The recently released Beatles album entitled Love has got me thinking... and blogging. Though I have yet to hear the entire album, Love is a mash-up of old Beatles songs which was created as the soundtrack for a Las Vegas stage show featuring Cirque du Soleil. The album was produced by the slicing and dicing of the Beatles catalog primarily from the years of 1963-1970 and features songs which mix elements of Penny Lane with Strawberry Fields Forever or one song that uses the guitar riff from Blackbirds as the introduction to Yesterday.

LOVE is an interesting example of the 21st century phenomenon of "mashing" because unlike most mash-ups, the record is comprised of Beatles music and Beatles music only and made with the explicit authorization of the group. But some fans are wondering if the manipulation and reconstruction of the Beatles' music is sacrilege?

I was thinking about Manovich’s discussion of remixing in “Models of Authorship in New Media,” when I remembered a really interesting example that I encountered in one of my classes last semester. DJ Spooky (aka Paul D. Miller) is a writer and DJ who recently created a project called “Rebirth of a Nation”. This piece is basically a remix of the technically brilliant yet horribly racist film “Birth of a Nation”. DJ Spooky remixes both the images and the sound, providing his own soundtrack. He says that, “By remixing the film along the lines of dj culture, I hoped to create a counter-narrative, one where the story implodes on itself, one where new stories arise out the ashes of that explosion.” To me, this approach seemed very much in line with Manovich’s view of remix. DJ Spooky aims to engage with the film in deeper, more deliberate manner than is implied by a term like “appropriation”. As Manovich says, "'remixing' is a better term because it suggests a systematic re-working of a source, the meaning which 'appropriation' does not have."

I found the Star Trek + Nine Inch Nails video clip on YouTube:

Here it is.

All I can say right now is... wow.