Cake of Theseus, or: Remix Culture through Baking

Remixing songs is a practice that's been around for decades, and the qualities that define said remixes change and evolve all the time. In more recent times a remix might swiftly follow an original release seeing how popular the song became (e.g Best Friend by Doja Cat and Saweetie has several remix versions that include new verses by other artists) , or it will come to fruition after one person created a popular version of the original song with an added effect (e.g. Steve Lacy's Bad Habit getting a sped up version released onto Spotify).

There are also the remixes that will come out of taking several songs and taking elements from each to create a new song altogether (e.g Madeon's Pop Culture; funny enough I could not link the spotify version of this song, possibly because of copyright infringement). These types of remixes will be the one I focus on here, seeing as they are the ones that, because they're made up of several songs, might face unfair scrutiny from the corporations that own the original clips of the songs, and are willing to chase every stray penny to be made from their music. My thesis states that when one rips parts of songs in order to place into a wholly new one, then that new song is different from any of its given origins, and shouldn't be separated and examined for its separate parts.

This is a lot like baking.

This photo shows all of the ingredients I used to make this carrot cake recipe. The ingredients are clear and obvious here, but as I continued, slowly they became increasingly difficult to just parse through by the naked eye.

Can you see the flour from the baking soda from the baking powder here? Can you find the salt or the sugar?

The sugar part was a trick question because I put the sugar in with the oil and the eggs.

Here.

And this is the final product pre-oven. There's plenty of carrots and you can see the cinnamon and even the flour on the edges.

But once we're in the oven (I had to bake two layers because the recipe I used was for a bigger pan than I had).

And we are glued together with icing.

Can you see the sugar? Or the carrots? Even if you can taste the ingredients, do you taste them alone? Or do they contribute to the whole instead of act separate?