| > "remix culture" required skill and talent. We were told that what we were doing didn't require as much skill as whatever the previous generation were doing to sample music and make new tracks. In hindsight, of course you find it easy to cite the prominent successes that you know from the generation. That's arguing from survivorship bias and availability bias. But those successes were never the point: the publishers and artists were pissed off at the tens of thousands of teenagers remixing stuff for their own enjoyment and forming small yet numerous communities and subcultures globally over the net. Many of us never became famous so you can cite our fame as proof of skill but we made money hosting parties at the local raves with beats we remixed together ad hoc and that others enjoyed. > The artists creating those projects clearly have hundreds if not thousands of hours of practice differentiating them from someone who just started pasting MP3s together in a DAW yesterday. But they all began as I did, by being someone who "just started pasting MP3s together" in my bedroom. Darude, Skrillex, Burial, and all the others simply kept doing it longer than those who decided they had to get an office job instead. The teenagers today are in exactly the same position, except with vastly more powerful tools and the entire corpus of human creativity free to download, whether in the public domain or not. I guess in response to your "required skill and talent", I'm saying that skill is something that's developed within the context of the technology a generation has available. But it is always developed, then viewed as such in hindsight. |