Michael Jackson's new single, This Is It , was largely created by others, structured around a recording he left behind of himself singing at a piano. All the orchestration and rhythm have been added posthumously, along with the back-up singing. It is what in electronic music circles is called a remix, that is, a new piece of music based on some central element - usually the melody or the vocal line - of an old one.
Remixes are often radically different from their originals, and so the remixer's authorship is usually as important or more important than the original composer's. Both the remixer and the original composer are credited in the track listing.
In big stadium pop music, such crediting would be impossible to accomplish, since there are multiple authors to start with. Britney Spears doesn't write either the words or the music for her songs; she has teams of songwriters for that. That's why discussions of "Britney Spears's music" always puzzle me. Discussions of her singing and dancing make more sense. To speak of "a Britney Spears song" is just a useful simplification for the sake of categorization; her name becomes that of a virtual author, a sort of avatar for the creators. And, of course, there have been entirely virtual pop singers, represented by cartoon characters (remember the computer-generated idols Kyoko Date and E-Cyas, or the British "band" Gorillaz), or hired actors (think Milli Vanilli, or C+C Music Factory, which replaced the voice of its slim, super-hot video star with that of a very talented but overweight blues singer). Most contemporary pop stars - and even some dead movie stars, reconstructed in various magical ways for the completion of expensive films - have a similarly symbolic relationship to the art bearing their names.
The team behind rapper Tupac Shakur put out eight albums after his death, seven of which were completed "without his creative input," as the industry phrase goes. The vocals were created from snippets of his voice cut out of previous recording sessions. The process is eerily reminiscent of scenes in William Gibson's predictive fictions, in which dead people's personalities, voices and images are stored in massive computers and animated by clever programs into virtual versions of themselves that can be consulted like oracles. It could be argued that Tupac Shakur is now, indeed, one of these immortal virtual people. And since the Michael Jackson industry is now undoubtedly reassembling and re-editing every second of studio-recorded voice in their archives to produce hundreds of new songs, Jackson's stored persona will become one of these immortally producing constructs.
The prolonging or extrapolation of a dead author's ideas is not unknown in literature, either: J.R.R. Tolkien miraculously published a new saga in 2007, called The Children of Hurin , 34 years after his death. This epic fantasy novel had been similarly reassembled from the writer's notes by his son. Christopher Tolkien called it "editing": He admitted in an appendix that he had written a few "bridging" passages here and there for the sake of coherence, but insisted that he had not invented any new story elements.
Christopher had done an even more aggressive reimagining of an unfinished work called The Silmarillion 20 years earlier, even engaging the services of another writer, the Canadian Guy Gavriel Kay, to assist in the assembly. One imagines that the abandoned work of many prolific authors could be similarly reanimated with a little work. Why not keep publishing "new" works by David Foster Wallace, for example, who now has a hero status and an iconic fan base and doubtless left enough unpublished works behind to fill out a few more books? Why not new works by Kafka or Balzac or Emily Dickinson (all her work was published posthumously anyway)?
The same is already done for fictional characters: A new James Bond book came out in 2008, 44 years after the death of his creator, Ian Fleming. The project was approved by Fleming's estate and the book was written by Sebastian Faulks in a style as close as he could make it to Fleming's. The process is almost undistinguishable from the ones that claim to be creating genuine new work from recordings or notes. Once we know a distinctive style and a familiar subject matter, and given the amazing technology for reproduction now available, we can ourselves create new works by our favourite artists endlessly merely by imitating them; philosophically, it's not terribly different from using their actual traces.
One thing that complicates the new Jackson song even further is that it's not at all new: It was already recorded by another singer (1991, Sa-Fire). So what, Jackson's fans might think: They would still like to imagine Jackson recording it in a full-powered studio. And that's what the fleets of high-powered computers in the Sony laboratories can do: They can imagine it for you. Wholesale.