Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable Culture (review)

Mashed Up seeks to explore how technology, especially the possibilities unleashed by digitization and computers, is revolutionizing the production of music. For Sinnreich, the challenge is both conceptual and political. At the conceptual level, the modern conception of music, which held sway from approximately 1800 until the 1980s, relies on a series of binaries: art-craft, artist-audience, original-copy, performance-composition, figure-ground, materials-tools (43). In Chapter Two "The Modern Framework" explains how these binaries tended to function to promote a Romantic approach to music in which artists were geniuses, who had distinguished themselves from folk musicians. In the book's second section, Chapters 4-9, Sinnreich draws on a wide range of interviews to demonstrate how newer forms of music, including mash ups, hip-hop and techno, have produced considerable ambivalence about the modern conception of music. Mashed Up concludes that these new forms of music are challenging (1) the idea that artists are somehow unique geniuses; (2) the distinction between composing, arranging, consuming, and criticizing music no longer holds as they are increasingly interrelated activities; (3) the private/public distinction; and (4) the conception of music as linear, not recursive (197-202).

These conceptual shifts herald, for Sinnreich, the need for political and legal changes. The book argues that these new forms of music "are posing a significant challenge to modern social institutions and to the hegemonic order" (14). Drawing on both Foucault and Marx, with a nod to Plato, Sinnreich encourages the reader to view configurable music as a form of social resistance. Echoing Foucault, the book argues that "resistance to musical regulation becomes an engine of aesthetic innovation" (30). Mashed Up frequently illustrates how the contemporary copyright regime largely relies on the Romantic conception of authorship to secure ownership rights in music and how burgeoning changes in musical production increase conflict with copyright. The book provides ample corroboration of how copyright laws have affected the production, distribution, and consumption of hip-hop, techno, and mash ups. Because we are still in a period of transition though, Sinnreich's research reveals that there is no clear, coherent, or shared conceptual or legal framework among participants in these new forms of music.

Mashed Up emerges out of the burgeoning new field of Critical Information Studies and its strengths and weaknesses are those that are common to interdisciplinary work. The study draws on cultural studies, philosophy, legal studies, and musicology in its theoretical framing but relies on ethnographic interviews as the main form of evidence for making its claims. The result is a deeply engaging text that asks a bevy of interesting questions and offers surprising insights, especially the disagreements among musical creators about the meaning of these new technologies.

For American studies scholars, the study will seem to lack historical context and fairly loose conceptions of culture, community, and resistance. For all of the talk about politics and resistance, Mashed Up tends to frame the political as individual acts without any real connection to distinct communities. Part of the difficulty here follows from the effort to conceptualize hip-hop, techno, and mash ups under the rubric of configurable culture. While hip-hop may be political, it is not entirely clear what those politics may or may not share with techno or vice versa. One would need to look at the history of specific musical forms and communities in much more detail to help the reader understand the key differences between them. It might also uncover that the modern framework for music was designed precisely to authorize and empower some communities more than others, undercutting some of the force of the book's premise that technology is fundamentally altering the rules for musical production and political economy. Rather, it might be the increased political and economic power of formerly marginalized communities, which is leading to the legal conflicts around configurable music. Following from this problem, Mashed Up offers one dissatisfying conclusion: "the very act of engaging culture through a configurable lens...