They proclaim themselves the mouthpieces of dead artists, an idea that would be laughable at a seance, much less a boardroom discussion with an artist seeking to use part of their work. Of all the people that I loudly wonder who in the FUCK they think they are, these would top the list.
One of James Joyce’s heirs spent several years bullying anyone who attempted to do anything with his work, including peope who were just trying to celebrate Joyce’s literary legacy by *gasp* READING HIS WORK ALOUD. He’d likely still be threatening Joyce’s fans if several of the copyrights hadn’t expired in 2012, 70 years after Joyce’s death. Apple Records has made using any of the Beatles’ songs in film or TV nearly impossible, demanding outrageous amounts and passing out several hundred no’s for every yes. Because the Beatles hated people enjoying their music, if the label’s lawyers and surviving members are to be believed.
So, your choices as an artist boil down to this:
1. Embrace the inevitable and realize that artists build on their predecessors’ work. Some just build in a more direct fashion.
2. Surround yourself with bristling lawyers and an openly hostile attitude towards other artists.
This is how you properly move an unrelated music genre onto the strobe-lit dance floor. Only a few producers can make this leap without the result sounding like an offshoot of such club music atrocities as Rednexx’ Cotton Eye Joe cover or any number of crossover country hits that had a lazy 4/4 applied to them by an aspiring Club 69er with a handful of 808 loops and the imagination of a drive-time AOR dj.
Balkan Beatbox does this incredibly well, dragging post-Eastern-bloc music over to the bassbins and plying it with near-Mitsubishi-quality E. The Alabama 3 have been embracing Roland drum machines and various electronic interjections, bringing their country/blues mixture ever closer to the smoke-and-lasers of club culture.
Add the name James Copeland to this incredibly short list of unlikely roots music re-routers. This South African producer traffics in something called “electro-swing,” which is as good a name as anything for this housed-up remix of Hillbilly Moon Explosion’sMy Love for Evermore, which itself is a rockabilly torch song featuring some splendid his-and-hers vocals that play off each other, alternating between breathless and guttural.
Copeland’s remix is party in the front, toying with a couple of truncated loops before unleashing the kick drum. After two minutes of pace-setting, Copeland cues a drop, peeling away nearly everything but the original and giving HME a chance to stretch their (almost certainly) black stovepipe jeans a bit (perhaps get a cigarette lit as well) before giving the business end of things the “business” and riding the loops back into the groove.
Altogether an amazing remix, one that sounds like not much else out there. It’s enough to make even the most ardent nu-greaser put away the his or her switchblade and play nice with the club kiddies and their endless assortment of paraphernalia/stuffed animals.
Minor Scratches 
On Originality
This extra-long (but you’re getting used to that) post was provoked into existence by the comment James Copeland left on the post featuring his amazing remix of the Hillbilly Moon Explosion’s My Love Forevermore.
There’s a certain attitude out there, largely in established artists, but also found in those who use “analogue*” equipment to craft their music, that remixing isn’t creativity. If provoked, these artists will go even further than simply suggesting a lack of artistic merit, calling for these remixers and mashup artists to create their own “original” music. This carries over to some music fans as well. It’s generally found in older fans, ones who are averse to electronic witchery in all its forms (including rap, which is a.] most electronic and b.] “not singing”), finding something distasteful about those who use machinery to shit all over their preferred genres.
*Guitar/bass/drums
Beyond the casual disdain, there’s a strain of complete ignorance driving these statements. I’ve run down several of the ridiculous objections to quote/unquote remix culture previously, specifically in regards to the complaints about mashup artists. It always boils down to one simple, but thoroughly ridiculous claim: that these derivative works are not truly creative works simply because they are not “original.” Since there’s nothing quite as moronic as a hive mind with a superiority complex, let’s go ahead and start demolishing these arguments starting with the big one: originality.
[Some demolishing music for your ears whilst your eyes do the heavy lifting. This is Heaven’s Gate by the mysterious Stalker, which believe it or not, is Lady Gaga’s Pokerface pitch-shifted and run backwards, with some additional tweakage applied for maximum holy/unholy otherwordliness. (The “holy/unholy” thing with the abused forward slash means that this track teeters on the precipice of good and evil, like the devoted hymnal of a church that dabbles in black majicks to increase its congregation’s tithing percentage.)]
Stalker – Heaven’s Gate.mp3
ORIGINALITY
Apparently, if you don’t craft your music from the ground up (with standard instruments like guitar/bass/drums or regional equivalents [mouth harp/accordion/bagpipes/throat singing]), it’s not “original” and as such is (again, apparently) not “creative.” I’m not sure which claim is more offensive: the fact that only certain instruments are capable of producing “original” music or the fact that only “original” works are creative.
First off, placing arbitrary limitations on your creative toolset is your problem. Don’t project your issues on the rest of the creative community simply because you feel machines and software have no place in creating music. This is legacy bullshit that has zero basis in reality. Electric guitars, so often deployed by “original” artists, were once as unwelcome as Ableton. Thousands of years of music creation has moved us to a point where nearly any non-electronic instrument can be reproduced electronically. Not only that, but the resulting tones can be looped, reversed, reverbed, distorted, layered, stretched, sped up or simply used as a capable replacement for the oft-impractical need to have an entire band in one place at one time in order to lay down a track.
Secondly, who the fuck do you think you are? Honestly. Have you forgotten the thousands of years of music history already? Are you and your band of honest musicians truly trafficking in only “original” works and bristling every time you see me place quotes around that word? Do you seriously think that your “original” music stands alone, free from outside influences and your own personal music history?
No one creates in a vacuum.
– Julian Sanchez, Things that are Irrelevant to Copyright Policy
Oh. I see. That’s not the same thing. So… it’s one thing to have influences and produce music that shows this and yet another to simply remix it?
Once again, we’re back to arguing about the legitimacy of certain instruments and pieces of software. It has nothing to do with “ripping off” the artists. It’s just that you’ve decided what you do is “creative” and the producer morphing your quotidian rock into a dance floor monster is simply offering up a simplistic variation. (So simple you couldn’t reproduce it if you tried, but still…)
[Speaking of remixes… Here’s the original version of Spiritualized’s ode to love, drugs and druggy love, I Think I’m in Love. Beautiful in its own lethargic just-home-from-the-methadone-clinic way.
And here’s the Chemical Brothers doing some “mere” remixing, taking the warmest parts of the “junk running down my spine” feeling and adding their own electronica-via-rocknf’nroll touches, including an amazing section of drums/bass/spiraling noises that sound very much ChemBros without completely eradicating J. Spaceman’s spacey rock.]
Spiritualized – I Think I’m in Love (Chemical Brothers Remix).mp3
[And as an added bonus in the the-best-artists-steal department, here’s Spiritualized quoting Elvis Presley in a new context, but not new enough apparently, as Elvis’ estate forced this track’s removal from subsequent pressings.]
Spiritualized – Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space (Deleted Version).mp3
These people you’re bashing? The remixers? The “derivative artists?” They craft their own originals as well. There are very few remixers out there who DON’T produce their own tracks. Even mashup artists, the ultimate derivative artists, have gone on to produce original albums, form bands and do production work for other original artists.
DJ Dangermouse went from The Grey Album (Jay-Z vs. the Beatles) to one-half of Gnarls Barkley along with several other projects. Belgian mashup duo 2ManyDJs went from infringing the hell out of nearly everyone to cranking out top quality dance music as Soulwax. Another pioneer of the mashup scene, Richard X., has gone on to produce hits for Annie, Kelis and the Sugababes.
Richard X./Sugababes – Freak Like Me.mp3
CONTROL
At some point, your music will be used to soundtrack something you don’t care for or condone, like furry porn or a pagan marriage ceremony. You CAN’T stop this from happening. The only thing you can do is choose how to react. Remember, just because they’ve got bizarre habits doesn’t mean they don’t venture out into the public to purchase music, attend concerts, etc., often without the colorful costumes and visible erections. Do you really want to cut off a potential source of income just so you can keep control of your “artistic legacy” or whatever you choose to justify hard-assian overreaction?
There’s only one way to control use of your artwork. Keep it unreleased and locked up. Not a great way to make income and an even worse way to express yourself creatively. This lack of control is understandably scary, but on the bright side, an internet’s worth of feedback is readily available. Most artists want their art to be seen, heard and experienced. But some want to control these interactions, and in this day and age, especially if your art can be converted to 1s and 0s, there’s no way to do this. So you have to decide how you’re going to react, keeping in mind that your reaction to “misuse” can often mean the difference between gaining fans and sales and being relegated to obscurity (or worse, infamy).
– Steve Albini
Some artists treat this interaction with all the care of a cigarette-smoking driver piloting a leaking fuel truck across the only bridge in town. After their carelessness sets the bridge on fire, they find themselves with little more than an empty fuel truck and no road out of a town filled with enraged citizens.
EXPANSION
Here’s one thing remixers, samplers and mashup artists are willing to do that many “original” artists simply won’t: expose your music to new listeners. While these artists sit around, preaching to the converted and decrying various “ripoff” artists, these derivationists (BRAND NEW TODAY — THIS WORD!) are bringing (like James Copeland) swing to the dancefloor or (Hood Internet), the Black Keys’ garage rock to the hip hop crowd (and vice versa).
Hood Internet – Hard and Gone (Ace Hood vs. the Black Keys).mp3
The next time you’re wondering why your album sales have plateaued or ticket sales have slumped, perhaps you should consider the limits you’ve placed on yourself by limiting your creative output to the same static set of fans using the same static arrangements and instrumentation.
THE HELL IS WITH THE FANS?
It’s patronizing enough when artists decide their work is unfuckwithable, but it’s even more appalling when fans attempt to claim secondhand ownership of these creations. I’m already reeling in disbelief at the fact that some artists believe their work in completely unapproachable and guard it with the tenacity of a pit bull on Adderall, but I’m completely baffled by fans who decide (with or without a statement from the band in question) that they are somehow “protecting” the band’s “integrity” by piling a whole lot of hate on some remixer.
Even if the band has stated that they are unhappy with remix of song X, your “job” as a fan is not to simply repeat the company line. If you don’t care for the remix either, so be it. But to take a personal tack is to presume that remixer X crafted his or her version SOLELY to piss off the band and its fans. Remixes are usually done because the remixer digs the source material, not because he wanted to shit on someone’s creative output.
But most frustrating of all is the survivors of legacies who guard the former artist’s output with the same ferocious tenacity, swollen with secondhand entitlement and a staggering amount of presumptiveness. They proclaim themselves the mouthpieces of dead artists, an idea that would be laughable at a seance, much less a boardroom discussion with an artist seeking to use part of their work. Of all the people that I loudly wonder who in the FUCK they think they are, these would top the list.
One of James Joyce’s heirs spent several years bullying anyone who attempted to do anything with his work, including peope who were just trying to celebrate Joyce’s literary legacy by *gasp* READING HIS WORK ALOUD. He’d likely still be threatening Joyce’s fans if several of the copyrights hadn’t expired in 2012, 70 years after Joyce’s death. Apple Records has made using any of the Beatles’ songs in film or TV nearly impossible, demanding outrageous amounts and passing out several hundred no’s for every yes. Because the Beatles hated people enjoying their music, if the label’s lawyers and surviving members are to be believed.
So, your choices as an artist boil down to this:
1. Embrace the inevitable and realize that artists build on their predecessors’ work. Some just build in a more direct fashion.
2. Surround yourself with bristling lawyers and an openly hostile attitude towards other artists.
Which choice is more likely to gain you fans?
-CLT
Comments Off on On Originality
Filed under Commentary, Covers, Electronica, Hip Hop, Remixes
Tagged as Ace Hood, Beatles, Black Keys, Chemical Brothers, Dangermouse, James Copeland, James Joyce, Julian Sanchez, Mashup, Originality, Remix, Richard X., Soulwax, Spiritualized, Steve Albini