Twilight of the Authors

Remix Culture and Critique of Uncreative Writing in Contemporary Popular Music

Abstract

The article reconsiders authorship in contemporary popular music by reframing remix culture as an ecological paradigm that spans production and consumption, arguing that the convergence of DAWs, VST-based automation, MIDI workflows, and platform logics has shifted creative authority from composers to producers while normalising procedural recursion, formulaic harmonic environments, timbral homogenization, and dynamic flattening, all effects intensified by algorithmic optimisation and prosumer labour. Positioned against celebratory accounts of recombination – and written mainly in 2019–2020, with minor later additions, as a non-scientific provocation  – the essay contends that today’s remix culturetends toward an “uncreative drift”: a mnemonic stalemate in which re-use and automation cease to generate new meanings and instead stabilise standardised solutions aligned with platform affordances and algorithmic capital Historical vignettes (from musique concrète to hip-hop turntablism and rock experimentalism) clarify that repetition and reuse are not inherently uncreative, as their aesthetic valence is context-dependent and now increasingly governed by industrial mediation and gatekeeping within platformised media ecologies. The conclusion situates algorithmic composition within this landscape, clarifies its limits, and reaffirms the centrality of human agency. Remix culture emerges as an ecology marked by mnemonic stabilisation and an ‘uncreative drift’, a regime that privileges reproducibility and procedural efficiency while weakening conditions for exploratory meaning-making.