548 PART 4 | SINCE WORLD WAR II
money through downloading; instead, the goal is to create a market for concerts
and merchandise such as collectible deluxe CDs. In some cases, it works: the band
Dispatch gained a following on Napster and went on to tour nationally to capacity
audiences. In 2007 they played three sold-out shows in Madison Square Garden,
the fi rst band without backing from a major label to do so.
The quality of do-it-yourself recorded music has benefi ted from affordable
sound recording and editing software, which allows a laptop to take the place
of the racks of expensive audio equipment that once was within the means only
of professional recording studios. The same technology also makes it possible to
manipulate the recorded music of other artists. One result is the remix, in which
a recorded song is altered by adding, subtracting, or changing the dynamic bal-
ance between textural layers; revising the song’s structure, generally by length-
ening it through repetition or interpolation; shifting the pitch or tempo of the
original; or combining any or all of these techniques. The practice dates back to
the disco era, when record companies would release “extended mixes”—six- or
seven-minute versions of songs whose radio versions were closer to the three-
minute mark—for the use of club DJs. Hip-hop DJs, of course, were creating their
own extended mixes by looping breaks, and their manipulation of vinyl on turn-
table set the pattern for later remixes, which use digital technology to expand
the ways in which a song may be altered. Club DJs may, for example, alter the
tempo of a slow ballad to make it more suitable for dancing.
But remixes can be more than simple reworkings of dance music. The Cana-
dian John Oswald, who began creating sound collages in the 1970s, alters popular
songs to create avant-garde electronic music that defamiliarizes the familiar, a
process he calls “plunderphonics.” “A plunderphone,” he wrote in 1985, “is a rec-
ognizable sonic quote, using the actual sound of something familiar which has
already been recorded. Whistling a bar of [Edgard Varèse’s] ‘Density 21.5’ is a tra-
ditional musical quote. Taking Madonna singing ‘Like a Virgin’ and re recording
it backwards or slower is plunderphonics, as long as you can reasonably recog-
nize the source. The plundering has to be blatant though.”
Oswald’s 1988 Plunderphonics EP displays his remixing aesthetic. One track
features Dolly Parton covering a 1950s doo-wop song, “The Great Pretender,”
her voice altered to sound fi rst like a chipmunk, then like herself, and then like
a masculine baritone, accompanied by an eerie electronic soundscape. Other
tracks similarly defamiliarize Elvis Presley, Count Basie, and Igor Stravinsky. In
every case, the source material is recognizable, but in no way would anyone mis-
take Oswald’s work for a mere copy of the original. Rather, his collages create
new meaning by commenting on the originals.
Oswald’s aesthetic of creating new music from recognizable sources informs
another type of musical recycling, the mash-up, in which tracks from two or
more songs are combined to create a new song. Although the idea of the mash-up
goes back to 1950s novelty songs, the use of the technique for more than comic
purposes probably begins with DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing.... ., a 1996 album con-
sisting entirely of samples from a wide array of popular music and jazz. Mash-ups
became more widely known in 2004, with the rapid proliferation on the Internet
of DJ Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album, a mash-up of the vocal tracks from Jay-
Z’s Black Album with heavily processed instrumental tracks from the 1968 album
offi cially called The Beatles but generally known as The White Album.
Because Danger Mouse had not cleared the instrumental tracks, the holder
of the Beatles’ copyrights, EMI, cited the Digital Millenium Copyright Act tothe remixJohn Oswaldthe mash-upDanger Mouse172028_22_531-558_r3_sd.indd 548 23/01/13 11:20 AM