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Video
Music

YouTube Remix Tames Savage Commenters

Israeli sampling genius creates 'mother of all funk chords.' What's not to like?

Allison Martell 17 Mar 2009TheTyee.ca

Allison Martell regularly writes about online video for The Tyee.
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Together, an opus.

I used to think there was no YouTube clip perfect enough to satisfy the site's vicious commenters. Minimalist moderation and mass popularity have combined to create what is probably the most hostile environment on the mainstream Internet. As Slate's Michael Agger observed, even the laughing baby attracts bile.

But ThruYOU makes me think the tide may be turning.

ThruYOU is the name of what might traditionally be called an album. But this is no ordinary album, nor is it simply a musical collaboration on YouTube. It's a series of seven songs painstakingly mixed by Kutiman, also known as Israeli musician Ophir Kutiel, from other unknown (and unknowing) musicians' YouTube clips. And it's taken the Internet by storm in the last two weeks.

So far, YouTubers can't find anything mean to say. A typical comment, from user Aftershok, reads: "WHAT?! WHAT DID I JUST SEE?! OMG! Did that just happen?!"

Even stranger, the positive comments are not confined to the main ThruYOU clips. This video of a grinning boy blasting through a scale on the trumpet, which was one of the original clips sampled in ThruYOU, would usually be ripe for ridicule in YouTube's middle school lunchroom environment. But instead, its place in the ThruYOU credits has prompted a little burst of praise and encouragement in comments.

The first album to be composed entirely from samples was DJ Shadow's Endtroducing... in 1996, but kids these days are more likely to compare Kutiman to Girl Talk, whose sample-only tracks have captivated indie circles for several years. Kutiman has one-upped these artists by remixing video as well as audio and his video editing is as slick and clever as Girl Talk's audio editing.

As more than one blogger has pointed out, ThruYOU is a bit of a copyright minefield. Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law prof and Creative Commons advocate, suggests that anyone who watches ThruYOU will immediately understand what is wrong with current copyright law. Lessig would prefer a world in which remixes are unambiguously legal, so projects like ThruYOU can thrive and multiply.

I think Lessig is right, but I'm more struck by Kutiman's evident love and respect for the artists he samples, many of whom are amateurs, barely worth watching on their own. He takes the time to thank everyone he has sampled, and promotes their videos with credit links. It might be Kutiman's genuine, omnivorous love for music and video that is taming the brutal critics of YouTube. If so, we can hope this isn't a one-time project.

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