Since we’re talking about repurposing and remixing, what happens when a re-creation completely changes the original work to something new?
Take “Useless.”
To put the song in context, it was released just after a tumultuous time for Depeche Mode. One member had a nervous breakdown and had to leave the band’s worldwide tour, another was having problems of his own, and a third quit the band in frustration.
Oh yeah…the final member almost died from his heroin addiction.
The three remaining members convened to make an album. Despite continuing problems, they succeeded. The result, “Ultra,” contained a few songs that were as harsh as anything the band ever recorded.
One of the harsher songs was “Useless.”
If you don’t have time to listen to and watch the video:
Fletch is hiding behind his sunglasses and acting moody, Dave is snarling and throwing things, and Martin is playing a hard guitar hero. And the famed vocal interplay between Dave and Martin, present in many Depeche Mode hits, now consists of shouting. The location of the video shoot, the Cwmystwyth Lead Mine in Wales, only added to the “leaden” nature of the video.
Even the plane and other humorous elements don’t “shake” the oppressive mood.
But then it was time for the remix. Depeche Mode songs have been remixed hundreds of times, yielding very strange results. For many fans, their first exposure to Martin Gore, Guitar Hero was when the band took the electronic “Behind the Wheel” and grafted it on to the old American song “Route 66.”
Several years later, when the time came to remix “Useless,” the band turned to the Austrian duo Kruder & Dorfmeister.
Who removed the guitars and the snarl.
This is just one example of many in which the remix is almost totally divorced from the original work.
But can we remix words?
Can I take an old Bredemarket blog post and “remix” it into a different-sounding piece with a completely different message?
Something to add to my to-do list.
As a postscript, the words “Something New” were included in this post intentionally.
For a variety of reasons, the Beatles’ albums in the United States bore no relation to the original British albums. One of those U.S. albums was called “Something New.”
