Mashup and Revolutionary Cultural Appropriation

The term "mashup" hearkens back to "grunge." My parents would understand the term about as much as I understand Linear A. Those creating the culture often display an understandable embarassment when the term is invoked. Mashup has a certain cache in the present moment, appearing on the covers of magazines and in lifestyle pieces on television news. The concepts mashup employs are of course nothing terribly new. Take a song which has become a cultural in-joke (say. "Ghostbusters" by Ray Parker, Jr.) and lay it over a fierce beat and a raunchy bass line. Alternately, mix-up two old classics, say Jay-Z and the Beatles as in the case of DJ Dangermouse Such cut-up and resplice techniques appear in hip-hop, house, and dub reggae. The cut-up technique, when applied to music, queers the standard pattern of musical creation. Who writes a mashup? The artist having their song nicked? The sonic alchemist whose modus operandi is solve et coagula? Both? Neither? Hip-hop learned the hard way how cut-up techniques threaten the music industry. In the 80s artists fought (with varying degrees of success) lawsuits accusing plagiarism. Mashup represents an even graver threat to the music industry's hegemony over pop music. While many pooh pooh the idea that music can act as a revolutionary force I advance the case that mashup is perhaps the most subversive genre of music to emerge since NWA taught me how to gangsta lean. While hip-hop, house and dub appropriate material, mashup has almost no clear author. The mashup artist does not create per se. Rather, they appropriate material, give it a new juxtaposition from which something authentically new emerges. This deeply undermines the music industry's reliance on stars. When the star system is undercut, the entire method of production and distribution is undermined. The most threatening aspect of the mashup alchemist's work is the logical conclusion of the end of the star system and its relation to production and distribution. Namely, the enormous control that the recording industry holds over culture and subcultures gets broken up in the face of anonymous artistic outlaws creating chaos from cash.

While not possessing the downright evil of the energy or pharm industries, the recording industry presents massive obstacles to cultural liberation. The music industry- perhaps more successfully than any other industry except athletic footwear or jeans- has marketed itself not as product, but as lifestyle. Think back to high school and how music determined identity, clothing, friends and pastimes. Mods and rockers rioted over what were essentially music-derived lifestyle choices. While haircuts and clothing represent the most obvious expressions of subcultural identity, the driving force is music with kids plunking down between $12 and $20 for each disc. A semi-recent market survey indicates that "urban youth" (i.e. black and brown people between the ages of 12 and 35) spent a staggering $70.4M in 2000 alone. How many of these kids from the poorest segment of society are now spending their hard earned lettuce on useful things like dope and comics? Still, the music industry is driven by youth tastes (particularly those "urban youths") and it is not uncommon to meet a teenager who blows their entire meagre paycheck every week on CDs and records. Sony and the rest of the RIAA have pitched their product as must-haves for any hip youth worth their oversized jeans. In this sense they can be likened more to drug dealers than music salesmen. While the product they peddle isn't junk, it certainly seems as necessary from a status perspective. The further removed one is from concrete jungle, the harder it is to remember that status is not merely a sense of pride one feels. It determines one's place in the pecking order, something which carries dire consequences for youth from the projects to the mall.

A breath of fresh air came in the late 90s with Napster, the founder of which is now a billionaire- at least on paper. The RIAA fought a several years battle against even the thought of MP3s as a viable format. Over five years later they slowly realized the war had been lost. Getting the punters to shell out a buck a track finally seemed better than missing the boat entirely. Even then the industry continued rubbing egg on its own face, taking old ladies to court for their 14 year old granddaughter downloading a Britney Spears track to sing along with in the mirror. Most of the RIAA's mounted up to thousands of dollars. Public opinion remained staunchly with grandmothers and tech-savvy folk who refused to pay. Many of us still remember erstwhile thrash lords Metallica pathetically telling the world how "file sharing is totally UNcool maaaaaaaaaaaaan..." It did little more than further tarnish their image. The genesis of iTunes and the lawsuits the RIAA handed out almost felt like nuclear brinksmanship. Paranoid college students (likely [gasp] stoned on drugs) asked each other in hushed tones if that copy of Metal Machine Music they downloaded freshman year was going to be their undoing.

Meanwhile people like Alec Empire showed us how a suburban white boy with a computer and some (likely pirated) software could be his own kind of gangsta, recycling beats from Prodigy with vocal samples from Wu Tang Clan. Mashup took the concept of "jacking for beats" (to quote O'Shea Jackson) one step further. Mashups often take their material from far more mainstream sources than breakcore. While breakcore often lifts riffs, samples and beats from a track, mashup often takes the entire track or at least significant parts. I recommend that everyone reading this article stop now, hop on yr favorite program for downloading music (a legal, RIAA-affiliated one OF COURSE) and pick up the White Album of mashup, The Action Packed Mentalist Brings You the Fucking Jams, a release from electronic music's favorite smart ass, kid606. On the surface, the album is little more than the juxtaposition of mainstream hip-hop and r&b, Detroit ghetto tek, riot grrrl, and the odd pop song. However there's clearly more there. On just about any P2P program if you search for "kid606" this album is the one that will come up. The album was released by an ostensibly Kiwi company because of its dubious legality. The samples (particularly those from mainstream hip-hop and r&b) can almost not be called samples. kid typically uses the entire song. What's more the songs are better with his new beats and bass lines and easily obtainable for free.

Beyond just putting beats together that make yr ass shake, kid606 engages in full on magic! on the record. Where Burroughs outlined techniques for tape recorders, kid606 uses mashup for magic!al attack. Missy Eliot's "copywritten so don't copy me" morphs first into "don't copy me" and then into "copy me" over and over again. The artist taunts the star with her own words, showing how easily they can be transformed once taken out of the studio. There seems little reason to believe that kid606's intent was not to cost Missy Eliot money, particularly when one considers his overall schtick (some slogans: "kid606 can kiss my black ass", "to know me is to hate on me" with song titles like "it will take millions in plastic surgery to make me black")- i.e. being the kind of asshole no one wants coming after them. He wields the magic!al sword like a scalpel, cutting off just a bud of his enemies art and using it like a shotgun, blowing holes in their image and their art. In short, kid606 has posited himself as more of a thug than Missy's boyfriends. His theft takes place not in a convenience store, supermarket or even a bank. Rather kid606 steals music in a semi-legal way and then uses it to attack the source. The similarly repeated phrase "just study a tape of NWA" shows that, despite his public persona, kid606 has a vested interest in creation, as well as attack. He points the way forward for kids sitting around their parents basement, tired of slick pop, rap superstars, "punk", and whatever else the recording industry has decided they must have this week. Generic, rehashed beats are ripe for magic!al attack on the part of a rising generation of sorcerers who think that the industry that tells them Missy Eliot is better now that she's lost weight is full of shit. Mashup, particularly when remixing hits which would generally cost one upwards of $20, seems born of frustration against an exploitative industry trying to give them garbage for gold.

Mashup- whether or conscious or not- utilizes the best magic!al techniques to come out of the Burroughsian / TOPY current. Mashup seems little more than the magic!al technologies of cut-up (and related techniques) applied in an unconscious and populist way. Mashup magi don't need to read TOPY transmissions or Word Virus to know what they're doing. In this sense, we have as much to learn from them as they do from us. Quite simply any kid with a computer can make a mashup with the proper program. Now all we need to do is let them know the power they hold in their hands. And then the fabric of reality will begin to be radically rewritten by every kid bored on a Saturday afternoon.

Posted by Ulysses Lazarus at July 7, 2006 05:09 PM