Full Description
Any and all songs are capable of being remixed. But not all remixes are treated equally. Rock This Way examines transformative musical works—cover songs, remixes, mash-ups, parodies, and soundalike songs—to discover what contemporary American culture sees as legitimate when it comes to making music that builds upon other songs. Through examples of how popular discussion talked about such songs between 2009 and 2018, Mel Stanfill uses a combination of discourse analysis and digital humanities methods to interrogate our broader understanding of transformative works and where they converge at the legal, economic, and cultural ownership levels.
Rock This Way provides a new way of thinking about what it means to re-create and borrow music, how the racial identity of both the reusing artist and the reused artist matters, and the ways in which the law polices artists and their works. Ultimately, Stanfill demonstrates that the extent to which a work is seen as having new expression or meaning is contingent upon notions of creativity, legitimacy, and law, all of which are shaped by white supremacy.
Contents
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Rock This Way, or The Shape of Musical Norms
Chapter 1 Judge a Song by Its Cover: Cover Songs Between Transformation and Extraction
Chapter 2 Stir It Up: Remix and the Problem of Genre
Chapter 3 Monstrous Mash: Mash-Ups and the Epistemology of Difference
Chapter 4 Fight for Your Right to Parody: Parodies and the Cultural Politics of Kindness
Chapter 5 Feels like the First Time: The Politics and Poetics of Similarity in Soundalikes
Conclusion: Toward a Theory of Ethical Transformative Musical Works
Data Appendix
References
