Daring to remix

clipped from findarticles.com In pop music the concept of remixing has risen from cottage industry to big business as quickly as the industry worked out that one hit could equal two pay-days. Pop industry now thinks in terms of a release followed by a remix, which can range from a rip-off to a genuine improvement on the original. On the whole the new production gives the piece contemporary relevance, which is to say the potential to make jazz appeal to a new, younger audience – shades of Dadaists and early surrealists trying to bring their art to the people as a part of the modernist project of social transformation. The approach is a close cousin of popular music’s response to postmodernism, DJ culture, immortalised in Grandmaster Flash’s `Wheels of Steel’, a collage of seven minutes of existing recordings. This new world has no rules.