Don’t just remix music. Do it when you’re not satisfied with what others have done.
Today’s guest blogger is named Gustav Almestad, who is 29 years with a masters in Library and
Information Science. A feminist rapper that goes under JLA and compulsive blogger,
most active on Twitter, his own Nerd's Life Deluxe and the sex blog Pillow Talk.
Quite often you’re not completely satisfied. You hear a song with a spectacularly nice intro and then comes someone singing some crappy melody, a boring verse rhythm, or maybe a really bad text. You read a book that had a really good idea but the language was too weird or boring, the end was too predictable, or maybe the language was good but its message was bonkers.
A remix can mean slightly different things in different contexts, but it originated in the music world first. Mixing, changing the structure of a song or sound mix. In hip-hop it tends to be the same rap but with new music, or perhaps an extra verse from a guest rapper. In club music it tends to be a song from a different context, bangin' for the dance floor, or perhaps even more bangin' if it was already bangin’ to start with. Maybe you’ve made an album and ask a couple of foxes to do something new and fat with a song you have written, so you can get a B-side.
But you can remix everything. You can get into the programming and remix Linux to your own version. Remix is a hacker culture, remixing and participation is Web 2.0 and all that nonsense. You can be the editor of what you consume and just take out anything that does not fit and do it better. Or why not just battle it out with the source itself? I have an example of my own. No, I have two.
Just over two years ago, a book by Pär Ström said that feminism was the oppression of men and that women have snuck into power all over the place. I didn’t agree. I could have disagreed in different ways - by writing something about it in his blog, debate it on DN debate or clench my fists in my pockets - but I wanted to battle. So I got the book as a PDF-file and scribbled down everything that had to object to. Over, under and around the entire original text. It was a lot. And now it’s out, a punkish mixtape fresh new edition of the book. Grovt Initiativ RMX.
Last fall, a new album by Navid Modiri & Gudarna came out. I was asked to do something with one of the songs, so I took the best one of course and made something completely different with it. Better, one might think, but in this case it suffices to say that we made it into something else for someone else. Namely for the clubs. Grovt Initiativ RMX.
From the world of film, we of course also have the example of Be Kind Rewind, even if they mostly made remakes of entire films there. A remix normally contains traces of the original content. I was of course not completely satisfied with that movie anyway, so it's better to remix that too. Get to work.
Required time:
1 day or less.
Cons:
There’s the issue of rights. You rarely have the copyright to the original recordings or text of someone else. It’s possible to weasel your way out of it, but the safest thing to do is to ask nicely or to have been asked from the beginning.
Pros:
The idea comes to you free by the feeling of discontent, and you make everything exactly the way you want it. Isn’t that what you want?
