Re-appropriation

Burns writes in From Memes to Mashups: Creating Content from Content that ‘music mashup artists re-appropriate music to resist the dominant music industry’(77).  This understanding of the mashup as an act of defiance presupposes a capitalistic understanding of culture against which re-appropriation takes place.  The word “re-appropriation” suggests that cultural capital, an example of which is the music “legitimately” produced by music corporations as in Burns’ example, is not truly controlled by its originator.

In all forms of artistic re-approriation,  pre-existing material can be used again for the appropriator’s own purposes to make new meaning, just as in Hebidge’s punk analogy safety pins are taken out of their intended use and re-appropriated for use as a counter-cultural statement (77).

Safety Pin Punk Hero

Re-appropriation as an act of democratization of culture is demonstrated in another of Burns’ examples, that of Trent Reznor of the band Nine Inch Nails who ‘broke from his label Universal Music Group to host his own site where fans could remix copywrighted material’ as a way of expanding the ‘artist fan-relationship’ (83).  As a consequence of this action, consumption of music and of the artists themselves was liberated from the corporate control of Universal Music Group which would previously have capitalized on its ownership of rights to the music in question.  Reznor’s site allowed for a model of consumption which was not really consuming at all, as rather than maintaining intellectual property as something which could only be used once it gave users the power to re-use existing material in order to create their own.

Burns, Kelli S. “From Memes to Mashups: Creating Content from Content,” Celeb 2.0: How Social Media Foster Our Fascination with Popular Culture, p. 75-87