Jon Cozart: A Remix Master

         Remixes are in our everyday life and you often don’t even notice them until you start to look for them. Jon Cozart, the YouTube sensation, makes remixes of songs as a career. He commonly takes songs and movies and makes comical renditions of them. One of my favorites, among millions of others who’ve viewed it, is a medley titled “After Ever After”, in which he remixes four Disney songs. Using songs from the ever popular “The Little Mermaid”, “Aladdin”, “Beauty and the Beast”, and “Pocahontas”, Jon Cozart transforms the words to create a new, catchy song. He puts a little bit of an adult spin on them, taking aspects from real life problems, but at the same time making it laughable.

            In “After Ever After”, Jon Cozart touches on the BP oil spill from 2010, the war on terror, bestiality, and Native American genocide ALL in the same song! I’d consider him a genius or dare I say… a remix master. Because all of these kind-of serious lyrics are to the tune of Disney songs, they seem happy and funny at a first listen. But after taking the time to understand what he’s talking about, they turn into an analysis of real life issues. That’s why this song is considered a remix. Cozart took the melodies from the original songs and the ideas and characters from the Disney films to create this medley and put his own spin on it.

            In my opinion, “After Ever After” mainly fits into the genre play classification of remix, which Dustin Edwards defines as “deploying a text that blends, repurposes, or moves in and out of genre expectations” (Edwards xxx). The original songs were in Disney movies, for God’s sake. They were clearly intended to happy and fun and to be listened to by children. But Cozart turns this around and creates a song analyzing real problems in the world that is meant to be listened to by an older audience.

            Marilyn Randall put it well when she said, “all literature, or art–in fact, all of human activity– is essentially repetitive, and that ‘plagiarism’, therefore is inevitable” (Randall 3). This meaning that nothing is truly original! We’re always building off of other people’s ideas and concepts. Take a look around you and you’ll see all of the different remixes that exist in everyday life!