[M]ore troubling even than the hypocrisy of a few rock stars is the narcissism at the heart of the phenomenon of home remixing–the notion that to take a work of creative expression and make it “ours” is to improve it. It is a colossal mistake to coerce an expression of others into an expression of ourselves. The premise of open-source remixing is that finally we can admire nobody so much as ourselves. But in music, as in all art and love and politics, there is usually more to gain in trying to understand what belongs, uniquely and idiosyncratically and serendipitously, to somebody else.