There’s an interview on the Creative Commons blog with Disquiet Junto instigator and Aphex Twin historian Marc Weidenbaum. It’s full of his usual keen insight.
Here are some key quotes.
Something important for me happened in 2006. I’d been running my Disquiet.com website for a decade at that point. And that year, Brian Eno and David Byrne were celebrating the 25th anniversary of their album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, one of my favorite records, and they did a very simple thing that was informed by Creative Commons. They posted online the stems, the core constituent parts, of two songs off this record, and they said to the world: you can remix these, for free.
And at the time, I was not unfamiliar with this concept, but I was relatively unfamiliar with the idea of someone that prominent doing this so comfortably. I was a very big fan of remixes. Remixes form a huge part of the way that I understand music. I remember when I was attending college, in the mid-1980s, buying an extended version of a song that I liked, by an Australian band called INXS, and I remember being astonished by how listening to the remix could kind of make you completely rethink the way that you relate to the original, and that moment was really important, realizing that altering something does not detract from the original, but can enrich your understanding of it. Part of the reason that particular remix registered with me was because it sounded the way the music sounded in my memory — the parts I liked, the parts my memory would often play on repeat when I wasn’t actually listening to the original version of the song.
This is quite a remarkable insight: remixers focus attention on the hottest parts of the song, making the internal experience of remembering the song into an external listening experience for other people. Recursive! Sometimes I think remixers are telling more musical truth than anyone else out there. I suspect Marc would agree.
I should mention that the Creative Commons was a significant influence on my Selected Ambient Works Volume II book. Much of the book is concerned with what I term the album’s “cultural afterlife”: that which happened to the music after it was released. I explore how the album’s tracks, which are all but one lacking titles, were given names by listeners. I interview a composer who transcribed the tracks for traditional chamber music ensemble, and two directors who used the music in their films, and a choreographer and sound designer from two different contemporary dance ensembles who used the music in performances. I talk about unofficial, unlicensed remixes, as well as official, sanctioned licensing of the music. My sense that our understanding of the album has been informed by these subsequent uses takes a cue from the old Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt koan from their Oblique Strategies set: Repetition is a form of change. The music itself hasn’t changed in 20 years, but its repeated use and reuse has changed our understanding of the music.
Repetition is a form of change. Repetition is a form of change. Repetition is a form of change. Repetition is a form of change.
One specific experience comes to mind: I took a two-week trip by myself to Scotland when I was in my mid-20s, and I was amazed by the “Right of Way” laws in the United Kingdom that permit free travel on certain routes between public places, even when those routes involve passage through an area of private property. This was completely mind-blowing to me at the time, since I came from the United States where “private property” is synonymous with “restricted” and “off limits” and often involves someone who’s more likely to shoot than to call a lawyer.
When I was in Scotland I walked along these Right of Ways, completely fascinated by the opportunity, the concept, and the experience. And there is a connection between this idea, and these memories, and what I’ve done since that point in my life. There’s something in that walking through the shared geography of Scotland that relates to how I think about culture. In the early 1990s, my head was deep in what some people tried to call “avant-pop,” especially writers like Jonathan Lethem and David Shields, who were doing inquisitive meta-works that involved pre-existing texts and drew from influences in an acquisitive manner, and to me this relates to the idea of property being left open for creative use. It’s like a creative stroll.
I admire those same Lethem and Shields texts, not because they’re a radically new form of creativity, but because their method of creative appropriation is the only artistic method that there is. Lethem and Shields are just unusual for drawing more attention to their sources. One day, these two will represent the baseline consensus for how art operates, and the radical position will be the outrageous notion that ideas pop into being in the heads of lone geniuses ex nihilo.
[W]hen I talk about Creative Commons licenses, I’m essentially always thinking of it in terms of a particular license, which is the one that gives the ability to remix, the one that allows for “derivative” works. And I’m troubled by the fact that a lot of Creative Commons use does not actually employ that. For example, I’ve written a lot about the netlabel community. There are about 600 netlabels at this point that actively release music by musicians with the permission for that music to be downloadable for free. And that’s an incredible world of music. But an oddly small percentage of those netlabels employs the license that allows for creative reuse, which I find disappointing. So I’m always pushing for people to think beyond the non-commercial download, and to think about the creative re-use. I’m also wrestling with the word “derivative.” It seems to have a negative cast to it. There may be a better word, a word that makes the benefits more self-evident.
There is no worthwhile work of art that isn’t derivative. Bad art is insufficiently derivative of too few different sources. If we want a less pejorative term, let’s look to the language of heredity and ancestry, mutation and selection and evolution. Novelty in art (and all other forms of intellectual endeavor) comes from the hybridization of existing ideas. Ideas don’t get magically created from nothing any more than organisms do. Preach on, Marc.