The Remix

It was his day off yesterday and Fred went to the record store. He came through the door giddy at five in the afternoon, shortly before I had to head back to the theater for the evening’s rehearsal. I had been wandering the apartment restlessly, riffs of operetta music in my head keeping me from sleeping. Did I want to hear what he’d got? ‘Course I did. I stretched out on the couch; he played me music.

It’s been like this since 1997, which is when we first moved in together. In St. Paul, in Brooklyn, in a beach house in South Carolina and an apartment in Paris, at our parents’ houses, while housesitting...and now in Germany. Me on the couch, him playing records. 1997 is also the year Usher came out with “You Make Me Wanna,” and I probably hadn’t heard it since then. Until yesterday. Fred brought home a remix, and when he put it on, familiar R&B lyrics slipped over a slowed down ragga beat. Nice. I walked to the theater, new old sounds in my ears.

To make a remix you take something that already exists and rip it apart, eliminate some things and keep others, add new elements and manipulate the rest. David Shields talks about the remix in his book Reality Hunger as one of the many ways musicians use existing material to create new sounds. They’ve been at it for decades – from Jamacain DJs manipulating American R&B in the 1950s, to dub reggae artists recording over pre-existing material in the 1960s, to sampling in hip-hop, and DJ mashups and the mixtape. It is our modern way of making, Shields suggests, and not just in music but also writing and visual art and graffiti and movies. Yes, authenticity, originality, and ownership are called into question, but artists have already answered with their work. “Who owns the music and the rest of our culture?” writes Shields, “We do. All of us. Though not all of us know it – yet.”

We're living the remix. You and me, some turntables, a pile of books and two cats. Another late night dinner, the coffee boiling again, we open and close windows, throw away stacks of old bills, you put on another record. We do all the same things differently or we do different things in the same ways. Some things we keep and some things we throw away and new things get added. New York City remix. Midwest remix. Now here.

Fred was surprised when I started singing along to the Usher track, when I jumped up and danced. How do you know this? he laughed. I had no idea, it was just there. A song I hadn’t heard in so long but could sing by heart when he played it.