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Michael MeederSolis MHL 668Paper #2, RevisedNovember 23, 2009

Points of Entry: The Hermeneutic Arc and the Art of Remix

“Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new. Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works

of those who came before.” JUDGE ALEX KOZINSKI / Palmsout.net Remix Sunday

Introduction

Exploiting and exploring the Internet as a medium to connect with musical

sources and cultures has fascinated me since its early days (ca. 1995), but recently

my endeavor has been simplified and articulated for me by social networking web

sites and music web logs. The Internet has become a nexus of places and spaces

(termed “virtuality” below) where music occurs. Discounting ethnomusicological

inquiry into online music cultures and music-making would be a mistake, as

“[v]irtuality is only as real as any other cultural production; it has only the meaning

with which people imbue it” (Cooley 2008: 91). If also, “we believe that music must

be understood as part of culture” as Nettl states, and “we believe that we must study

all the world’s music,” then the Worldwide web’s music must be included (Nettl in

Rice 2008: 44). I am talking about music enabled by the web and Internet, and

musics able to be studied via the web as well.

I believe Cooley is being a bit too general on the interaction between

ethnomusicology and online places of cultural production, therefore I want to delve

a little deeper and provide some pathways for future fieldwork, while

simultaneously discussing my observations concerning artistic process and points

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of entry –entry to being in-the-world (also the artistic world), and figuratively as

certain music creates points of entry in the listener.

As a teenager, I was active on various local music web sites – online spaces

that fostered the growth and social relations of our ska music subculture. I helped

produce sites for this content. With the advent of so-called Web 2.0 frameworks and

technologies (circa 2004, when the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference occurred),

sites that encourage content creation (web logs, MySpace) and “sharing

communities” like Flickr have abounded, enabling cultures connected through

notions of collectivity and imagined communities, who are altering the musical

process, making it more streamline. Digital music becomes aligns itself with

process, opening up potential for future explorations of any crafted piece.

Music-focused web logs are updated regularly (the content being mostly new

to the public and kept new through breakout remixes), some multiple times a day,

revolving around content able to be played and/or downloaded directly from the

web site. The preponderance of dance music web logs gave rise to the term “blog

house” (ca. 2007) and spawned the so-called “nu rave” movement.

My thesis is that the remix is the sound of the hermeneutic arc, and this arc

connects self with other, insider with outsider. When a remix of any particular song

comes up on my iPod, my thinking brain thinks, “this is the sound of the

hermeneutic arc.” Remixed tracks are “deep fun,” to interact with in many ways:

definitely music (re)creation. They form the soundtrack to any dance party,

although the dance genre is only one of many taking part in and benefitting from

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this tool of cross-genre discourse. The process of remixing allows prosumers1 (as

well as ethnomusicological fieldworkers) to blur boundaries between producer

(insider) with the consumer (outsider). The outsider appropriates musical sounds

and imparts his musicality in a hermeneutic arc of 1) understanding 2) explanation

and 3) appropriation (Wiercinski 2008). I have noticed many DJs going through this

process to gain entry to the professional and industry levels of music. Once a

creative individual makes a remix and web sites feature it (this is quite nerdy at one

level), that person is then gaining ground on becoming an insider. In that moment,

that individual is between insider and outsider, he has fallen into a gap that Rice

describes as “no place” and there completes the gap between not knowing and

knowing, through appropriation. The hermeneutic arc is the remix that, like data

files arcing in the sky, are received and remixed by the Other, who thereby merges

his/her/their otherness with the data.

Remixing is a process of appropriation that can further a culture through a

re-envisioning of the self and Other, or of self through the Other, of Other through

the self, in the form of digital and digitized music: a continuum, a communion, music

as process. Opposing the object-orientation of the pop release, online music blogs

proliferate the re-imaginings of individual and collective remixers, bent on making

a niche for themselves in the world of music, even gaining notoriety and quickly

using this as a means by which to launch their own artistic careers in the ever-

changing industry of do-it-yourself’ers. The idea of the remix challenges the notion

1 “Economists see the prosumer (producer–consumer) as having greater independence from the mainstream economy. It can also be thought of as converse to the consumer with a passive role, denoting an active role as the individual gets more involved in the process.” Wikipedia 2009.

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of ownership, and “music as object”. Remixers have matured into a respectable

group of artists, diversifying the art of the remix as much as necessary, creating new

genres of music, and blurring boundaries of self and other, some actively seeking to

breakdown this perceived boundary, even to the listener. Girl Talk (Greg Michael

Gilles) performs with his laptop as an instrument, he is surrounded by people who

whisper and shout in alignment and cohesive ecstasy. Gilles’ dialogic performance

echoes part of his philosophy: “We are all the same dude!” as Girl Talk exclaims at a

party during RiP: A Remix Manifesto (2009). The scene does not translate well to

paper.

Internet Ethnography and Online Music Communities

Research on the Internet as a qualitative place of inquiry has been limited to

text and textual relationships, their hallmark problems being misinterpretation,

disembodiment, isolation, fragmentation, and mistrust (Markham 2005). For who is

behind the words on the screen, and what are their true intentions? Most of the

ethnography talked about representations of the self through text, because it’s

easier to judge qualitatively, and you can work it into your written research

findings. That was Internet pre-2000. Although cyberspace is largely text, spaces

are opening up in every direction asking for your content, your music, videos, and

photos. The web surely is finding new ways of inspiring creativity and opening

artistic work up to be viewed and shared.

Where is the field? Where is the method?

Discussing “Virtual Fieldwork,” Cooley suggests: “fieldwork should happen

where music happens” (2008: 106). So where is music happening? A lot of music is

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happening on the internet. What do I, or Cooley, mean by “happening”? The

interviews with Girl Talk featured in the film RiP show him remixing tracks on his

laptop, and they give no power to the place in which he is working: his basement.

Fieldwork that documents the “cut and paste” (Lessig, 2004: 277) techniques of

laptop computer mixing would be interesting in terms of process, and how that

process of construction translates or permeates the future life-expectancy and

salience of the remix. RiP has invaluable interviews with Girl Talk, who is open and

candid – homologous with his music’s message. This approach, of observation and

interviews, is weak when compared to the method of participant-observation.

Talking to insiders will take you in the direction of “an emic understanding” but “not

all the way there” (Rice 2008: 59).

The fieldwork method of participant-observation would be instrumental

towards any meaningful body of work on the art of the remix. Also instrumental to

The researcher would need to engage in social networking with others in the field,

spending time with the people who feature, write about, enjoy, and make the music

themselves. As this is more of an open-ended community than a closed one, “The

hermeneutic gesture of genuine openness can play a vital role in promoting the

culture of friendship in a globalized and yet profoundly divided and critically

differentiated human society, ”(Wiercinski 2008). As most of the contemporary

(“digital”) music artists are omnipresent online, following their arc would be an easy

way to passively observe, although the researcher should want to participate.

Tim Rice writes about wanting to “become a musician [italics his own]”

(2008: 49). Rice tells a story of how he came to play the gaida, without his mentor

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Kostadin. What Rice says about not needing pedagogy similarly applies to those

wishing to learn the processes involved in sample and track mixing. One could

feasibly teach one’s self much in the way of making a remix; you do not need a

teacher or an instructional video. Rice writes:

Culture and its traditions are also acquired by observing, mimicking, and embodying shared practices (Bordieu 1977) and by appropriating, understanding, and interpreting shared, symbolic actions (Ricoeur 1981C) without the direct intervention of parents, teachers, informants, and insiders. (2008: 49)

Online culture is very much self-taught, and this is what could enable and serve as

foundation towards future research negotiating the pathway of becoming a musical

voice in the community.

The Hermeneutic Arc

Tim Rice recounts the way he was able to learn the gaida by abandoning

binary methodology of etic/emic and simply “acted musically” (2008: 51). Rice fell

into the gap between Insider and Outsider, “a theoretical ‘no place’that felt very

exciting, if not exactly like a utopia” allowed him to be “neither an insider nor an

outsider,” (51). Rice tackles the gap physically, “An act of appropriation that

transformed me” (51). The same process of transformation, via the hermeneutic

arc, is evident in the phenomena of remixing musical tracks. With a basic

knowledge of music software, anyone can do it (remix): a little kinesthetic tinkering,

and the remixer is transformed by the act of appropriation. Like Rice says, this does

not make you into an insider (he wasn’t a Bulgarian himself), but it can. Rice

recounts hearing the welcoming phrase “You are a gaidar” as stated by an older

neighbor of Kostadin (52).

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“The field is the metaphorical creation of the researcher” (Rice 2008: 48).

Now allow me to define what I perceived to be the field, when researching online

music culture and how artists interact with one another. If we follow the

ethnomusicology framework that “fieldwork should happen where music happens”

(Syed 2008: 106), then we must contextualize the field with regard to Web 2.0,

MySpace, and the many music blogs. This is indeed amateur hour, but the amateurs

are quickly becoming professionals, turning careers out of hit singles debuted on

MySpace, record labels from blogs, and a new class of prosumers. So, these are the

sites where fieldwork should begin, where one is introduced to the musical content

creators. This is just a point of entry.

Web 2.0 enables process-oriented activity, such as uploading, sharing,

blogging, social networking, user-to-user interaction, and multi-user collaboration

in a never ending stream. The majority of popular music blogs, like newspapers and

magazines, are run by multiple individuals, featuring content from multiple sources:

local, international, and self-promotion. This collective presence has replaced the

earlier environment on the web, which was more object-oriented: the solitary

“homepage,” the single-user account, the official website of, and commercial routes

of consumption. On the web, the collective agents of creation have become the

norm.

Collective processes of creation, feedback, alternation (you/me), critique,

inclusion and exclusion prove strength is in numbers. The “field” is not a place, but

a quilt of personalities (Others), and finding yourself in that field means taking on

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the hermeneutic arc. The remix is presently the most explicit means by which a pro-

sumer (or ethnomusicologist) can enter the field.

Insider/Outsider

I now seek to use the form of remix to narrate the process of inter-

dependence between insiders and outsiders. To a non-musician (like myself), an

insider can be considered someone knows how to make music. If we consider the

musician as the insider, we can see that anyone remixing their unique work is the

outsider, trying to get in. The artists in fact need their listeners to create this type of

discourse about what the music is, what the track’s specific limits are, if limits exist.

What is techno? What are disco, nu-disco, rock, or music? What do all these terms

signify? Musical discourse is understood, explained, and appropriated via remix.

The insider needs the outsider. By releasing (via cyberspace) individual

musical instrument tracks used in the recording of their actual performance, the

professional artist is seeking Otherness, which the outsider can fold in, thereby

translating the work across genres and therefore audiences. Remixing is not just

something DJs do, although they often do it as well. Anyone, any rock band, any

individual(s) with the right technical and musical knowledge can practice the remix;

this process of culture does not need formal pedagogy. As stated in the above, its

learning is enhanced by the “observe and mimic” route of technicality blended with

making whatever artistic choice one wishes, with audio software (Rice 2008: 49).

Remixes of rock groups have been a recent recurring meme, in that they

enable a band (dead form of popular art) to become twenty-first century sounding.

I could list dozens of contemporary rock chart toppers and most of them would have

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their remixes and cross-genre transplantation to thank. The relationships between

the collective underground and/or unknown remixers and the chart-topping pop

stars would probably see each other as the outsider, and themselves the insider.

Therefore, this binary can be seen as false. Nevertheless, collectives of relationships

in this way have helped create culture, as the Klaxxons and remixes of the Klaxxons

by Soulwax and many others, helped define the “Nu Rave” style.

Who/Where am I in relation to the field?

As I write this, I am aware of being both an outsider and an insider

simultaneously, as this binary is relative. On the whole, though, I am an outsider: I

do not produce music remixes, I only know a handful of prominent DJs and come off

more as a fanboy, at my lowest reading. To improve this status I could take various

routes: promoting, writing, producing, DJing, remixing. The remix, however, is the

ubiquitous and most poignant point of entry. The message is direct: I am producing

a synthesis with you; I am co-creating with your work. Eventually, with masterful

precision the statement can become: I can improve this sound, or seek to alter it my

way. Combining self with other, the artist/remixer produces a new fusion of

musical knowledge, and the music grows legs. An artist’s status can easily be raised

to entire new levels, for instance, if a popular and well-known musical group

remixes the work of unknown, or of another genre, and vice versa.

The Remix

Many artists welcome their work to be remixed, though not always and not

everyone. Certainly many mainstream artist’s could not and will not allow their

work to be touched in any way, and thus remixers must tread over copyright laws,

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which is a contentious point among those in this musical community. Listeners who

appreciate this type of artistic work might equivocally scoff at the notion of

“intellectual property,” much less respect it. The control over “intellectual

properties” is merely an obstruction to the layperson or outsider adding to the

discourse of certain “protected” Pop recording artists. There can be only one

Madonna, yet Madonna herself has been putting out albums that are built on

sounding like remixes because she needs the outsider for new talent, reinforcing her

updated message, and diversifying her message across different discourses of music,

which adds to her ongoing discourses about age, sexuality, gender, and status.

Recently the website Palmsout.net featured remixes of Haydn’s “Symphony in

G-Major” and the Beatles “Day in the Life” on “Remix Sunday.” The site also features

a “good old fashioned remix contest” (AC Slater 2009), whereby parts of the track

are made available by the band themselves for amateur and professional remix

purposes, as leading rock band Radiohead have done with tracks from In Rainbows.2

Similar to a hip-hop cipher, or battle between crews, the remix contest gives rise to

new talent, inspires lazybones “outsiders” to become active insiders, and raises the

dialogic roof.

Several remixes strung together to form the “extended mix” shows their

effective presence, the end product is not the remix. Once a remix is produced an

re-appropriated by a DJ who finds its appropriate “point of entry” in his extended

mix, the remixer gains ground and exposure into ongoing discourses of that music,

on the web and into the ears of his listeners. I want to point out here that remixes

2 See results of the remix winners at http://radioheadremix.com/

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are chiefly built upon the premise that the remixer is vaguely unknown and actually

benefits from this status. For example, one doesn’t hear remixes on the radio, or

hear of Britney Spears doing her own remix of a Christina Aguilara song. However,

this relationship is mutually beneficial in the world of underground artists, with the

remixes at times being as good as or better than the original.3

Creative Aspects of Remixing

The remixer makes a series of artistic choices when producing a remix. The

amount of work needed to put together the remix can be more than the effort of

creating the original. An artist who creates mash-ups (sandwiching multiple song

samples together), Girl Talk, is like a remixer on steroids. He can put as many as

twenty-one songs together in a three minute track. Lawrence Lessig (2008) asks

Girl Talk why creating remixes is “good”:

It’s good because it is, in essence, just free culture. Ideas impact data, manipulated and treated and passed along. I think it’s just great on a creative level that everyone is so involved with the music that they like. . . . You don’t have to be a traditional musician. You get a lot of raw ideas and stuff from people outside of the box who haven’t taken guitar lessons their whole life. I just think it’s great for music. (2008: 14)

And, Gillis believes, it is also great for the record industry as well: “From a

financial perspective, this is how the music industry can thrive in the future . . . this

interactivity with the albums. Treat it more like a game and less like a product.”

Stated another way, Gillis is asking the industry to take a process-oriented view of

music like the remixing community has.

3 Tiga admits on his podcast “My Name Is Tiga” that the Proxy’s remix to his 2009 track “What You Need” is almost (and may be) better than his original.

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Conclusion

The remixer experiences a blurring of boundaries between Insider/Outsider

and Self/Other, in a process that Ricouer and Rice call the hermeneutic arc. The

remixer as ethnomusicologist could gain understanding of self and Other through

participant-observation methodology, which is already inherent among economies

and communities of sharing. The remix closes the gap between insider (musician)

and outsider (creative Other). The overwhelming shift towards process-oriented

rather than object-oriented conceptions of music and “intellectual property” have

been fostered and reinforced by online communities who value the merit of

culturally building upon the past. New spaces have emerged that encourage the

non-musician to become part of the creative process of fully expanding a track’s

creative and artistic and inter-personal limits through the art form of the remix.

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Works Cited

Cooley, Timothy J, Katharine Meizel, and Nasir Syed. 2008. “Virtual Fieldwork: Three Case Studies.” In Shadows in the Field. Barz, Gregory and Timothy J. Cooley (eds). Oxford University Press: New York.

Kozinski, Judge Alex. 2009. “Remix Sunday: 135.” Palmsout Sounds. Retrieved from http://palmsout.net/2009/10/18/remix-sunday-135/

Lessig, Lawrence. 2004. Free Culture. New York: Penguin Press.—. 2008. Remix. New York: Penguin Press.

Markham, Annette N. 2005. “The Methods, politics, and ethics of representation in online ethnography.” In The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research. Denzin, Norman K. and Yvonna S. Lincoln (eds.). Sage Publications: Thousand Oaks, California.

Rice, Timothy. 2008. “Toward a mediation of field methods and field experience in ethnomusicology.” In Shadows in the Field. Barz, Gregory and Timothy J. Cooley (eds). Oxford University Press: New York.

RiP: A Remix Manifesto. 2009. Gaylor, Brett (Dir./Writer). Eye Steel Film.

Slater, A.C. 2009. “B. Rich make me dance remix winners.” Palmsout Sounds. Retrieved fromhttp://palmsout.net/2009/09/16/b-rich-make-me-dance-remix-winners/

Wiercinski, Andrzej. 2008. Hermeneutics and the Humanities: International Conference at the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Jagiellonian University, Kraków.

Wikipedia. 2009. “Prosumer.” Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosumer

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