In the face of increasing consolidation of the radio market, a more conservative political climate, and growing sensitivity to public dissent in the wake of the Patriot Act, there has been a dearth of anti-war music in the mass music market since 2001. While country radio has provided a platform for the musical articulation of pro-war positions, YouTube, a video-sharing website, has become a place where the increasingly individual experience of listening to anti-war music can be supplemented with more communal listening. On YouTube, users on both sides of the war debate can create their own political mashups, a medium comprised of mixed audio samples and/or mixed video samples preserved for public consumption.
Observing the behavior as a silent participant on the message boards corresponding to mashups of Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)" and John Lennon's "Imagine," I demonstrate that political communities with specific communication and aesthetic values are being formed around these multimedia signs. Online communities offer a somewhat more democratic alternative for public articulation of political positions; however, the rhetoric of the online communities and of the larger musical-political climate post-9/11 is considerably parallel.
Examining mashups from an aesthetic perspective reveals postmodern principles at work on multiple levels. The lines that once separated creators, producers, and consumers are blurred as editing software becomes available to more people, and as the flow of information increases. Producers and consumers no longer negotiate the meanings of particular signifiers within the confines of hierarchical corporate structures: these signifiers are now easily resignified, and reappropriated to make new meanings in different contexts. The increasing flow of information and postmodern principles of fragmentation and multiplicity that characterize mashups position users differently than more coherent, narrative-driven media, resulting in decentered conceptions of time and new ways of relating to texts.
Virtual spaces offer different ways of interacting, creating, and using music to be political. Musicking (to borrow Christopher Small's term) online affords new ways of relating to texts and to each other, and allows users to renegotiate the terms of cultural production. However, because users in the virtual world develop social skills in the offline world, pre-existing cultural paradigms inhibit the possibilities presented by new media. The potential of new media to radically democratize communication and cultural production has not yet been realized.