Remix: To combine or edit existing materials to produce something new.
The term remix originally applied to music. It became prominent in the last century during the rise of hip-hop, the first musical genre to widely incorporate sampling from existing recordings.
Early example: The Sugarhill Gang sampled the bassline from Good Times by Chic in the 1979 hit Rapper’s Delight. Since then, that same bassline has been sampled dozens of times.
- Music
- Video
- Photos
Today, anyone can remix anything and distribute it globally almost instantly. You don’t need expensive tools. You don’t need a distributor. You don’t even need skills.
Yet the techniques involved—collecting material, transforming it, combining it— are the same ones used at every level of creation. You could even say: everything is a remix.
Part 1 — The Song Remains the Same
To explain this, let’s start in England in 1968. Led Zeppelin forms when Jimmy Page recruits John Paul Jones, Robert Plant, and John Bonham.
They play extremely loud blues that soon becomes known as— Wait. Let’s rewind.
Paris, 1961. William S. Burroughs coins the term “heavy metal” in his novel The Soft Machine. That book itself was created using the cut-up technique— literally cutting up existing texts and rearranging them.
So in 1961, Burroughs not only invents the term heavy metal, the genre Led Zeppelin would later pioneer—he also produces an early form of remix.
Led Zeppelin and Copying
By the mid-1970s, Led Zeppelin is the biggest touring rock band in the United States. Yet many critics and peers accuse them of imitation.
- Bring It On Home borrows its opening and closing from Willie Dixon’s song of the same name
- The Lemon Song uses lyrics from Killing Floor by Howlin’ Wolf
- Black Mountain Side uses the melody from Blackwaterside, arranged by Bert Jansch
- Dazed and Confused is an uncredited cover of a song by Jake Holmes
- Stairway to Heaven opens similarly to Taurus by Spirit
Led Zeppelin clearly copied a great deal of other people’s material. That alone was not unusual.
What made them different were two things: they did not credit the original artists, and they did not transform the material enough to claim originality.
British blues bands commonly recorded covers, but unlike Zeppelin, they didn’t claim to have written them. Most bands emulated a general sound. Zeppelin copied specific melodies and lyrics.
Legal Remix
- Covers – performances of existing material
- Imitations – copies transformed enough to remain within the law
These account for almost everything the entertainment industry produces.
Ironically, after their success, Led Zeppelin went from copying to being copied: 1970s: Aerosmith, Heart, Boston. 1980s: heavy metal. Later: sampling culture.
Part 2 — Remix Inc. (Hollywood)
Most blockbuster films rely heavily on existing material. Of the ten highest-grossing films of the past decade, the majority are sequels, remakes, or adaptations.
Hollywood’s greatest skill is turning the old into the new. Stories are told, retold, transformed, retold again, and subverted.
Genres become subgenres, each with strict conventions. Horror splits into supernatural, slasher, zombie, and creature films. All reuse and transform familiar elements.
Star Wars as Remix
Star Wars remains an extraordinary work of imagination, yet its individual components are as recognizable as samples in a remix.
- Joseph Campbell and The Hero with a Thousand Faces
- 1930s Flash Gordon serials
- Films by Akira Kurosawa
- War films, westerns, and science fiction classics
George Lucas collected materials, combined them, and transformed them. Without those earlier films, Star Wars would not exist. Creation requires influence.
Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino represents the ultimate remix filmmaker. Kill Bill is essentially a cinematic mash-up, densely packed with elements sampled from countless films.
Part 3 — The Elements of Creativity
Creativity is surrounded by myths: that it comes from sudden inspiration, that original works break all molds, that genius creates from nothing.
Creativity is not magic. It comes from applying ordinary thinking tools to existing materials.
Copying Is How We Learn
- Bob Dylan’s first album contained eleven covers
- Richard Pryor began by imitating Bill Cosby
- Hunter S. Thompson retyped The Great Gatsby word for word
Nobody starts out original.
Transformation
- Steam engines
- The QWERTY keyboard
- The light bulb
These were not isolated inventions but critical points in long evolutionary chains.
Combination
- Gutenberg’s printing press
- Ford’s Model T
- The Internet and the World Wide Web
The basic elements of creativity are copying, transforming, and combining.
Part 4 — System Failure (Intellectual Property)
Culture evolves like biology. Genes copy, mutate, and combine. Ideas—memes—do the same.
But our legal systems treat ideas as isolated property. Copyright and patents were meant to encourage creation and build a rich public domain.
Instead, they expanded into excessive protection, litigation culture, and patent and sampling trolls.
Final Conclusion
Ideas are not neat. They overlap, tangle, and build upon each other. Everything we create evolves from what came before.
Copy. Transform. Combine.
That’s how culture works.
That’s how we live.
That’s how we create.