White Panda

White Panda is a group of two individuals, Tom Evans (Procrast) and Dan Griffith (aka DJ Griffi) who have become famous for creating remixes from old and new songs alike. The group is based out of Chicago and Los Angeles. White Panda formed in early 2009 and has released a series of musical remixes that usually feature an American Top 40 song that has been remixed with another artist and/or an older song.

An example of this is their remix called Drake and Diane, which you can access here. This song mixes Drake's song "Over" with John Mellencamp's song "Jack and Diane" to create a mashup that showcases both the hip-hop/rap music Drake creates with the American pop-rock image that Mellencamp endorses.

White Panda, like many other remix artists, brings into question issues of ownership and authorship. It can be questioned whether the material White Panda is creating can actually be called their own. The sense of belonging that is created with an original work is now questioned, as is the concept of the original work itself. Do the remixes that White Panda is making constitute what it means to be original? Or are the remixes White Panda is creating simply just an act of repetition and recombination of old forms? These are some of the questions that can be asked of Remix Culture.

A friend of mine attended the White Panda concert in London, ON this past weekend and noted that the audience that was in attendance at the concert was different than she had expected. Does this mean Remix Culture is reaching out to a different group of people than what the original music was capable of? The groups that listen to Drake and John Mellencamp can be said to be very different but when the two types of music are combined, does a new audience and consumer group form?

To listen to more of White Panda's music, their whole discography can be downloaded (for free!) here. It's great to see that remix artists such as White Panda seem to be more about sharing their talent and getting their voice and their creations heard rather than purely publishing their content for monetary and economic value. As danah boyd states in her article "Blogging Out Loud: Shifts in Public Voice," remix is a bi-product of cultural consumption and one that expresses identity development. By allowing the public to download their music for free, White Panda is able to experience the reactions of the public and from these reactions, they are able to figure out where they sit in the realm of cultural consumption and how to remix themselves into popular culture in a more meaningful way and at a more successful level.