See that image on the right, there?  That’s the egg of what is known as a cowbird, a bird which, a little like a cuckoo, tricks other birds into raising its young and therefore is able to avoid doing any fucking work itself.

I hope you can see how I would think this a suitable image to illustrate a rant about fucking remixers.

I was actually intending to use a picture of a parasite to illustrate this particular post but, honestly, I couldn’t stomach the Google image search.  It would have more accurately illustrated how I feel though. I also did a search for ‘attention whore’, but the results were almost as unpalatable.  Perez/Paris Hilton or a fucking tapeworm, which would you rather gaze at a picture of?  You see why I went for the eggs.

To make matters even worse, as much as I have been driven to despise the epidemic of cack-handed, attention-whoring remixes which infest the fucking internet like a nasty dose of the crabs, remixes are not something I think are inherently bad.  In fact, there may not be many, but there are at least some remixes which I think are brilliant. 

And as much as my chief whinge about remixes is largely based around accusations of parasitism and attention whoring, I am not foolish enough to entirely dismiss remixing music as a skill – not least by the obvious test which excuses a similar accusation that DJing is just like a playlist plus cross-fade: if it can be done badly, which it very clearly can, then you cannot possibly deny that it is therefore indeed a skill, so I don’t lack respect for remixing which is done well.

And to continue in mitigation, the remix also serves a really nice social function amongst musicians too.  I know loads of musicians who swap around remixing duties with one another’s music, partly as a way of working with people they respect, partly out of sheer fascination in what will be done with their music, and partly as a sort of tangential way of making connections which bind their communities together.

And, to reiterate, I have heard some fantastically good remixes.

But I have heard so, so many hundreds which are shite.  Not just shite, but embarrassing shite.  And, the worst, and the reason for this rant, not just shite, not just embarrassing shite, but embarrassing shite done solely for the purpose of cynical attention whoring and parasitically exploiting someone else’s success.  And the fact that this latter category seems to far, far outweigh any of the former in the volume with which it is ejaculated and the shrillness with which it demands our ears is the chief reason remixes have slowly but surely made me come to despise music.

For those who do not know it, The Hype Machine is not just ‘a’ but probably ‘the’ music blog aggregator.  When it first started out mp3 blogs were relatively few and far between, so aggregating them all made sense, and the Hype Machine’s chart was a relatively significant chart of what those people mental enough to spend all day writing about music for no obvious benefit to themselves. A song I posted by an unknown band from Norwich called Bambi Get Over It stubbornly stayed at the top of the chart for days back in 2008, despite precisely zero PR effort, just because people liked it that much.

Bambi Get Over It – Badman

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Slowly but surely, as the mainstream music press both collapsed and developed appalling tunnel vision, music blogs became more or less the one place people who were into ‘alternative’ music of any stripe went to find the stuff, and consequently the Hype Machine became a big fucking deal.  However, people soon learned that certain keywords would be searched for regularly on the Hype Machine and because of the way the front page acted like a ticker of what every mp3 blogger out there was posting, there were certain ways to game the system.

It got to the point a few years ago where we music bloggers were openly taking the piss out of Anthony who runs the Hype Machine by pointing out that, balls to actual musical relevance, crapping out a remix of a Radiohead cover was the obvious and inexorable way to get to the top of the Hype Machine chart.  The charts were fucking infested with fucking awful remixes.

Now, the guys at the Hype Machine put a lot of work into making sure their chart is highly relevant of course, and not just PR fodder or remix attention whoring, so at the time and on numerous occasions since they have seriously tweaked how they calculated their chart to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen.

This was more of a problem in the US of course, because their mainstream press collapsed much more than ours here in the UK, and that which remains is still for the most part hopelessly afflicted with tunnel vision.  Blogs have never really had the same prominence here, so to a degree we escaped this problem… until Twitter and fucking Facebook.

Now what was a problem for the Hype Machine is no-one’s problem at all.  Do either Facebook or Twitter care how much utter garbage people’s feeds are clogged up with?  No, of course not, they just care that you have them, what’s in them is your problem.  But the old trick of gaming the information-feed-rubbernecking habits of the human animal is still just as effective.

Back then it was Radiohead, but the very second I heard the term ‘Lana Del Rey remix’ it was pretty fucking obvious what would cause me to mash my head against the desk the most in the early months of 2012.  Now, Lana Del Rey herself is someone I already despise for being an attention whore – it is the single characteristic which most consistently defines her career thus far – but at least she is using her own tunes and her own image, depressing as it may be, to get us to glance her way for a few minutes.

The countless shitty remixes on the other hand are no more than fucking parasitism.  She got famous more or less on her own terms.  It was, albeit, with significant financial help from her label who saw someone with the beginnings of a product they could polish and whose goal was simply fame and would therefore presumably be obedient and pliable, but nevertheless Lizzy Grant is at least famous for being Lana Del Rey.  Which in the modern world is a kind of warped form of integrity I suppose.

The remixers on the other hand, or at least the herds of those who are suddenly remixing her songs, are bringing next to nothing to the fucking table.  She is famous, and they desperately want to put their name in brackets after hers in an mp3 tag in the contemptible hope that people looking for her might notice them clinging onto her skirts and that somehow by association someone might end up giving the tiniest fragment of a fuck about their worthless contribution to the world.

As a music blogger, my inbox is testament to this sort of parasitism.  When a band gets famous, particularly if they exhibit flash in the pan symptoms, or generate a degree of fevered hysteria which, love her or loathe her, Lana Del Rey most certainly did, you can be absolutely certain that I will see a depressing influx of two things: covers of their material, which is one of the reasons I am so very skeptical of cover versions, and a considerably more significant spike in remixes of their material.

And this inevitable flood of utter, exploitative, worthless garbage which floods the world of remixes makes me fucking despise the bastard things, and the people in music who encourage that sort of shit.  It’s leeching off other people’s skills, whilst contributing the bare minimum of anything at all to the world yourself, and it’s fucking pathetic.  And worse, there are good things to be done with remixes and good people who do them very, very well indeed, and I will probably never hear them now because the deluge of utter shit contaminating the term remix means I will never open another email which contains the word ever again.

Fucking do some actual creative work yourselves, you cunts, and stop exploiting other people’s skills and stop giving a bad name to the people who do that stuff well.