Abstract
This article employs Stuart Hall’s concept of ‘articulation’ to show how, in the mid-2000s, a loose coalition of tech activists and commentators worked to position mashup music as ‘the sound of the Internet’. Key aesthetic characteristics of mashups were utilized to present Web 2.0 as a specific kind of democratic, participatory media environment – one that had the power to dethrone old social institutions, and to render various kinds of borders and boundaries redundant. This short-lived articulation between mashup and the Internet has had significant benefits for contemporary platforms that have made their fortune on user participation; it has been less beneficial for the longevity of mashup as a genre. Thus, this article inverts the standard presentation of mashup music and network technologies. Generally presented as a musical culture that needed the Internet, mashup can be more fruitfully understood as a music culture that the Internet needed. This reformulation provides cause to question our contemporary relationship to ‘digital optimism’ more generally.
Highlights
This article employs Stuart Hall’s concept of ‘articulation’ to show how, in the mid-2000s, a loose coalition of tech activists and commentators worked to position mashup music as ‘the sound of the Internet’
While the strength and shape of this optimism has varied across the decades (Streeter, 2011), it found an especially intoxicating formulation in ‘Web 2.0’, which focussed on the imminent mainstreaming, and the full beneficial realization, of the Internet’s circulatory capacities
Mashup music is a musical form in which a new recording is made by combining samples of existing, usually well-known popular music recordings, most frequently by layering the vocal tracks from one recording ‘above’ the instrumental tracks of another
Summary
This article employs Stuart Hall’s concept of ‘articulation’ to show how, in the mid-2000s, a loose coalition of tech activists and commentators worked to position mashup music as ‘the sound of the Internet’. Keywords Articulation, cultural texts, democratization, digital optimism, Internet history, mashup, music sampling, remix, Web 2.0
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More From: Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
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