Do It Yourself: Dance Music's Changing Dispositions in Experimental Music Practices

While popular music scholars frequently assert dance music’s cultural and aesthetic distinction as a music thriving outside mainstream Industry structures, this presentation claims that popular dance music not only inspires experimental cover versions of mainstream hits, but also leads to intricate and implicit underlying associations with this original mass-mediated material. This process places popular dance music in alternative yet dialectically resonant contexts, imbuing popular “hits” with new meaning, while challenging common marketing strategies and obsolete copyright laws with new modes of distribution. Those particular distributive activities initiated by independent DIY artists, engage and respond to the ubiquitous transnational star system by commandeering the reproducing, copying, editing, remixing and reinterpretation of digital content facilitated by the Internet. In particular, this presentation investigates and explicates the process of transforming and reinterpreting the creative values connected to dominant popular dance music texts into an experimental musical framework. It reveals how music that appears in the top of the charts provides the basis for independent artists such as plunderphonics who teeter on the brink between independent, avant garde and inventive pop cover artists.