That's an interesting question, as we have countless examples of people trying to update and improve art, and it creates a paradox not unlike the Ship Of Theseus. When we reach back in time to alter the art we have lived with for however long, it no longer is that piece of art, and yet we still know exactly what it is. Identity is not a simple concept when you break it down, and that follows through to art as much as anything else.
Is "The Last Supper" still the painting put on the wall by Leonardo when it's estimated only 20% of his original brush strokes still remain?
I will not profess to have even a sliver of the insight necessary to answer that loaded question, but I can carry the thought over to the world of music. We know that the recordings aren't the same when a band goes into the studio and records a new version for reasons that usually have to do with rights and money. The composition is the same, and the production might be attempting to be exactly the same, but performances never are. They are the same song, but not the same 'song', if you know what I'm trying to say.
Things get more complicated when we talk about more subtle changes, such as the remastering of albums that comes along very often at milestone anniversaries. The artists want to give their work a fresh coat of paint, ostensibly to make them sound better than ever, but realistically to make them sound acceptable to a younger audience that has yet to buy their own copies. The producers turn a few knobs, alter the frequency spectrum, and usually compress the audio even further, and we wind up with a record that is the same as the one we have always known and loved, but yet it isn't.
So I revert to my initial question; when does changing a piece of art get to the point it is not longer the same as we have known it?
This came to mind recently as Green Day is releasing a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of "Warning". I've already written about the album itself for its anniversary, so I want to instead focus on the recording itself. In addition to demos and live material, the new set comes with a remaster of the album to update it for today's tastes. That is rather interesting to me, not for any changes they could make, but for how unnecessary the process appears to be.
I still play "Warning" regularly, and every time I do it strikes me just how great the album still sounds. "Warning" was released in that stretch of time when expensive studio gloss was still paid for, and the loudness war had yet to set in. There is a depth, clarity, and richness to the sound that is expansive in a way today's rock records rarely are able to achieve. Green Day sounded like a band with a major label budget to work with.
So why would they remaster an album that sounds great?
There are two main answers; 1) Today's listeners want/expect albums to be uniformly louder and compressed, and 2) They have to have some hook to justify charging us more for a new version of an old product.
Neither is a great defense, but the business aspect is an aside from the artistic one. We have yet to ask whether or not this new version of "Warning" sounds better, or even as good, as the original. That, above all else, should be the most important facet of this conversation.
The fact of the matter is that the remaster does not sound as good as the original. That depth and clarity is flattened out, with the overall sound coming across thinner and more brittle. Instead of sounding more powerful for packing a harder punch, it sounds more fragile and closer to the breaking point. There is a paradox in music where if guitar amps get cranked too hard, they stop sounding heavy and become a soft mash of fuzz. The same happens when productions are pushed to be too loud and compressed, as it leads to recordings that feel forced.
This phenomenon has become a plague upon us. If we are lucky, they are simple remasters that highlight bits that might have been better off keeping to the background. In more extreme cases, full remixes are done that change the entire character of albums. Dio's "Holy Diver" was remixed for its fortieth anniversary, and listening to that is like hearing someone taking a chisel to "David" because they wanted to give him more girth 'down there'. The result was a record that lived its entire duration in the 'uncanny valley', because it was clearly still "Holy Diver", but it was different enough all the way through that I could never get comfortable thinking about it as anything but a costume worn by the original. Elvis Costello did the same thing to "This Year's Model", transposing the keyboards for guitars as the main instrument, which completely destroyed the very sound that defined the album.
So are these albums still the albums we started out with? Philosophy would tell us, as in the paradox, there is no easy answer to the question. It is a matter of degrees, and emotion. Remasters that sound enough like the original without being offensive can still be the same album, just seen through a different pane of aging glass. Remixes don't feel the same at all, and make us question our very memories of the music. It's harder to say going back in and making fundamental changes leaves us with the same piece of art.
As in the case of "The Last Supper", we have a contemporary copy to see what it was supposed to be, and we can catalog the differences. But in that case, no one alive has ever seen the original intention on that wall, so the restoration is the only knowledge we have of the painting. For these albums, we still have the originals, and many of us still have our memories. Those can't be brushed away like the layers of dust and grime.
We need to be careful when we touch history. Our ears change and fail us as we get older, so all of this search for improvement is trying to balance reality to fit our more limited senses. It's a compensation for what we can no longer hear, and a twisting of the truth that allows us to believe we aren't getting older.
I'll keep my memories, thank you very much.
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