This post was submitted by Jack

I keep threatening to write about Remix Geekery here, but I’ve been putting it off because it feels like such a big job.  The topic is really too important to me to half-ass it and it’s really quite expansive for these short, discreet columns I write for TNG.  Last week, though, I journeyed solo to Belize and Guatemala for a short vacation and the thing about traveling alone is that even after filling up my days with activities, I’m always left with long hours in the evening to do things I always plan to do but get superseded at home by friends, the internet, etc.  This usually means reading long, boring but ultimately rewarding books, but this time I decided to also undertake a small auto-biographical project of trying to surface the earliest memories I have of my exposure to Remix Culture.  I dug up less than I might’ve expected, but there are some gems, and as I start to think more systematically about how I’m going to approach  the Remix as the probable topic for my Master’s Thesis next year, I think it’s probably important work to lay out my own relationship to the topic.  Plus hopefully someone else out there will find this interesting.

I think the first time I ever heard a remix of a pop song – at least one that I was aware of as such – was when I was very young, had to be around eleven.  My parents had gone out for the late afternoon and evening.  I don’t know where my sisters were.  I remember that for about the past year I had been slowly watching the original Star Wars trilogy, which was also a major moment in my geekish development.  That afternoon there was a marathon on television so I rewatched the first two and then saw Return of the Jedi for the first time.  The catharsis I experienced watching the triumph of the finale scene was extended and amplified when I then went into the kitchen and turned on the radio to underscore my chore for the night – unloading the dishwasher.  What I heard as I started putting away the dishes startled me.  It sounded like The Backstreet Boys’ “Quit Playing Games With My Heart,” but it also sounded different.  The tempo was faster, the bass was more powerful, there were extra instruments (or at least noises), and the track seamlessly transitioned into and crossfaded with others.  I vaguely remember that the set included Jennifer Lopez’s “Waiting For Tonight,” but that’s the only other song that comes to mind.  From then on, though, I know that I would always try to tune in on Saturday nights to what is now called Open House Party, a nationally syndicated radio program with some songs airing remixed and some in their original forms.  I loved the remixes instantly, a taste that would go on to represent much of my aesthetic life.  As I learned more and got deeper and deeper into it, I fixated on the idea that a song and eventually moving-image media as well could be manipulated to say something or communicate a set of emotions different from what was originally intended.  Thinking about it now, this probably fits into my general (and fairly odd I think) taste for things that take the same base but express themselves in different styles or different colors.  I’ve long thought that may also be the reason I love collecting Fanta bottles from all over the world.

When my family finally got a computer and internet connection that could handle it, I immediately started downloading and hoarding different versions of my favorite songs.  I remember when I graduated from 8^th grade, I made my family listen to five different remixes of Ace of Base’s Europe-only hit, “Hallo Hallo,” in the car on the way to the ceremony.  My mom hated the repetition but grinned and bore it on my day, later commenting that she must be doing something right when I was honored with the “Ace of Base/Survivor Bad Taste in Popular Culture Award” for my class.  I felt deeply honored by the sarcastic title.  My tastes had certainly landed at the margins of my peers, but that sort of worked for me.  I knew what I liked.

I have a harder time placing when I first became aware of audio-visual remixes.  In my early years on the internet I know I became aware of AMVs and vids and eventually Mad movies, circulated mostly through peer2peer protocols.  I also saw them and heard from the creators at conventions my dad would take me to especially Anime Weekend Atlanta, but I really didn’t open up to the way these were linked to my music tastes or the parallel interpretive and critical power of the form quite so quickly.

All of this and particularly my middle school graduation day now seem prescient in so many ways not the least of which being that I now spend a great deal of time studying niche cultural production that is labeled by many to be in bad taste.

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