Music and Remediation

Remediation is an interesting concept for any person that consumes media on a regular basis.  The authors begin down an interesting road about music as they introduce the concept of hypermediacy and at one point state that music is the site where most hypermediacy is happening on a regular basis. However, the authors make no mention of remediation in music?  They do not include a chapter on this subject?  I thought that this was an interesting change of direction from the authors and I would like to spend a few minutes exploring the idea of remediation within music and music culture.

The authors focus on just a few base artists where hypermediacy is happening at an alarming rate.  However, I would like to argue that the entire discourse community of music is a large network of remediated actions.  One artist does something that is an elaboration or a continuation on a theme from a prior artist, then jazz and folk come along to work with these norms, but they are working on breaking them and remediating them to their own needs.  In recent years, since 1980, Hip Hop culture has been based on creating new ways of understanding music and ideas through repurposing other types of music.  For example, I watched a rapper named Theophilus London this last week use "Puttin' on the Ritz" to create a new song that creates similar themes just in a hip hop context.  I was surprised to see that David Byrne was one of the biggest examples the authors gave.  In the eighties he used Japanese play formats to create new and modern centerpieces of music.  However, Byrne as a focal point is not the best.  Groups like NWA and Public Enemy, and artists like Sage Francis and POS in hip hop and Fatboy Slim, Tiesto, and Burial used existing sounds to create new auditory collisions that both paid tribute to the prior works but also sent the genre in a new direction.  In an example that is closer to my music home, the first time that I heard Brand New sample gospel songs and then lace them to a song that has ties to Fugazi, Nirvana, and the Jesus Lizard it was like a light went on in my head.  Remediation can really show us ways to view the world in different and new ways, but also allow us to see the possibilities in the normal everyday things around us.

Here are some examples of my favorite musical remediations:

Broken Social Scene "Meet Me In The Basement" -

http://youtu.be/NiRjwpCrCMc

Brand New "Vices" (Video is unrelated, just listen to the song) -

http://youtu.be/UbONRHjtKb8

Fatboy Slim "Weapon of Choice" -

http://youtu.be/XQ7z57qrZU8