| Life at The Terminal with Dave Dri |
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LIFE AT THE DESKTOP WITH DAVE DRI Remix this article and win. First prize will be a published article in Zebra Magazine, the rights for myself and other affiliated writers to utilise your work in perpetuity and a couple of emails saying how awesome you are. For a greater chance of winning, log in to the Time Off website to purchase additional words, such as “woot” and “exacerbated”. This is, of course, ridiculous, and yet exactly what remix culture has stooped to in an increasingly common scrabble for attention and money. The fact that a magazine called Remix exists at all is a strange indication of how far we have come from the Wild West beginnings of remix culture in the 1990s. Sure the stems were bounced and flipped long before that, with Sir George Martin no doubt making dope party mixes of Beatles tracks for his dinner parties, or chopping up bits of tape to make Ringo Starr say such hilarious things as “I... am... a good... drummer”. It was only in the 1990s however that the strange days dawned for the remixers. In the case of Jason Nevins’ remix of Run DMC’s ‘Its Like That’, the publisher that owned the rights to the music overlooked the band’s own liberal attitude to uncleared samples and strung Nevins out for a paltry US$5000 for a record that went on to sell five million copies worldwide. Remix is, and has been for some time, big business. More than that, the humble remix is not just an eternal contentious topic on Internet forums but the subject of documentarie, such as Rip: A Remix Manifesto, which explores Girl Talk’s infamous use of copyrighted material based on “recontextualisation”. Outside of these commercial and philosophical extremes, the process of remixing is both fun, and a means for establishing artists to make a name for themselves. A local Brisbane act did just that, launching Bitrok into global acclaim as a UK-based DJ magazine championed their cheeky vinyl run of an unauthorised Underworld remix. Underlying all of this however, is the reality that “remix” means “money”. The relative merits of independent and DIY digital labels creating a remix “competition” as a means to achieve some promotion and marketing, and for an up-and-coming producer a chance to have a release, is a topic for another time. What is disappointing is the increasing frequency of major labels and their “independent” imprints in creating prize-less or obscene remix competitions, under the premise of “helping up-and-comers”. The fact is that a remixer can simply message or email another producer or label and offer their services with a great deal of success. So where is the appeal of remix competitions that offer little in the way of an actual prize? Or having to purchase the remix parts from Beatport? Just where does “up-and-coming” translate to “exploitable”? With the Modular label’s Damn Arms remix competition offering a massive prize package for the winners, who happen to be Sunshine Coast’s own Jad Lee and Dominique Bird, the weak marketing attempts of Allido Records’ incredibly pointless Daniel Merriweather remix look only more embarrassing. If you see a competition with no actual prize, a charge for the remix parts, or a user popularity voting system to find the winner, then chances are you are witnessing a lazy label, uninspired marketing department and hungover public relations staff. And that’s “remix” in 2009. |
