Archives for 2009

By Marc Weidenbaum

Matthew’s previous post got me thinking about a lot of different things, starting with the possible illusion that remix-based music production is inherently simple to accomplish. While the effect of a turntable can be approximated with a mouse click, to equate the two is to miss the qualities inherent in vinyl manipulation (and other such means of working with recorded sound, from John Cage’s sliced tapes, to CD mixing, to real-time digital synthesis). A turntablist actively working with the vinyl is very different from someone using a “reverse-LP” effect, and just because someone can add that preset flavor to a track doesn’t mean they really can cook. (I’m a big fan of Paul’s Boutique, too — the 20th anniversary just came out. The Dust Brothers are an incredible team, and I prize my MP3s of the instrumental versions of those tracks; they’re eminently listenable to in their rap-less form.)

I agree that Lessig doesn’t focus on those implications. I think, in
the end, he’s really talking about “popular” culture in its myriad
forms, and most specifically popular culture (1) as a product and (2)
as an activity. When it comes to popular music as a product, my sense
is he isn’t — and probably needn’t be — concerned with the manner in
which it is produced, because that would fall into his “professional”
bucket, which is mediated by legal systems of creative attribution and
publishing agreements and so forth.

It’s popular culture as an activity that’s really where he’s doing his
thinking. (That is, popular culture as it’s consumed, and especially as
that consumption becomes a form of creativity — the “W” in “RW.”)
That’s the realm where digital literacy is key, both as an
interactive-creativity opportunity for a new generation (and old ones,
if they wanna play along), and as a necessity in education. I think the
closest he gets to this is in his discussion of that video literacy
program in Houston.

When it comes to less-popular music (I’m kind of avoiding the term
“art,” or at least I was trying to and have now failed), me, I’m not
particularly concerned that some percentage of kids who might have
picked up a violin will now fiddle, instead, in digital synthesis
software. I do get the concern — the atrophy of physical production of
music as computerized tools make realization of musical ideas a more
fluid and easily accessible opportunity. I’d be hard put to see the
result as anything but positive. But as for the atrophy part, I guess
I’m not expecting that to happen. I mean, I saw the Pixar movie Wall-E,
yeah, but I don’t think we’ll all be floating around on hovercraft
synthesizers, and shooting each other our casual remixes via Bluetooth
as we slowly lose the ability to walk or even move our previously
nimble fingers. (Sorry to overstate it. It was just kinda fun to run
with the image.)

When I fear the future, I look to the past for precedent. (Yeah, not
always with comforting results, but it’s a good reality check.) A
hundred-plus years after the rise of photography, painting is still in
full force. I have never walked into a gallery and seen a photo of a
tree and bemoaned the artist’s loss of necessity to have used a paint
brush to realize it — no more than I think any less of impressionist
painters who had the benefit of train tracks to get them to those
lovely natural seaside scenes they so loved to paint.

I also take pleasure in the reverse — transporting the past into the
present: imagining what my cultural heroes of the distant past would do
today. Would Bartók appropriate folk songs as raw field recordings
(and be something of a rival to Steve Reich and Scott Johnson)? Would
Tallis compose motets for near-infinite voices, and work with producers
Manfred Eicher or Brian Eno? Would Bach have a day job at Google, and
spend his time working on advanced algorithms that perpetrate wild
varieties of melodic and rhythmic transformations?

In each case, I think the answer is yes. But those individuals today
just as likely might, despite the tools available to us that they
didn’t have, take comfort in the more traditional materials,
techniques, and technologies. Again, the art gallery is a good reality
check. Today, handcrafted art is everywhere. Galleries are full of soft
sculptures, and drawing is taken seriously as an art unto itself (a
peer to painting, rather than a step in the process) as it’s never been
before — in part as a reaction to the rise in digital technology, but
also because despite the availability of 3D modeling and Photoshop and
so forth, yarn and pencil are the tools these artists have found speak
to them.

By Matthew Guerrieri

I wanted to delve a little deeper into the whole question of what
remixing means for aesthetics and culture; Lessig doesn’t talk about
it much (I didn’t expect him to, it’s not really the point of the
book), but for me, perhaps predictably, it’s one of the more
interesting questions around the whole topic.

Part of the usual
defense of remix culture involves citing one or more salutary remixed
works, but I’m going to be contrarian and start off with a
particularly inane example: director Zack Snyder’s use of Wagner’s
“Ride of the Valkyries” as background to a Vietnam War sequence in his
film version of Watchmen. Tom Service, the classical music
critic for the Guardian, blogged
about it last week, making the connection with Francis Ford
Coppola’s famous use of the piece in Apocalypse Now, and, I
think, rather misguidedly complimenting Watchmen for a
similarly trenchant use of the piece. Service was pretty handily
pilloried in the comments for his suspect characterization of Wagner’s
original Valkyries, but one
commenter cut to the quick of the larger
point:

Personally, I doubt Zac Snyder has ever heard of
Wagner or The Ride of the Valkyries. It’s just that helicopter piece
from Apocalypse Now, innit?

Now, I don’t know how much
Wagner Snyder does or doesn’t know–though I’d bet he didn’t sit down
with Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft. But at the very least, it’s
fair to say that, thanks to increasingly available modes of
distribution, the number of people who have seen the “Valkyries” scene
from Apocalypse Now vastly outnumbers those people who have
actually seen the entire movie, and that group probably vastly
outnumbers those who have seen the entire movie in a movie
theater, as Coppola originally intended. For most viewers,
Snyder’s use of “Ride of the Valkyries” is a reference to a reference,
and a fairly contextually disconnected reference at
that.

Again, this is kind of a worst-case scenario, and I’m not
trying to condemn remix culture. But I think there’s a lesson for the
way contemporary RW culture transforms the RO culture it’s using.
Coppola’s use of Wagner is a gloss, but a fairly sophisticated one. (A
while ago, I got
into it at length.) Snyder’s use of it strikes me as a more
one-dimensional moment of semiotic recognition–comparatively less of
Wagner’s mythology is in aesthetic play. And I think that’s a
universal phenomenon: as cultural artifacts are more easily accessed,
there’s a certain amount of contextual impoverishment that comes with
it–maybe not inevitably, but that is the path of least
resistance.

Here’s another way of thinking about it. I spent
most of yesterday sitting at the piano practicing. That sort of
performance–taking music on the page and realizing it–is, in one way,
an exemplar of RW culture. But, of course, there’s a fair amount of
work that goes into it. (Which is why I have to practice.) In
technological terms, sheet music is an extremely lossy compression
format, and it takes an awful lot of contextual and algorithmic
knowledge to convert it into something aesthetically usable. Digital
video and audio, on the other hand are, by comparison, virtually
lossless, and can be converted into something aesthetically usable
with almost no knowledge of either context or the needed algorithm.
It’s almost an inverse relationship–digital culture gets rid of the
generational loss in sound and picture quality, but in a way,
introduces a generational loss in context.

I will reiterate
that I’m not trying to portray contemporary remix culture as good or
bad–like any format/medium/practice, the results can be both. (In
certain circumstances, the mass accessibility of culture can
force originality–as Paul Schrader once said about movies,
“Before video, it was a lot easier to knock things off because no one
had seen them.”) But I am suggesting that the analogy that Lessig
makes with Sousa’s RW culture–amateur singing societies and the
like–is nowhere near as solid as he would have us believe.
Post-digital RW culture is vastly different than what’s come before.
(This is, for example, why my BS meter started blinking on page 104,
when Lessig calls sampling “a modern equivalent to jazz”–without
taking anything away from sampling or jazz, that’s stretching the
category beyond the point where I find it has useful
meaning.)

The remixed cultural artifacts I find rewarding range
from the sublime (Jonathan Lapper’s superb “Frames of
Reference,” or film critic Jim Emerson’s inspired 2007
10 Best List) to the ridiculous (DJ Party Ben’s “Single Ladies (in
Mayberry),” which still makes me laugh harder than an essentially
one-note joke probably should). In fact, I would say that, for me at
least, the best remixes are the aesthetic equivalent of a well-told
joke, which is not to say that they need be funny, nor should that be
read as a backhanded compliment–I have a great appreciation for
well-told jokes. But it’s indicative of the conceptual nature of
remixes–as the art form stands now, I respond more to the skill and
cleverness with which the concept is executed than to any transcendent
artistic purpose. An example: Kutiman’s much-celebrated YouTube
mash-up Thru-You—“The Mother of All
Funk Chords” is technically amazing, but independent of
its concept, is it musically on par with, say, the Famous Flames or
Parliament/Funkadelic in their prime? Not really. Given the nature of
its construction, should we hold it to that aesthetic standard? If
not, what becomes of that aesthetic standard?

Where this ties
back into Lessig’s argument, I think, is that his bias towards RW
culture–you can almost hear him gritting his teeth whenever he tries
to say something nice about RO culture–leads him to gloss over the
fact that the hybrid economy he describes, at least to my reading,
significantly disincentivizes the creation of new RO culture.
(If Strong Incentives Will Increasingly Drive Commercial Entities to
Hybrids, as the heading on p. 228 puts it, then RO culture will
increasingly only be economically rewarded in as much as it can be
remixed.) If all culture starts to take place “Within the Context of
No Context” (in W.S. Trow’s noted formulation),
that’s a significant change, both aesthetically and economically, from
the pre-digital framework that Lessig references. But that’s probably
another post.

A lot of Remix rests on questions of access (“Not necessarily free access. Access.” p. 46)–access to content and then the freedom to use and alter that content.

Related to that, then, one item that kept nagging at me as I read Lessig’s book is how fast we’re approaching a basic literacy that requires computer literacy. And that means not just that you can Google and send an email, but that you can edit media with real fluency and that you are comfortable organizing and processing a large portion of your life through your computer. Or at least a committed and powerful group of people will be focused there, creating and consuming the culture that results. It’s exciting in its massive potential to rouse people from their couches and get them thinking and expressing, but isn’t there a danger that goes unmentioned for all those (and I suspect this could become an even greater issue in the short term as families look to cut expenses) without computers and internet access in their homes? How will that widen the gap between socio-economic groups? Will technology provide lower-cost options quickly enough and public schools be able to keep up for this to be something of a non-issue?

On the other side of that access coin is the issue of higher education. There was a father in the book who noted that his son was having trouble getting into graphic design school until he was able to demonstrate the impressive media-editing knowledge he already possessed by showing administrators his anime music videos. (Page 77, for those playing along at home.) How long then before the importance of traditional higher education as opposed to other forms of training shifts as well, opening career doors to a different group of people who were perhaps previously shut out?

By Brian Sacawa

As Lessig explains in the preface to Remix, a central motivation for his crusade calling for the reform of current copyright law is a concern for his children and the fate of their generation. In the current digital climate, certain activities that have become completely natural to kids, including many creative processes made available by digital technology, are deemed criminal acts. What will be the outcome, Lessig wonders, in a society when a whole generation is raised as criminals?

By relieving copyright’s firm grip on portions of digital media and promoting a freer “Read/Write” culture–a return to the time of the amateur–Lessig hopes to save the children. Though I’m whole-heartedly in favor of the majority of what Lessig argues for, this raised a question which went largely unanswered: What will perfect access–getting whatever you want whenever you want it–do to culture? Patience, that once-prized virtue, may become extinct.

By Marc Weidenbaum

By and large, I don’t merely drink but regularly swim in the brand, flavor, and vintage of Kool-Aid that Lawrence Lessig serves up.

The issues that are central to Remix, and to Lessig’s work in general, are fairly core to my own understanding of cultural consumption and of the roles of artists and consumers, and the institutions and technologies that mediate the relationship between them.

If what he’s getting at is that the 20th century was an anomaly in the way that music (for the sake of our conversation here at ArtsJournal.com), as well as other culture, is produced and enjoyed–that the direct association of a piece of “content” (some music or writing) and its physical manifestation (a CD, a book) was something that didn’t exist during life before piano rolls and vinyl recordings, and won’t exist after the Internet/MP3s/etc. has fully supplanted CDs/DVDs/etc. … well, then, certainly, I agree.

But, of course, agreement isn’t enough. That’s just preaching to the choir, which isn’t exactly what Lessig’s talking about when he gets nostalgic for Sousa’s concern about people gathering in communal song.

Plans for what to do about this transition–how to navigate it–are necessary. And despite the book’s orderly three-part structure (status report, economic context, legal proposal), I didn’t come away feeling newly prepared to negotiate what’s necessary to decriminalize casual/amateur sampling, let alone to convince a corporate entity to change its long-held sense that intellectual property should be protected at all costs.

In regard to the latter, there are fine examples in the book of companies that have woken to the value of their readers/users/constituents’ role as something other than pure consumers–from the experiences at Warner Bros. in regard to fans’ curation of the myth of Harry Potter to (and I would have liked to read more of this) Microsoft’s shepherding of the user-monitored technical-support groups. That kind of learning on the part of a large company arguably could have been the sole subject of the book. The focus may have worked in its favor.

It’s the former area, though, where Remix really didn’t seem to fulfill the promise of its subtitle, because throughout the book, Lessig draws a pretty clear distinction between moms who have posted video of their kids dancing to Prince songs, and large businesses protecting their intellectual property. My issue with that is the distinction itself, which I think is getting foggier and blurrier and more ambiguous, and will get all the more so. People are spending increasing time consuming casually produced content, from the broad realm of home videos to more specific subcultures like machinima–time that traditionally has been spent consuming mass-produced, mass-distributed culture. In effect, this amateur/fan-produced content has become a kind of long tail, to use the de rigueur term that Lessig does to describe the narrowly popular realms of culture that, all combined, in fact account for much of cultural consumption. As that kind of consumption of music (and film, and writing) becomes a bigger slice of the media-consumption pie, then even if the individual examples are casual the overall phenomenon no longer is.

Anyhow, for starters, that’s the key issue that I came away from Remix wondering how to reconcile. I look forward to reading everyone else’s take, and discussing further.

By Matthew Guerrieri

I’ll concur up front with Lessig’s underlying argumentative framework: that copyright law, in its current state, is onerous and impractical, and that using the courts to determine IP licensing guidelines is ham-fisted and counterproductive.

There were two things, though, that I kept thinking while reading the book. They’re kind of related. The first has to do with Lessig’s whole idea that we need to decriminalize read/write culture–remixing, amateur mash-ups, &c.–because otherwise we’re branding creative activity as criminal. The parade of Western artistic activity (especially in the last century) has included no small number of outlaws and transgressors. Make certain activity legal–even activity that, in a sane world, should be legal–and there’s no shortage of artists (or artistic kids) who will simply seek out another illegal channel. Lessig’s interviewed artists all struck me as either unusually earnest or slightly disingenuous; the aesthetic frisson of rule-breaking is a constant in artistic history. (Do you think Shepard Fairey isn’t at least slightly pleased that Boston cops keep giving him a hard time?)

This might just seem like aesthetic posturing at the margins, but it’s salient to the other thing I kept thinking. If you look at the history of mass media–particularly since World War II, when mass media became lucrative enough to attract people more interested in profit than content–the most artistically rich and rewarding content has come during what might be called “nobody knows anything” periods, when technology and tastes changed too fast for corporate structure to keep up: rock-and-roll in the late 50s/early 60s, Hollywood in the late 60s/early 70s, pop music in the late 80s/early 90s (hip-hop and grunge), and so forth. If Lessig is right that hybrid economies–which leverage the community aspects of internet activity–are starting to emerge as workable corporate models, my instinct is that it signals the end of the current internet’s “nobody knows anything” phase, and online culture is about to get a lot more corporatized. Lessig uses Lucasfilm’s attempt to leverage community–accompanied by draconian licensing terms–as an example of a corporation that doesn’t “get it,” but who’s to say that, in fact, Lucasfilm doesn’t actually understand it all too well? “Star Wars” was the gateway from the nobody-knows-anything New Hollywood to the corporatized Hollywood of the 80s, after all.

As Lessig extolled each example of a hybrid economy (none of which, by the way and as far as I can tell, actually pay their content creators anything), what I kept wondering was not what a widespread network of such hybrids would look like, but instead at what point that corporatization would trigger a rebellion, and what form that rebellion would take. To use Lessig’s categories: my gut feeling is that, the more commerce thrives in Web 2.0, the more art will migrate to Web 3.0, whatever that might be. Whatever it is, I’m pretty sure the RIAA won’t like it.

Oh, one more thing, in re: page 95–I’ve listened to Schoenberg pieces a hundred times. Leck’ mich, Lessig!

By Marc Geelhoed

I want to get behind Lessig’s credo, and make it easier and legal for everyone everywhere to have access to all cultural artifacts and use them as they see fit, for free. If for no other reason than not everyone can afford to buy every song they want, or every book, they ought to be able to get them and digest them and be fulfilled by everything they want. I get that. But I’ve got a couple problems with Lessig’s thesis, mainly stemming from how he frames the past and present, but then getting into how to make it work in the present (that we’ll save for later).

The way I read it, Lessig’s point in Remix is that there existed in the past a “Read-Write” culture, which was followed and supplanted in the 20th century by a “Read-Only” culture. For musicians, this means that sheet music was purchased with the intention of playing and singing it in the future. (Lessig doesn’t go in to this–and footnote number 1, there are oceans of history that Lessig doesn’t go into–but there was a thriving music-publishing industry that was pretty dogged when it came to control over sheet music.) The advent of recording changed this, with the result that fewer people became proficient in playing instruments and singing such that families and friends didn’t gather round to make music, and amateur music-making died out. Or at least, it diminished greatly in importance from the time when the only way to hear music was to hear it performed live.

Today, Lessig argues, “Read-Write” is returning in the form of remixing in video and audio, and that peer-to-peer file-sharing facilitates this. Remixing is today’s version of communication, according to Lessig. In fact, we’ve been remixing all this time and we didn’t know it whenever we quote someone else’s writing. Just as we don’t need an author’s permission to make a point in our own essay (be it in high school, college, or The Atlantic), so we shouldn’t expect amateur musicians to get permission to remix existing music.

(I have to call a Time Out at this point. The point of the hypothetical original essay Lessig refers to was likely that it would serve as a springboard to further ideas and discussion. That was emphatically not the purpose of the song or sonata, or even photograph taken for a newspaper. The intended usage has to have some bearing on how the copyright law views it, right?

Time Out 2 is that the second essayist could presumably make their argument without quoting the original essayist. While the quotation undoubtedly strengthens the argument, the point could still be made. That is not the case with the remix, which by definition can’t exist without something to add to something else.)

Yet it’s this notion of “writing” that Lessig views as the paradigm for all that follows. “It is through text that we elites communicate (look at you, reading this book). For the masses, however, most information is gathered through other forms of media: TV, film, music and music video. These forms of ‘writing’ are the vernacular of today…It is no surprise, then, that these other forms of ‘creating’ are becoming an increasingly dominant form of ‘writing.’ The internet didn’t make these other forms of ‘writing’ (what I will call simply ‘media’) significant…Using the tools of digital technology…anyone can being to ‘write’ using images, or music, or video.”

Like I said, I want to be forward-thinking and get behind this. I don’t want to be the corporate suit saying this is all wrong. But I do think he’s misinterpreted cultural history and intellectual history here. Anyone agree? Before I get shouted down for my admittedly retrograde ideas, I’d just like to say that I do think there’s legitimate criticism to be made using the media in its original form. A perfect example is Thom Andersen’s 2003 documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, in which Andersen spliced clips from roughly 150 movies together under his own narration to portray how the city has been portrayed by the film industry. The film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum said in an introduction to a recent screening that “Its importance comes from Andersen’s use of the medium to criticize the medium.” The documentary has never been released on DVD because of the likely headaches in acquiring approval, although it would make a great test-case of the fair-use doctrine.

I’ve been impressed by Lawrence Lessig’s public speaking and am a fan of his work on projects such as Creative Commons. Still, I didn’t want to drink the Kool-Aid on his book before I’d even cracked the cover, so I tried to start in a defensive position. Knowing full well that I am a reader easily seduced by tidy arguments and good writing, I proceeded from graph to graph with caution.

There are passages to poke at and argue over, and I’m sure we’ll get around to plenty of that this week. (For instance, has he presented those Sousa quotes fairly? Something doesn’t smell right about that to me, but that’s just gut. More research required.) Still, as a person who regularly finds herself pounding her head against her desk in frustration when it comes to sorting rights issues in an online environment, to start I’ve just got to say, “Right on!” A lot of the basic ideas Lessig lays out just make sense. Thinking about all forms of media as “writing” in the 21st century (because if you can type, you probably can/are using PhotoShop and iMovie to get your message across as well). Changing copyright rules so they are less like the tax code and more like “No right turn on red” (a.k.a. comprehensible without professional assistance). Separating the professional use of copyrighted material from the amateur use (Sure, go ahead and make a video of your 6-year-old kid dancing to the Chicago Symphony’s recording of The Nutcracker and post it to YouTube for your relatives to see). Early on, Lessig notes that if you’ve seen what good remix is, you’ll get why it says something powerful all its own–so if you need to, go see some (link courtesy Steve Smith).

That said, I think opening and closing the book with a punch of “You’re turning all our remixing/file sharing children into criminals! And I care more than ever about the children now that I’m a dad!” opens the door to too much sappy emotionalism. Even though it’s probably true, it dispersed a whiff of melodrama over the whole book for me that wasn’t needed. But you’ve got to hand it to him, couching his argument in a frame of wasted resources on other unwinnable wars (War on Drugs! War on Terror!) and proposing new views on the economy in the midst of upheaval have got to be in this season.

Some books just insist that you take the topic beyond the page, and so this week I’m super excited to inaugurate Blogger Book Club here at Mind the Gap. First off the shelf for discussion is the sure-to-stir-debate Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig.

Once upon a time I heard the name Lawrence Lessig mentioned during a panel at a publishing conference, and a room full of adults actually hissed in response. Who was this beast? As it turned out, he was a man with big (and, to some, incendiary) ideas–most of which had reducing the legal reach of copyright at their core. When I saw him on The Colbert Report a couple months back, it was clear he was still rocking boats. 

If terms like “intellectual property protection” and “copyright reform” raise your pulse rate, come take a seat on our virtual couch. If you’d like a little background before we get started, you can give the book’s contents a skim here, and there’s a quick capsule summary here.

Now, I’m no Oprah, but I am thrilled to be able to say that the following awesome people overlooked that part and agreed to join the club for this freshman outing:

• Corey Dargel is a Texas-born, Brooklyn-based composer, writer, and singer. Recent projects include the album Other People’s Love Songs and the music-theater piece Removable Parts. Corey blogs at 13neardeathexperiences.com about the creation of his new art-pop song cycle commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble.

• Marc Geelhoed manages the Grammy-winning in-house record label of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, CSO Resound. He was the first classical critic for Time Out Chicago, where he wrote from 2005 to 2008, and has contributed to Slate, the Financial Times, and the New Statesman.

• Composer and pianist Matthew Guerrieri‘s writing is always found at the blog Soho the Dog, frequently found in the Boston Globe, and occasionally spotted in NewMusicBox, Slate, and Playbill.

• Lisa Hirsch lives in Oakland, CA, where she’s a technical writer by day and a music reviewer, blogger, and chorister by night. Read more of her writing at Iron Tongue of Midnight.

• Saxophonist Brian Sacawa is the executive director of Mobtown Modern, a new music series presented by the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. He is also the co-founder of the duo Hybrid Groove Project, author of the blog Sounds Like Now, and a fierce bicycle racer.

• Composer Alex Shapiro aligns note after note with the hope that a few of them might actually sound good next to each other. Alex’s acoustic and electroacoustic works are performed and broadcast weekly across the U.S. and internationally, and can be found on almost twenty commercially released recordings. A former longtime Los Angeles denizen, she was born and raised in Manhattan and now lives on acreage closely supervised by the deer and foxes of Washington state’s San Juan Island. Alex procrastinates on her next piece by updating her website and her blog.

• Steve Smith is a man out about town Night After Night. He is also the music editor for Time Out New York, a weekly lifestyle, arts and entertainment magazine in New York City, as well as a regular contributor to The New York Times.

• Marc Weidenbaum writes daily at Disquiet.com (since 1996) about ambient/electronic music and sound art. He’s been published in Nature, NewMusicBox, Down Beat, and Pulse! (where he was an editor for seven years, and edited the comics for a decade), as well as in the manga magazine Shonen Jump (where he was an editor for five years), among other places. In April he’ll have an audio piece in an exhibit at the Crewest Gallery in Los Angeles. He lives in San Francisco’s Richmond District.