Race, Gender and Censorship in Digital Remix Culture A
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NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY Illegitimate Media: Race, Gender and Censorship in Digital Remix Culture A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS for the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Field of Comparative Literary Studies By Abigail T. Derecho EVANSTON, ILLINOIS June 2008 2 ABSTRACT Illegitimate Media: Race, Gender and Censorship in Digital Remix Culture Abigail T. Derecho In 2008, the term “remix culture” is widely understood to refer to mash-up videos and movie parodies, distributed on websites such as YouTube and authored primarily by white male teenagers. This dissertation argues that digital remix was invented primarily by African American men, who, in the mid-1980s, began using digital samplers to cobble together pieces (or “samples”) of existing recordings to form new sonic compositions, and by white American women, who, in the early 1990s, formed online communities on Usenet groups to share fan fiction (fanfic) – stories based on their favorite characters from television and film texts. In other words, digital remix culture was pioneered largely by communities that had long been (and continue to be) marginalized by mainstream mass media industries. Both digital sampling and online fan fiction were censored soon after they appeared. In the case of sampling, censorship was imposed from forces outside the music industry, by a New York District Court, which ruled in 1991 (five years after digital sampling began) that all unlicensed sampling was equivalent to theft. In the case of fan fiction, censorship was imposed from within fanfic communities, as peers’ negative reactions to explicitly sexual content caused writers to cease posting such content. I argue that the constraints and limits imposed on early digital remix production, from without and within, were the direct result of the Culture Wars that raged in the U.S. during the eighties and nineties. The Culture Wars consisted of numerous 3 battles regarding representations of race, gender, class, and sex. Although sampling and fan fiction did not loom large in the public’s consciousness during these years of heated debate, both forms of remix were closely associated with social groups and cultural forms – inner-city black youth culture, rap music, and pornography – that came under attack in this period. The censorship to which early digital remix was subjected was a mere by-product of larger conflicts in American society, but the ramifications of these early restrictions, including the status of remix production as, for the most part, illegal, artistically illegitimate, and incapable of yielding financial benefit for its makers, persist today. 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Special thanks to my dissertation committee members, Prof. Samuel Weber, Prof. Lynn Spigel, and Prof. Alex Weheliye, as well as to all of my other academic advisors at Northwestern University, including Prof. Roger Boye, Prof. Dorothy Wang, Prof. Scott Durham, and Prof. Jeffrey Sconce. Many thanks also to the Paris Critical Theory Program, administered by Prof. Margaret Sinclair and Prof. Weber; my participation in the program, in the academic year 2006- 07, enabled me to make a good deal of progress toward completing this work. I will forever owe my Northwestern undergraduate students, and my fellow graduate students, a great debt for making my progress towards the Ph.D. so rewarding, exciting, and enjoyable: Steve Persch, Ian Bennett, and Annica Schjott deserve special mention (this project may never have been finished if not for Annica). A very special shout-out goes to the Communications Residential College. I would also like to thank both the Derecho and Kosnik families for their unflagging support. Finally, this dissertation is dedicated to the memory of Xavier Perrot, who will always serve as one of my greatest role models and inspirations; and to Benjamin Kosnik, the most important person in my life. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Identifying Remix, Investigating Censorship ............................. 6 CHAPTER 2 Common Sense vs. Common Sound: How the Culture Wars Killed Digital Sampling .............................................. 32 CHAPTER 3 Sampling, Cyborg Children, and the Race for the Future ............................. 89 CHAPTER 4 Dam(n) the Flood of Female Fantasies: Restrictions on Women’s Online Pornographic Fan Fiction ......................... 140 CHAPTER 5 Audacious Incursions vs. “Safe Space” Retreats: How Internet Fan Fiction Communities Invented a New Model for Media without Making a Dime ...................................................................................... 175 CHATPER 6 Conclusion: License to Remix............................................................................. 225 BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................................. 237 6 CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Identifying Remix, Investigating Censorship THE AGE OF REMIX Remix culture’s practitioners make extended dance mixes of popular songs, “sample” (that is, extract fragments from) songs and incorporate the sampled excerpts into new songs, and produce cover versions of songs; they create fan productions, such as re-cut trailers, re- enactments, fan fiction, fan art, fan films, fan vids, game mods, and machinima, which are all expansions or alternative versions of mass media texts; they make mash-ups of songs, music videos, films, television shows, and video games; they disseminate their creations in person (trading mixtapes or CDs or flash drives) or through the postal service (mailing out fanzines or edit tapes) or via digital networks (posting on, or uploading to, or streaming through, Web message boards like Yahoo!Groups and communities like LiveJournal and blogs and individually-owned-and-operated sites and clearinghouse sites like YouTube). A producer of remix culture is anyone who transforms a cultural object and then makes that transformation public. A consumer of remix culture is anyone who listens to, watches, reads, or plays these transformed media texts. Producers and consumers of remix now number in the millions. The popularity of remix culture, its penetration of everyday life in the U.S. and around the world, is so extensive today that several cultural critics and theorists call remix the defining cultural practice of the present historical moment. In recent years, the phrase “The Age of Remix” – the common context being, “We live in the Age of Remix” – has echoed across a wide span of media outlets. Here are some excerpts, in chronological order, from essays that have 7 crowned remix with the title of early twenty-first-century zeitgeist: From Pete Rojas, Salon.com, August 1, 2002: “Pop culture in general seems more and more remixed – samples and references are permeating more and more of mainstream music, film, and television, and remix culture appears to resonate strongly with consumers. We’re at the point where it almost seems unnatural not to quote, reference, or sample the world around us....To the teens...recombination – whether legal or not – doesn’t feel wrong in the slightest. The difference now is that they have the tools to sample, reference, and remix, allowing them to finally ‘talk back’ to pop culture in the way that seems most appropriate for them....In a world of constantly recycled sounds and images, bootleg culture is no aberration – it’s part of the natural evolution of all things digital.”1 From Bernard Schütze, HorizonZero, April/May 2003, in the “remix: generate/regenerate” issue: “[W]e are clearly living in a remix culture: a culture that is constantly renewing, manipulating, and modifying already mediated and mixed cultural material....[There were] many forerunners of remix culture....The fundamental difference between these previous forms and the remix is that the latter does more than gather, juxtapose, or rearrange preexisting materials: It actively transforms and reworks these elements in a way – and to an extent – that was not possible before. This is largely due to the creative harnessing of electronic and digital technologies, as well as to the cultural climate of an ailing postmodernity.”2 From the Introduction to the “Remix Planet” issue of WIRED magazine, July 2005: “Have you noticed? Everywhere you look, pop culture has been digitized, resequenced, and 1 Pete Rojas, “Bootleg culture,” Salon, 1 August 2002, http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2002/08/01/bootlegs/index.html (accessed 29 November 2007). 2 Bernard Schütze, “Samples from the Heap: Notes on Recycling the Detritus of a Remixed Culture,” HorizonZero 8 (May 2003), http://www.horizonzero.ca/textsite/remix.php?tlang=0&is=8&file=5 (accessed 29 November 2007). 8 reassembled. Remixed. It started in music with hip hop samples and extended dance versions. It moved to movies, with director’s cuts and Tarantino-style swipes from other films. Now it’s spread to TV, games, music videos – even cars and fashion. From Kill Bill to Gorillaz, from custom Nikes to Pimp My Ride, this is the age of remix.”3 From Jon Pareles, New York Times, May 27, 2007: “[This is] the age of the sample, the remix and countless YouTube parodies.”4 From Lev Manovich, “What Comes after Remix,” Winter 2007: “It is a truism today that we live in a ‘remix culture.’ Today, many cultural and lifestyle arenas – music, fashion, design, art, web applications, user created media, food – are governed by remixes, fusions, collages, or mash-ups....If I had any doubts that we are living not simply in Remix Culture but in a Remix Era,