Remixing Faith in the 21st Century

UK' s uber-popular rock-band Radiohead has been making waves since their album OK Computer won "Best Alternative Music Album" of the year in '98. This past fall they kicked everything up a notch whey they recorded, produced, and then distributed their album, In Rainbows, through their website. This was all done with no major industry label backing them. One of the world's biggest band's bypasses the powers-that-be and did it all on their own. And if that was not enough, they left the price of the album up to each customer who could decide how much (or how little) he or she would like to pay for the album. There are many speculations, but no one knows how much money they made or how many albums were downloaded. What we do know is that once the album was released it became one of the best records of 2007.

This past April Radiohead did another thing that sparked imaginations and challenged the preexisting structures of the music industry, yet again. They setup a website and invited people to remix one of their singles, "Nude." Along with the invitation, they released the audio tracks containing the guitars, strings, drums, bass, and vocals through the iTunes music store. They invited people to participate in a contest to see who would make the best remix of their song, all the votes would be made by Radiohead fans (the winning remix received 38568 votes). By looking at remix culture, I think the church can learn something about how creativity and imagination interacts with existing ideas and structures and builds off those resources while also moving beyond them in new ways.

Here's one such example of remix video that's been really popular all over the web (here's what the original sounds like):

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