One new composition is made from bits and pieces of many others, and the art and the message lies in their selection and the way they are reassembled

As of lately i've been really interested in the phenomina of the remix. This intigue came about from the hearing the many manifestions of Keak da sneaks "super hyphy." There is almost one remix of this landmark song on each new keak release. I began to question the intent of a remix, why make so many version of a single song? Also many remixes feature guest artists, what purpose does a guest artist serve and to a greater extent why does hip hop make use of guest artist more frequntly than any other genre of music. I linked the practice of guest artist back to hip hop cultures history in community building; fostering a cross polination of ideas between like minds. Here some of the information regarding remixing. the link provided also makes some interesting connections concerning remix culture and aesthitic.


the idea of creating musical 'remixes' appears to originate in popular music much earlier than this, in the work of Jamaican dub producers working in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Pioneering producers such as Lee Perry, King Tubby, and Scientist made an art form out of taking prerecorded rhythm tracks and rearranging them into a piece of music, a new version as they called it.

The DJ/producer/remixer-centered music culture of Jamaica was later transmitted to the United States [via the Jamaican immigrant community in New York City, from which many of the early hiphop DJs came] and to the United Kingdom as well [via the large numbers of Jamaican immigrants who began arriving from the 1950s onward]. Early hiphop DJs such as DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, and Afrika Bambaataa furthered the line of experimentation of the early dub producers, constructing live musical performances out of bits and pieces of recorded performances from the past.

This is a major conceptual leap: making music on a meta-structural level, drawing together and making sense of a much larger body of information by threading a continuous narrative through it. This is what begins to emerge very early in the hiphop tradition in works such as Grandmaster Flash's pioneering mix recording Adventures on the Wheels of Steel.

The importance of this cannot be overstated: in an era of information overload, the art of remixing and sampling as practiced by hiphop DJs and producers points to ways of working with information on higher levels of organization, pulling together the efforts of others into a multilayered multireferential whole which is much more than the sum of its parts.

One new composition is made from bits and pieces of many others, and the art and the message lies in their selection and the way they are reassembled and connected.

http://ethnomus.ucr.edu/remix_culture/remix_history.htm