2.8 Remixing Builds Community
Remixing is not new. Throughout literary history, we have borrowed, reinvented, and remixed texts. Today, remixing is not an individual endeavor, especially among youths. Whether teens are sampling from a favorite song, television show, film, game, or a combination of media, they are having fun and learning from each other. They are forming communities based on the task of bringing together disparate elements and forming new creations. They are motivated to create—not to receive a prize—but to be part of a peer-based learning community. Teens are drawn to the practice of remixing because it enables them to explore music, art, and video, reinterpret it, remix it, and produce their own versions to share immediately with their peers. Creating a remix requires youths to take the position of author, to be made aware of their audience, and to contextualize their intended meaning in a particular setting.
MC Lars, with Sir Frontalot, is widely considered to be a founder of the nerdcore movement. Nerdcore refers to a subgenre of hip hop music whose themes and images are drawn from subject matter generally considered of interest to geeks: games, science and science fiction, computers and digital culture, and cult media.
Like other nerdcore performers, MC Lars often incorporates allusions to films, television shows, comics, and novels into his work. For example, consider his video for “Space Game” which not only celebrates the virtues of early arcade games but also references characters from Star Wars (Darth Maul, Boba Fett, Sith girls), Lost in Space (Dr. Smith), Classic Star Trek (Captain Kirk, Scotty, Spock), Star Trek: The Next Generation (Q, The Borg), 2001:A Space Odyssey (Hal), The Matrix (Neo and Morpheus), X-Men (Magnito), Superman (Zod), and Doctor Seuss (“The Obleck”). In the later verses, the song claims to being “postmodernist” (under the banner of Robert Ventura and Andy Warhol) evolving from modernists such as T.S. Elliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, e.e. cummings, Wallace Stephens, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Watching this video with your students can help them understand allusion and how it creates a juncture between old and new stories and, in this case, between high art and popular culture.
Several of MC Lars songs, such as “iGeneration,” constitute manifestos for those who have grown up in a world where music is easy to access and where remix is part of what it means to consume popular culture. As one critic explained, “MC Lars is a member of what he dubs the “iGeneration,” a group born and raised in the time of the Ninja Turtles, cassette tapes and new wave music, who now live in the age of Desperate Housewives, Sidekicks and screamo bands. These are the kids who have grown up using the Internet as a part of their every day life. They can conveniently carry 5,000 songs in their pocket, but are faced with the glooming fact that the world’s oil supply and Social Security will both run out in their lifetime. MC Lars is the hero of this new generation, addressing their thoughts and every day struggles in his music.”
The iGeneration has deployed all the resources of a participatory culture to create their own mash-ups of MC Lars songs, such as this version of iGeneration, which combines characters from the Japanese Anime, Naruto, with a visual style associated with iPod advertising, and another fan video which deploys images from advertising, news, The Matrix, and Battleship Potemkin. How do the two different image tracks change the meaning or reveal different aspects of the original song?
“Ahab” should be understood in this larger context, one of several songs which MC Lars has composed based on canonical literary works he reads with the same playful irreverence with which he approaches icons of science fiction culture. MC Lars jokingly said, "I read Moby-Dick, and I thought it was a great book but it was really long, so I tried to put it into three minutes." "Ahab" does manage to include a high number of reference points in the novel, some of which are expressed through the lyrics (such as the reference to the gold doubloon which Ahab nails to the mast or the shoutouts to Queequeg), some through the visual iconography of the video (for example, the scar on MC Lars's face or his peg leg). Would the song even make sense if the listener did not have a broad exposure to the major themes and plot twists of this classic American novel?
MC Lars, with Sir Frontalot, is widely considered to be a founder of the nerdcore movement. Nerdcore refers to a subgenre of hip hop music whose themes and images are drawn from subject matter generally considered of interest to geeks: games, science and science fiction, computers and digital culture, and cult media.
Like other nerdcore performers, MC Lars often incorporates allusions to films, television shows, comics, and novels into his work. For example, consider his video for “Space Game” which not only celebrates the virtues of early arcade games but also references characters from Star Wars (Darth Maul, Boba Fett, Sith girls), Lost in Space (Dr. Smith), Classic Star Trek (Captain Kirk, Scotty, Spock), Star Trek: The Next Generation (Q, The Borg), 2001:A Space Odyssey (Hal), The Matrix (Neo and Morpheus), X-Men (Magnito), Superman (Zod), and Doctor Seuss (“The Obleck”). In the later verses, the song claims to being “postmodernist” (under the banner of Robert Ventura and Andy Warhol) evolving from modernists such as T.S. Elliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, e.e. cummings, Wallace Stephens, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Watching this video with your students can help them understand allusion and how it creates a juncture between old and new stories and, in this case, between high art and popular culture.
Several of MC Lars songs, such as “iGeneration,” constitute manifestos for those who have grown up in a world where music is easy to access and where remix is part of what it means to consume popular culture. As one critic explained, “MC Lars is a member of what he dubs the “iGeneration,” a group born and raised in the time of the Ninja Turtles, cassette tapes and new wave music, who now live in the age of Desperate Housewives, Sidekicks and screamo bands. These are the kids who have grown up using the Internet as a part of their every day life. They can conveniently carry 5,000 songs in their pocket, but are faced with the glooming fact that the world’s oil supply and Social Security will both run out in their lifetime. MC Lars is the hero of this new generation, addressing their thoughts and every day struggles in his music.”
The iGeneration has deployed all the resources of a participatory culture to create their own mash-ups of MC Lars songs, such as this version of iGeneration, which combines characters from the Japanese Anime, Naruto, with a visual style associated with iPod advertising, and another fan video which deploys images from advertising, news, The Matrix, and Battleship Potemkin. How do the two different image tracks change the meaning or reveal different aspects of the original song?
“Ahab” should be understood in this larger context, one of several songs which MC Lars has composed based on canonical literary works he reads with the same playful irreverence with which he approaches icons of science fiction culture. MC Lars jokingly said, "I read Moby-Dick, and I thought it was a great book but it was really long, so I tried to put it into three minutes." "Ahab" does manage to include a high number of reference points in the novel, some of which are expressed through the lyrics (such as the reference to the gold doubloon which Ahab nails to the mast or the shoutouts to Queequeg), some through the visual iconography of the video (for example, the scar on MC Lars's face or his peg leg). Would the song even make sense if the listener did not have a broad exposure to the major themes and plot twists of this classic American novel?
That's the essence of an allusion: MC Lars is able to shorthand Moby-Dick because so many of his listeners will already know the story through other media representations if not through a direct experience of the book. The song also points to interpretations of Melville's novel that are often taught in high school literature classes, suggesting a work may come to us predigested, having been neatly broken down into familiar modes of literary analysis by the teacher.
Lars is now extending the community and exploring how to use hip-hop to teach teens literature and creativity. For example, MC Lars saw hip hop as a way to enage contemporary youth with the works of Edgar Allen Poe. He created a new song, based on Poe's short story, "The Masque of the Red Death" in collaboration with a group of students from Los Angeles's Robert F. Kennedy school. In this video, Lars explains his pedagogical approach, which he argues can be embraced by teachers and applied to a much broader range of literary works. By bringing remixing techniques into the classroom, students can collaborate and apply new media literacies to their understanding of a work. Much as MC Lars and his RFK-LA students remix Poe, teachers can channel students' desires to remix the culture around them as a gateway into close reading practices.
Lars is now extending the community and exploring how to use hip-hop to teach teens literature and creativity. For example, MC Lars saw hip hop as a way to enage contemporary youth with the works of Edgar Allen Poe. He created a new song, based on Poe's short story, "The Masque of the Red Death" in collaboration with a group of students from Los Angeles's Robert F. Kennedy school. In this video, Lars explains his pedagogical approach, which he argues can be embraced by teachers and applied to a much broader range of literary works. By bringing remixing techniques into the classroom, students can collaborate and apply new media literacies to their understanding of a work. Much as MC Lars and his RFK-LA students remix Poe, teachers can channel students' desires to remix the culture around them as a gateway into close reading practices.
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