[via MediaTheoryJournal.org]

Below is a video review of Margie Borschke’s book, This Is Not A Remix, I recently produced for the open access journal, Media Theory. Thanks to editors Janneke Adema and Simon Dawes for the opportunity!

This is Not a Remix: Piracy, Authenticity and Popular Music by Margie Borschke

Reviewed by Owen Gallagher

Publisher’s website: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/this-is-not-a-remix-9781501318948/

This is Not a Remix is a densely-packed academic monograph based on Margie Borschke’s research into the changing meaning of remix in the context of music culture.[1] Borschke offers perspectives on questions regarding the nature of remix and the role of copies in how we understand media. I read This is Not a Remix twice for this review, first as an ebook on an iPad, swiping right to reveal more of Borschke’s thesis, and then as a paperback—an altogether more tactile experience, due to the smell of fresh ink on paper, the physical act of turning the pages and the eye-catching cover. The content of both versions was exactly the same, yet the experience of reading each book was fundamentally different. Following Borschke’s argument, each is a copy but also a different instance of the source material. In this case, the form of the content is also different, even though the arrangement of words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters is precisely the same.

In the opening chapter of the book, Borschke outlines her vision for media studies and asks ‘why copies, why remix, why vinyl, and why redistribution now?’ She offers a critical approach, which focuses on the analysis of different forms in each of the subsequent chapters (remixes, disco edits, mp3 blogs, anthologies). Borschke’s study operates on several levels—material, formal, rhetorical, historical—with a central focus on the transition from analog to digital music formats, particularly the recent resurgence in popularity of analog vinyl, despite the availability of faster, cheaper and more effective digital delivery systems. One of Borschke’s key observations here is that the term “remix” has been appropriated, transformed and expanded to refer to all contemporary digital practices of copying and recombination.

The book begins by outlining a brief history of the copy, revealing the romantic tendencies of analog pasts and how they persist in 21^st century network cultures, leading to a critical comparative reading of contemporary media forms and how they are used. A  comparison is drawn between the historical use of remix with its current rhetorical use as a metaphor for digital culture, and how this leads to potential problems in understanding what remix really means.  In chapter 4, Borschke provides an in-depth case study on the analog disco edit, comparing its history with the current unauthorized circulation of digital and vinyl edits, and considers what these two practices can reveal about the materiality of media. She argues that analog representation seems to afford users qualities of personification that digital representation does not, and the persistence of vinyl in a networked culture may be seen as a digital tactic of rhetorical resistance against the corporate music industry.

Borschke’s study, perhaps to its detriment, focuses solely on music—mp3s, vinyl records, CDs, tapes and DJ culture. Drilling down a little, the analysis of musical artifacts leads to more pertinent questions, including “is remix an apt metaphor for digital culture?” In asking this question, Borschke makes the perceptive observation that the term “remix” has dramatically expanded in scope in recent years. Remix now refers to many media production practices, in numerous different forms, such as remix videos, photoshopped images, text cut-ups—the fundamental process of recombining samples into a new composition is the common factor that ties these practices together.  While I agree with Borschke that using the term “remix” to refer to the entirety of digital culture is counter-productive, resulting in the dilution of its meaning, the real danger is in expanding the reach of the term to include the simple copying of non-sampled content. Borschke’s argument suggests that the term “remix” should be confined to its origins in 20^th century music culture, however this would be too restrictive as remix has now evolved beyond music culture to include many other media forms such as video, games and animation. The ideal may lie somewhere in between these two extremes.

Central to all of this is the question of copyright and though Borschke states that she does not wish to focus on copyright in relation to music, it is discussed at regular junctures throughout the book. This is not a problem in itself, as the copyright debates are still regarded as the highest stakes issues in relation to remix; however, Borschke tends to downplay this association, perhaps because copyright is an over-discussed issue in the existing literature. This is Not a Remix remixes many ideas published by other authors; for example, in chapters 2 and 3 Borschke uses Google Ngrams to trace the development of the term “remix” over time, and analyzes the work of Rosalind Krauss and Sherrie Levine in relation to copies, as does Eduardo Navas in his 2012 book Remix Theory.[2] David Gunkel’s Of Remixology focuses on the concept of the copy over the remix, and introduces very similar ideas to those presented by Borschke in relation to Deleuze’s theory of repetition and Baudrillard’s  simulacra, as well as Plato’s theory of universals.[3] These overlaps may be considered a case of “multiple discovery,” whereby findings and insights are uncovered independently more-or-less simultaneously by multiple researchers in different parts of the world.[4] I can personally attest to this, as my own book on remix shares one of Borshke’s insights regarding the over-expansion and dilution of the term “remix” and I was not aware of her unpublished work, nor she of mine when we were both developing similar ideas on this a number of years ago.

The emphasis on mp3 blogs and disco edits in chapters 4 and 5 shifts the focus of the book towards a historical analysis, rather than a contemporary study, apart from a brief addendum in Chapter 6 discussing streaming music services (such as Spotify and Apple Music). Just as Borschke describes how countless mp3s, playlists and online music collections were lost when Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload servers were raided in 2012, streaming services—legal or otherwise—are susceptible to being shut down for economic or political reasons. Perhaps mp3s will go the way of the vinyl record and come back into fashion someday—having a copy of one’s entire music collection safely stored on a hard drive offers a certain security and peace of mind which streaming services simply may not be able to provide.

Margie Borschke’s This is Not a Remix offers interesting in-depth studies into DJ culture, mp3 blogs and the history of vinyl, and despite its obvious audio-centrism, provides useful insights into the nature of the copy in relation to remix. It is a fascinating read that provides much food for thought, and notwithstanding the criticisms outlined here, This is Not a Remix is a valuable addition to the growing remix canon.

References 

Alloco, Kevin (2018) Videocracy: How YouTube is Changing the World, USA: Bloomsbury.

Ferguson, Kirby (2011) Everything is a Remix, USA: Vimeo [https://vimeo.com/25380454].

Gallagher, Owen (2018) Reclaiming Critical Remix Video: The Role of Sampling in Transformative Works, New York: Routledge.

Gunkel, David (2016) Of Remixology: Ethics and Aesthetics After Remix, USA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Harrison, Nate (2015) “Reflections on the Amen Break: A Continued History, an Unsettled Ethics” in The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies (eds. Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher and xtine burrough), New York: Routledge.

Jenkins, Henry (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, USA: NYU Press.

Lessig, Lawrence (2005) Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, USA: Penguin.

Navas, Eduardo (2012) Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling, New York: Springer-Wien.

Sinnreich, Aram (2010) Mashed Up: Music, Technology and the Rise of Configurable Culture, USA: University of Massachusetts Press.

Notes

[1] Borschke is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Journalism studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. I have personally worked with her in the past in relation to remix, as she contributed a chapter based on the ideas in her PhD dissertation (originally published in 2012) entitled “The Extended Remix: Rhetoric and History” to The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies (2015).

[2] Borschke does not cite Navas’s book Remix Theory (2012) at all in her book, although she does reference the 2009 PhD dissertation on which Navas’s book is based in the bibliography.

[3] David Gunkel’s 2016 book Of Remixology is neither mentioned nor cited in Borschke’s book. A number of these overlaps and omissions were pointed out to me by Eduardo Navas during a number of email exchanges.

[4] This idea of “multiple discovery” is discussed in part 3 of Kirby Ferguson’s Everything is a Remix (2011).

Owen Gallagher was born and educated in Dublin, Ireland and moved to the Middle East in 2011. He is the author of Reclaiming Critical Remix Video: The Role of Sampling in Transformative Works (Routledge, 2018), co-editor of Keywords in Remix Studies (Routledge, 2018) and The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies (Routledge, 2015). Owen received his Ph.D. in Visual Culture from the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), Dublin and is a lecturer of Web Media (filmmaking, animation and game design) at Bahrain Polytechnic. He is the founder of Total Recut and maintains a number of remix-related websites, including criticalremix.com, remixstudies.com and reclaimingremix.com.