Blame it on the pop

I was already pretty sure I was going to write about this song for my first media response entry and then I did this week's reading on multimodalities and it seemed like a perfect fit. I've been a big fan of mash up music for a while now, there's something really appealing to me about an artist who can take bits and pieces of other songs and fit them together to create something totally new. For the last few years DJ Earworm has done these mashups of the top 25 songs of the year according to Billboard magazine. This year's is definitely my favorite one. I downloaded the track back in December and it's been on my running playlist ever since but it wasn't until I sat down to write this blog that I looked up the video for the song and I was amazed at how much easier it was for me to pick out the samples from the various songs when I could connect them to the visual images. Now that I've watched the video a couple of times I can pick out the the little bits just listening but it amazes me to think of all the little snippets I had previously missed even though I've listened to the song dozens of times before this. I'm not sure if that's what Kress meant by multimodalities but it definitely seemed to illustrate the idea to me.

I'm not sure how I would use something like this in my classroom, but I do think it would be an interesting way to introduce the concept of intertextuality. It might also be interesting way to talk about plagiarism and crediting your sources. I would be interested in hearing if my students felt something like this was more comparable to copying a quote word for word in a paper or paraphrasing something to make it their own. I think I would lean towards the latter explanation myself but I think it could spark some interesting discussion.