DJ culture has fallen into a place in my life in the city where I can't seem to escape it. I find that a DJ creates a musical atmosphere unparalleled by any other performance. It provides an element of live music, but at the same time, can be ambient. It is unintrusive, and doesn't require an "audience" to sit down and necessarily watch a "show".
I have no qualms with mashups. Lots of people do, as made evident in RIP: Remix Manifesto Personally, I see no reason why taking ideas from other artists and making it something new is frowned upon. Artists do it all the time. To me, it's creativity, its sharing, its consciousness. One thing is for sure - mashups are permeating our society left right and center. They exist everywhere, not just in DJ music, but in the DIY ethic of punk rock, certainly in the pop music of acclaimed stars like Lady Gaga and Beyonce, rap - which relies heavily on sampling, remixes, parody and SO much more. Other art also exhibits mashups - video art, collage, fashion ... the list is infinite, it seems.
Mashups aren't just a recent phenomenon, although it seems like they are gaining considerable popularity of late. Frank Zappa did it in the 1960's, extracting a guitar solo from a song and inserting it into a different song. He called it "xenochrony". He did this in his album Shiek Yerbouti - which is one of my favourite albums of all time - and it sounds so good because of the crazy layers of sound that he utilized this technique to produce. No one gave him a hard time about plagerizing himself, then. Which is essentially, what he was doing with this technique. Sometimes it is necessary to reuse ideas, recontextualize them, and turn them into something new.
So why do people hate on Greg Gillis?
He as a good grasp of the legal consequences of his work, is no fool when it comes to tissue engineering, and appears to throw a mean par-tay.
As we learn in the documentary, sampling even a single note is grounds for a lawsuit ... and his music is "a lawsuit waiting to happen". The issue here is the stealing of intellectual property. His computer is his instrument, one that lends itself wholly to remediation. He sees the moral struggle with collaging two songs together as something that will be dated very shortly. I totally agree. We will look back in a few years, maybe not even that many, and laugh at those on the "copy-right" (as opposed to the "copy-left") with scorn for being so rigid and dreary. Lots of people already do - Girltalk included.
Copy right = copy LAME.
The clip of the interview with Lars Ulrich and his Napster dealio was the most laughable peice of garbage I have ever seen. I was astonished at how conservative and power hungry he was. If I was in Lars's shoes, I would sit back and be satisfied at the musical legacy I had left on the universe and the expansive fan base and millions of dollars I had. I wouldn't be pissed off because some kid who can't afford to buy my CD somewhere downloaded it because he wanted to get down.
I felt really bad for all those poor souls who were being charged crazy sums for downloading music. (Especially that pastor.) These people are only products of their time, not pirates. It just comes down to: would we rather pay to have music, or have it for free? We seem to have the choice, these days. There are so many artists who promote free consumption of their music. Radiohead's album In Rainbows was a "pay what you can" album. But I suppose a band like Radiohead, who has an established fanbase and generally, millions of dollars, can afford to do this.
Is Girltalk a criminal? Not any more than I am, than everyone in the world who downloads free music is, or anyone who has ever sung "happy birthday". Is Girltalk an artist? I think so. In fact, I think he is more of an artist than a lot of stars who make music today.
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