Understand and Complicate
Understanding what assemblage and remix are and complicating the ways in which they manifest across media.
Voices of Scholarly Authority: Reinventing
Kathleen Blake Yancey and Stephen J. McElroy, define and provide examples for the concept of assemblage across different disciplines, including art; critical theory; and rhetoric and composition; in the introductory chapter of their book Assembling Composition. “Assemblage refers to and sanctions the makingness that textuality affords and its use, reuse, and repurposing of materials, especially chunks of text, in order to make something new.” (Yancey, McElroy 4). This introductory chapter is a solid starting point to complicate the definition of assemblage and how it varies across different contextual settings, while simultaneously keeping with the interest of “media, combinations, and contexts.” (Yancey, McElroy 16). Yancey and McElroy later provide a quote from a MoMA press release about The Art of Assemblage exhibit, which featured works made up of clippings and pieces of material, reassembled into something new.
Voices of Scholarly Authority: Recreating
Lawrence Lessig also takes an interesting approach to the creation of something new based on an existing source. In his work, The Social Media Reader, he uses the example of “The Superman” dance created by Soulja Boy and popularized across Youtube; the catchy sound and lyrical instructions on how to do the dance inspired thousands of people to record their own dancing videos and share them across the web. Lessig calls these forms of reproduction “conversations between young people from around the world.” (Lessig 159). However, he later explains that the issue with these sorts of “conversations” is, “that the laws governing quoting in these new forms of expression are radically different from the norms that govern quoting from text. In this new form of expression that has swept through online communities that use digital technology, permission is expected first.” (Lessig, 160). He goes on to describe the sort of “hybrid economy” we live in now, that tries to use outdated production/use principles to govern the modern, ever changing spread of digital media.
Voices of Scholarly Authority: Rhetorical Approach
In a special edition of Transformative Works and Culture, Virginia Kuhn explores the limitations of the term remix, and, “particularly those based in the visual arts, and argue for a rhetorical approach that can help illuminate the various registers of sound, image, and words, as well as the interplay of all three, which are available to the digital remixer.” She argues that the introduction of digital technologies expand the boundaries of remix, and then provides many visual examples via online video sharing platforms, like Youtube. One particular example showcases the song song “Now!”, by Santiago Alvarez, which takes the tune of the “Hava Nagila,” but uses new lyrics to make a statement on United States race relations during the mid 1960s. Kuhn’s examples of remix help to build a bridge between remix and assemblage and show how the two ideas in practice together can create something new.
Voices of Scholarly Authority: Concern
In a chapter of The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture From Consumerism to Control, Ted Striphas explains that one of the fears of publishers in the early days of digital text was copyright. He emphasizes how great this fear was by stating that in 1998, “Congress unanimously approved the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)... that prohibits end users of copyrighted materials from bypassing encryption systems or distributing information that might permit others to do so.” (Striphas, 549).
Voices of Legal Authority: Copyright
"How do I get permission to use somebody else's work? You can ask for it. If you know who the copyright owner is, you may contact the owner directly. If you are not certain about the ownership or have other related questions, you may wish to request that the Copyright Office conduct a search of its records or you may search yourself."
"How much do I have to change in order to claim copyright in someone else's work? Only the owner of copyright in a work has the right to prepare, or to authorize someone else to create, a new version of that work. Accordingly, you cannot claim copyright to another's work, no matter how much you change it, unless you have the owner's consent."
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Via Copyright.Gov "Can I Use Someone Else's Work? Can Someone Else Use Mine?" FAQs.
Voices of Legal Authority: Transformation
NYU music professor Lawrence Ferrara worked in defense of Led Zeppelin when they were accused of ripping off "Taurus" by Spirit, claiming that the riff “Stairway to Heaven” was accused of stealing had actually existed for centuries. NYU news writer Eileen Reynolds conducted an interview with Ferrara, posing questions like, “How can you prove something was copied?” Ferrera’s answers to some of Reynold’s questions move into the ideas of assemblage and remix, as he explains that many songs draw inspiration from--or model the style of--already existing works. If it were possible to monopolize or control a certain style/a certain sound, it would essentially be the death of creativity and inhibit future composers’ work. Ferrara also points out the technical-musical differences between “Stairway to Heaven” and “Taurus” to solidify his stance that “Stairway to Heaven” was transformative enough to not be considered infringement.
Voices of Legal Authority: Power
Sarah Cheeley’s piece, posted to the UNC School of Lawweb journal, primarily discusses copyright lawsuits against a few songs on Popstar Olivia Rodrigio’s debut album, Sour. To avoid a drawn-out legal battle, Rodrigo ended up adding artists such as Hayley Williams and Joshua Farro (Paramore) and Taylor Swift to the credits of multiple songs on the album. To me, this is a case where the art of assemblage and remix lost to the power of copyright-intimidation from powerful players in the music industry. I’ve listened to Rodrigo’s “Deja Vu” many times, and Swift’s “Cruel Summer” (the song “Deja Vu” was accused of copying) never came to mind. Rodrigo has even named Swift as one of her biggest idols, so Rodrigo’s style drawing inspiration from her senior’s is no shock. As Ferrera explained in the previous "Voices of Legal Authority" section, inspiration through style is a form of remix. Cases like Rodrigo’s resonate starkly different to me than instances of potential infringement like with Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven." It wracks my brain a little bit how Rodrigo had to add songwriting credits, but Zeppelin won their case.
Voices of Musical Authority: Remastering
The video Everything is a Remix Remastered starts off by providing a definition of the term remix: to combine or edit existing materials to produce something new. This video looks at remix through a Hip Hop lens and makes arguments about sampling, chord progressions, and more. Examples like “Rappers Delight" sampling the riff from “Good Times" help set the stage for the presence of remix across Hip Hop’s (and all of music’s) history. This video spends some time discussing how much of a work has to be changed (reassembled) in order for it to be considered a remix, rather than a copy. Kirby Ferguson plays multiple Led Zeppelin songs side-by-side with the songs they are accused of ripping off. It wasn’t as simple as sampling a riff or using the same chord progression, which falls into the category of assemblage and remix. They used lyrics, instrumentals, and more in an arguably non-transformative way without crediting the original. This video is really great to complicate the definition of remix and what constitutes as remix.
Voices of Legal Authority: Youtube
This article, by Kurt Dahl, walks through the steps of how to legally post a cover of a song on Youtube. The process is pretty convoluted, involving multiple permits and licenses, and permissions from the copyright holder. Dahl, however, offers Youtube’s alternative to the permit route, which is for Youtube to monetize the cover with ads and share the revenue with the copyright owner. But, the caveat is that it is at the copyright holder's full discretion if they would rather just take down the video than leave it up with ads. This makes me consider how transformative a cover is. Is it assemblage? Is it a remix? I haven’t fully decided my stance. Despite the precedents that Youtube has set with video removals or monetization, I’m still considering whether or not I think a random person singing a song could make viewers think, “I’m not going to listen to the original anymore because I have this cover now.” I haven’t decided if I believe a cover infringes on the copyright holder.
Voices of Musical Authority: Digital Technology
This Producer Tech blog post defines sampling with an emphasis in Hip Hop and explains the evolution of sampling through technological development and the advancement of production equipment. Much like the "Everything Is a Remix Remastered (2015 HD)" video, this source highlights “Good Times” and “Rappers Delight” as some of the earliest recorded instances of sampling. (By recorded I don’t mean “on the record” I mean literally pre-recorded: before the 80s, Hip Hop artists would freestyle over samples live. “Rappers Delight” was a recorded and produced song over a sample.) The blog post praises The Sugar Hill Gang’s use of sampling for “creat[ing] something new and fresh.” This era was considered “‘the golden age of sampling’ before stricter copyright laws were enforced.” Using adlibs, harmonies, and other musical elements as samples came along as new equipment, such as the Akai MPC, became popular around the mid 90s.
Voices of Legal Authority: Fair Use
The video Fair(y) Tale Use clips together dialogue from various Disney movies to create new sentences that explain terms and concepts such as copyright (and limitations of copyright), fair use, and public domain. The video actually explains that in certain situations copyright can be broken, like if you were to “borrow a small amount of a copyright [for teaching], news reports, parody, [and] critical commentary.” (Which is actually how the video itself is protected under fair use.) What really got me on the hook with this video was an in-class discussion where Professor Michael Neal mentioned that Disney tried to get this video taken down and lost. Taking clips of various characters saying one word at a time absolutely does not discourage viewers from consuming the original content. No one watched this and thought, “Great! I don’t need to buy a Monster’s Inc. DVD now that I have seen this video.”
Special Voice of Scholarly Authority: Adaptation
This piece, by Brooke Singer (wink wink), investigates movie adaptations of books as a text technology, and the ways in which the author's involvement (or lack there of) in the film-making process changes the intent of the original work as it moves across media. This work highlights a crossover between textual terms like assemblage, remix, adaptation, rhetorical trajectory, intersectionality, etc.