Remixing with an Electric Carver

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Music is a stake in games of power

It’s reasonable to say that the strongest undertaking in the pop music ambience is not the music; or at least not music alone, but a lifestyle. Apart from differentiations between genres –R&B, pop rock, boys’ band, girls’ band, and so on – pop music lifestyle is characterised by a sort of limitlessness; there are no apparent restraints for what a pop star can do. Clearly, pop lifestyle is a strategic idealisation; it is an industry in itself, familiar to us as the pop music industry.
However, it’s not so easy to define what exactly does the pop music industry produce. I am tempted to make use of a somewhat fashionable idea and say that it produces subjectivity. Surely enough, the pop music industry manipulates and promotes forms of subjectivity. It inserts hermetic notions of personal fulfilment (happiness, success, etc) into the pop music ambience, and makes them seem material (buyable) through the manipulation of signs and codes. But the pop music industry does not “create” subjectivity; it works towards the shaping of an entire ambience. It wants to become the listeners’ music, pod, sofa, lounge, snack and everything else around them. On a double move, the value of pop music becomes inhabited by and overflows the subject.
This technocratic update – from reproducing molds to shaping an ambience – allows the pop music industry to sidestep the dichotomies of use-value and exchange-value and try to capture and control the circulation of pop music regardless of form. The mold becomes obsolete.
What we see in this development is the industrialisation of desire; a specifically machined desire where the pop star is a complex assemblage representing the goal and absolute fulfilment of desire.
Pop stars are invested with more than human powers, hence the impossibility to establish a humanly relation with a pop star, and the anxiety to get close to one. As the name says, pop stars are essentially defined by popularity, which requires its own intricate apparatus for sustainability: success depending on popularity, popularity depending on visibility, and so on. But what matters most for our purposes is the operationality of pop chart hits in this cycle.
It’s not by accident that artists like V/VM “butchered their way through pop chart hits” in the late 1990’s and 00’s (the emphasys is single-handed to V/VM because it exerted a huge influence on my experience with and understanding of music at the time. V/VM was more important than other artists for me because it formalized the 'butchering' of music, giving body to a radical music label out of that attitude of defiance).
Pop charts are the official instrument for simultaneous measure and production of success of any given pop star. Coupled with the media system publicising it, the pop charts are a master signifier in the pop music ambience. The pop charts are one of the most significant tools of the music industry to turn pop music into a monologue.
By way of (re)ordering pop music and pop stars through its own value-adding system (beyond exchange and use), the pop music industry highly bureaucratises and corrupts the network connecting music to listeners.
In “exposing” the system of control of the music industry (through pop stars, lifestyle and the hits system), it’s important to realise that crisis are not contingent occurrences in the music ambience. “Accidents” can be invented by the pop music industry in order to renovate and perpetuate its control. But other types of accidents can be created in order to disrupt that control – scratch, glitch, noise, distortion, and so on.

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In the late 1990’s, P2P was fast becoming a popular tool for sharing music. It marked by far the most significant change in the way people consumed, and probably produced music at that time. The broad adoption of mp3 files as a standard music format for music sharing transformed the perception of quality of music reproduction, and consequently, the idea of fidelity and source. P2P was largely understood to be a direct threat to (if not the end of) the music industry, and issues of copyright infringement were dominating discussions in music.
P2P directly influenced at least two major breakthroughs in digital music production. First, it enabled instant accessibility to raw material for free - digital files ready to be processed through whatever software. And second, it created a sense of disposability of music, a sort of devaluation of the object turned file (a license to be reckless with music). P2P enabled a new conceptual framework for music distribution, consumption and production: online sharing. 
Before P2P, the exchange of music online was limited to a two-way connection, inevitably under a contractual agreement between server (music source) and client (listener) that maintained the general control of music distribution online. In a P2P network, the client-server relationship is substituted by a decentralised network of multiple peers, where every peer (every person) connected in the network functions both as client and server.
This marked an incredibly radical change, since the very infrastructure of a P2P network is composed of the different computers (and other hardware) of each person in the network. Resources such as bandwidth and storage space no longer depended on server’s capacities or type of contract, but on the actual number of people and the capacity of their computers to benefit the entire network.
Probably the most important implication of this decentralization of sources, and the fast propagation of a digital culture of sharing, is that control over distribution of digitalise-able material became extremely difficult. An enormous quantity of stuff could be made instantly available worldwide without having to pass through a central entity (i.e. the server of a particular company) with the authority and technological means to regulate traffic.
Peer to Peer completely bypassed the music industry and affected its centralising power at its core: “where do we locate the creation of money in [pop] music?” I say it is in the social interaction (virtual or otherwise) people have with and through pop music. From the industry’s point of view, P2P undermined the visibility over large areas (whole networks), precisely used for social interaction through pop music (their pop music).
In 2004, “it [was] estimated that as much as 70% of the network traffic in the Internet [could] be attributed to the exchange of files, in particular music files (more than one billion downloads of music files can be listed each week).” This gives us an idea of how fast music sharing spread over the period its initial five years.
But to describe P2P development in a sort of techno-cultural manifesto way is to circumvent the actual effect it had on people’s motivations for butchering pop music.
P2P was seen as a potential catastrophe for the pop music industry; it is as if P2P had popped open the sewers of the pop music ambience, and the music industry was trying to clean up the mess. One of the most symbolic examples is the legal case A&M Records versus Napster (2001).
Launched in September 1999, Napster (not the new sponsored napster) was probably the first P2P network to specialise in music sharing, and the first to become massively popular. Napster was probably the only P2P network at the time to take into account that not every potential music sharer would be knowledgeable of the intricacies of P2P networking. And so it provided users with a sensible interface, a decent search engine, and a face (a cat-like alien with green eyes and headphones). 
All this user-friendliness depended on Napster’s decision to have a centralised directory, which made the connection between sender (who initiates a search for a file), and responder or receiver (who answers the search query and provides the file) a lot easier. Ironically, the technological infrastructure that had made Napster so great (hybrid P2P and centralised server), was also what inevitably linked Napster with the copy-right infringements of its end users.
In 2001, A&M Records versus Napster set the precedent as the first legal case involving P2P networking with piracy. The court found Napster “contributorily liable” because it “knowingly encouraged and assisted the infringement of plaintiffs’ copyrights”; and “vicariously liable” because it “had the right and ability to supervise the infringing activity [and it didn’t].”
P2P battles for the rights of intellectual property in court and in public opinion not only bureaucratised even further the pop music ambience, but generalised the concept of criminality to every P2P music sharer, and introduced a kind of moral principles: music fans were reminded to be respectful towards the work of artists (mainly pop stars) who, after all, were the most affected by piracy.
Uncontrolled, descentralised music sharing (and the consequent everywhereness of music piracy), disregard for quality and fidelity in compressed music (mp3 files), and the hypocritical discourse of the pop music industry formed the ideal ambience for butchering pop.

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Speed is crucial for pushing the limits of pop lifestyle (to its limitlessness). For the music industry, it is crucial to be the speed-setter in the pop music ambience; hence the crisis provoked by P2P as it undermined the speed limit system of controlled distribution, and deregulated the timing of the music industry. For instance, full-length albums were made available for free even before official launch. And speed is crucial for butchering. The butchering of pop hits consists precisely in processing the songs through filters of time and memory, adding effects on top.  And quite often, making pop louder, harder and faster (and a lot funnier!).
International hits aim to create a kind of collective memory, a common ground for global values, regardless of socio-political-economical context. It is precisely that standardisation of feeling that is attacked by many producers of butchered pop. V/VM transforms English pub hits into deformed caricatures of Englishness. Meine Catadrufe pathetically sings along traditional Brazilian carnival songs. Rank Sinatra makes Sinatra scream for the bored. Kid 606 makes US Hip Hop digital and nerdy. Kevin Blechdom exhausts the clichéd romance out of love songs. The list pseudonyms, screen names and transliteration of names is vast and ongoing (although I never heard its music, my favourite of all times is ohboygeorgemichaeljacksonpollock). I should also mention my friend Uessels, with whom I butchered many songs.  
The butchering, hacking, collapsing, ruining, mashing of pop hits rely on the listeners’ memory precisely to frustrate expectations. A butchered pop will never sound like “we remember it”. Hence, the feelings associated with that particular song are also manipulated. The beat is slowed down or sped up; and sometimes is simultaneously slower and faster than the original version. It’s often played faster but time is stretched over time (time stretch effect), further confusing notions of rhythm, movement, and duration.
Butchering makes use of technical error and malfunction (glitch), assimilates audio piracy as a compositional prerogative (plunderphonics), and remixes original pop songs to create something else entirely; “audio sausages” as V/VM appropriately calls his pop hits versions.
Butchering pop songs is a tool of political resistance. Not the kind of noble resistance based on some kind of superior morality. Quite the contrary, butchered pop gorges on the bureaucratic and corrupted pop music ambience. Butchered pop is a by-product, the bastard of a music ambience dominated by the machined image of pop stars and pop lifestyle. And it is precisely this marginal condition that makes butchered pop (dys)functional.