Mashups, Girl Talk and Me
August 8th, 2008 by Dave Allen
Girl Talk live in Detroit. Photo – Christos/Detroitartist.org
Gregg Gillis is more well known as the musician Girl Talk. And he believes very strongly that he is a musician and not, as many people have called him, a DJ. If you haven’t heard his work you might wonder why there would be any issue for Gillis but upon hearing his craftily designed songs you will notice that each track is made up of many short snippets of samples of songs that you know you’ve heard somewhere else. On his recent album, Feed The Animals, that he released online Radiohead-style on Illegal Art he told the New York Times that it includes more than 300 samples and that he estimates that each minute of “Feed the Animals” took him about a day to create. That’s a lot of days.
More importantly though his preferred method of “song writing,” i.e. using riffs borrowed from other people’s work puts him front and centre in the debate over copyright law and fair use. His stance is that he is using such tiny samples of other people’s work that he argues his actions are protected under fair use. Not all legal experts agree but so far he has avoided the threat of litigation.
As a musician [I am a founding member of the UK post-punk band, Gang of Four] with my own copyrights I share his stance as I believe that copyright laws have become far too stringent and are now limiting artists’ abilities to be creative. Many people would like to see the law relaxed in certain areas to allow more creativity to spring forth. One area that definitely falls under the term known as gray is the practice of creating mashups. A Mashup in the musical form is exactly what Gillis is doing, literally intermingling or layering beats and samples from various songs on top of and into each other. The end result is surely a completely new work. As Wikipedia puts it – a mashup is a digital media file containing any or all of text, graphics, audio, video, and animation, which recombines and modifies existing digital works to create a derivative work.
Any digital media is open to the process of mashing, and just like a collage, where found images are most commonly rendered onto a canvas, the end result of this creative process should be considered a new original work. There should be no threat of litigation for artists such as Gregg Gillis who create these new works of musical digital art. Go here to hear Gillis in action as Girl Talk and see how many songs you recognize.
In that spirit I post here a mashup that I recently created in collaboration with the musician Jon Ragel who goes by the moniker Boy Eats Drum Machine. Rather than sampling we decided to actually perform the mashup by playing live in the studio on top of sampled drums. The song borrows parts from the artists Talking Heads, Aaliyah, Van Halen and The Cure.
BEDM feat. Dave Allen – Talking Heads/Aaliyah/Van Halen/Cure Mashup [MP3] Click to play, right click to download.
Tags: Copyright, DMCA, Download, Girl Talk, Gregg Gillis, Mashups, MP3, Music, Remixes
August 9th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
I don’t think you can glue a bunch of book chapters together and call yourself a novelist – even if it it’s highly entertaining – so I’m not sure how stringing electronic pieces of pre-recorded music together makes one a musician. Perhaps the “artist” known as Girl Talk has a high degree of musicality; I imagine it would take a measure of talent and skill to mash together a bunch of tunes and make it sound good.
But call me old school for thinking you should actually be an instrumentalist or a vocalist (likely with some degree of training) to call yourself a musician. Of course, there is a long history of people ripping off chord progressions, melodies and ideas, so most music is derivative. If you’ve got a bunch of music in your head, it’s impossible not to be. Likewise, if you want to do a new take on someone else’s tune (or multiple tunes as you did), I think that’s cool. God knows, the so-called Great American Songbook is the underpinning of most musicians’ jazz repertoire. But being derivative isn’t the same thing as playing the actual recordings of other people and claiming ownership.
Now that I’ve lambasted poor Mr. Girl Talk for being a presumed no-talent rip-off artist, I guess I’d better listen to his stuff so I don’t fall of my high horse if I’m wrong.
Low and behold, in the first “song” I hear on his MySpace page, “No Pause,” he has included 36 seconds of “I Can’t Wait” by our home-town pop favorite, Nu Shooz (I wonder if Valerie Day and John Smith know this?). With such a recognizable bass line, anyone who danced through the 80s would know that snippet in its very first measure. Then he mashes in 30 seconds of “Crazy On You” by Heart. Again, a highly recognizable guitar solo. If you lived through the late 70’s, you wouldn’t mistake it for anything else. Then he’s got Jimmy Hendrix saying “ ’scuse me while I kiss the sky.” Doesn’t matter what decade you grew up in, you know that line.
In other tunes, he uses highly recognizable samples from The Police, Paula Cole, The Jackson 5, Queen, Electric Light Orchestra, Roy Orbison, Nirvana, Earth, Wind and Fire, a bunch of rappers I would never recognize and…I give up! I could sit only through three of his insufferable mash-ups.
I was prepared to be somewhat open-minded about Girl Talk because I was expecting something a lot more interesting and artful. But listening to his tunes settled the matter. He is the DJ version of Weird Al Yankovich, but a lot less clever. His mash-ups are only entertaining in the way “Name That Tune” is entertaining. To his credit, he did pick some good songs to rip off, but I’d much rather listen to a mix-tape of the above-named musicians than his silly snippets of tunes strung together with cheesy electronic drum tracks.
He is definitely not a musician. And anyone who is doing what he does, is probably not a musicians. But he should make all the money he can. With rip-offs that lengthy and obvious, he’ll need it for his lawyers.
BTW, for anyone who doesn’t already know, “Girl Talk” is a famous standard written by the inimitable Neal Hefti and Bobby Troupe. Geez, even the guy’s name is unoriginal.
August 10th, 2008 at 7:28 am
Carri,
In the 21st century we now have to define musician. That won’t be easy. From our ancestors beating bones on the ground to birds in meadows trilling at dawn and whale-song, on up through the 15th century wandering minstrels who traveled town to town singing the “news,” through Bach and Beethoven and beyond, who is the “real” musician?
By any measure past and present I would argue that Gillis aka Girl Talk is a musician. Welcome to the 21st century where the tools that are at hand are no longer just a piano and a voice, where song writing is not about a tune and some lyrics. The deconstruction of song writing as we knew it is complete. And we can’t blame the young folks for this radical form of creativity, David Bowie famously explained his lyrical technique years ago as being borrowed from an idea by William Burroughs – Bowie cut up words and phrases (other peoples) from magazines and newspapers and books and laid them out on a table until he had “lyrics.”
You call Gillis a “presumed no-talent rip-off artist,” but where does that leave Bowie? Or how about David Byrne who recently played a building? Is he now less of a musician in your eyes for having departed from his “normal” musical activities?
The genie is out of the bottle and can not be put back. Gillis is just one of thousands of hyperactive young people who came of age as digital youth. He has an incredible photographic memory when it comes to music and can recall a chorus or a bridge or a melody line from almost any song that he knows will mash perfectly with another. That takes talent.
August 10th, 2008 at 9:14 am
though i dislike girl talk’s a.d.d. energy drink music, i can definitely not argue with the passion, care, or craft i hear in his songs. its interesting to wonder what makes someone a musician and what makes something music. gillis is certainly an artist, but is he a musician? for now i’d argue no, simply because nothing is being “played.” to add my small input, i would say that music is something physical expressed in sound. i.e. byrne’s building is a physical space being turned into audio in front of the viewer. yet, in spite of all this, gillis certainly spends enough time, energy, and craft to be able to call his end result whatever he wants to. but for me, i would label it collage, performance art, or maybe even dada before music.
(as an optimistic p.s., i hope that soon labels will be completely unnecessary for all forms of art. hopefully.)
August 10th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.(1) As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of “do it yourself”.(2) It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.(2) Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.(3) Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or anything else, is always a portrait of himself, and the more he tries to conceal himself the more clearly will his character appear in spite of him.(4) Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.(5) And for the citation of so many authors, ‘tis the easiest thing in nature. Find out one of these books with an alphabetical index, and without any farther ceremony, remove it verbatim into your own … there are fools enough to be thus drawn into an opinion of the work; at least, such a flourishing train of attendants will give your book a fashionable air, and recommend it for sale.(6) Art is either plagiarism or revolution.(7) Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.(8)
There, now I’m a writer, apparently. I just copied/pasted 9 quotes from 8 authors/artists, to form a meaningful paragraph without a single original word. Writers and artists have been doing this for centuries; they used to call it Plagiarism – now they call it Sampling. The technology changes but we’re still all stealing from each other all the time. And every once in a while, someone’s going to come along who hasn’t got a single original thought of his own, but who is able to artfully prepare the thoughts of others in such a way as to catapult himself into his 15 minutes of fame. The critics will love it – for a while. We’re living in a world where technology makes it easy for someone like “DJ Girl Talk” to exist and flourish. But take heart: the art that will be truly remembered over the ages is that of the originators, not the plagiarists.
But to your point, I wouldn’t call DJ Girl Talk a musician in the strictest definition of the word. I would definitely call him a performance artist, but “musician” is a term reserved for those artists who use a tone-generating instrument (including voice) to create original melodic or rhythmic content, and who perform said content in real-time to an audience of listeners.
Using samples to paint a “sound canvas” made up of other people’s original work would be like using a photocopier to create a collage of other artists’ paintings. Sure, it’s art; of course it’s valid, and many artists have created works using this medium; Andy Warhol’s soup can comes to mind – but did Warhol give credit to the marketing department at the Campbell’s Soup company for the anonymous graphic designers who originally created their soup can logo? – more to the point, Warhol at least took the time to put brush to canvas to create his work; GT is doing something that anyone with a computer running decent audio software can do by cutting and pasting. It is possible to create a meaningful, new “product” using such media, but that’s a completely different form of art from that which a musician does.
A completely different take on this would be if GT were to create his mixes live and in person using turntables, sound boards, keyboards, samplers, and other physical equipment. I don’t know if he does this or not – the quote in the article seems to imply that he creates his mixes on his own over the course of time, rather than doing so in a live, real-time environment. There are plenty of DJ’s who are artists at their craft, and plenty of musicians who use digital samples to augment their original melodies: Performing such work takes skill, timing, and energy, and consequently tends to garner much more respect from the at-large community of performing musicians and artists who regularly shlep loads of gear to a gig, set it up, perform, tear it down, and pack it up time after time – not to mention all of the countless hours spent practicing, rehearsing, composing, arranging, etc. To call GT a “musician” doesn’t properly do justice to all of the real musicians who regularly work to bring their art to the public through live performance.
Sources:
(1) Charles Dickens
(2) Marshall McLuhan
(3) TS Eliot
(4) Samuel Butler
(5) Leo Tolstoy
(6) Miguel de Cervantes
(7) Paul Gaugin
(8) Howard Aiken
August 10th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
[...] over whether Girl Talk is a musician or merely a talented DJ who puts together amazing mashups. Have your say here. Share this Post: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and [...]
August 10th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Artist? Absolutely! Girl Talk is awesome and fun. DJing takes talent! But he’s not a musician.
August 10th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
August 9, 2008
Click this link The New York Times Songwriters Blog for an opinion piece by Jeffrey Lewis on how he thinks he may be a rip off artist…..
“As a songwriter who got his start in the “antifolk” community of downtown New York performers, I have a certain snobbery when it comes to performing originals as opposed to cover songs.”
“Thus so many of us snobby “real” artists are just cover artists in disguise, taking various devious steps to confuse our listeners into praising our “songwriting.” Perhaps what I do should be called “song-composting,” “song-mulching,” “song-smoothie-ing,” something like that. Or you could just call it “ripping off” and take me to court. I’d probably lose.”
August 10th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Another thought came to me today when thinking about what Girl Talk is doing. If he were to take a highly recognizable bass line and PLAY it verbatim (on an instrument of some kind), drop it into ProTools and build his song from there, that might be mere plagiarism. Or depending upon how recognizable it was when he was done with it, it might not. It could just be inspiration. But he’d still be a LONG way from a finished product that most people would enjoy based upon their expectations of what professional audio production sounds like.
Anyone who has produced a recording project knows that it take a LOT of time and money to do it right. You don’t just show up and play. The studio has to be set up, you do a bunch of takes, digitally “splice” together the takes that work, maybe add some more tracks and instruments later, mix, EQ, and master it all (and I’m leaving out quite few steps). This requires expensive equipment (albeit not as expensive as it used to be) and years of expertise with all the latest tools – which is why studio time isn’t cheap. It also takes weeks or months of a musician’s time to do it right. Then, of course, someone has to market the album. And any musician who records someone else’s tunes has to pay the RIGHTS to do so – even if the composer is dead.
So, not only is GT by-passing the years of lessons, cost of instruments, sweat and tears, etc. that most musicians invest in before they can create something commercially viable, he is also by-passing the time and expense of getting a product ready for market and pushing it out there to gain awareness and popularity. He’s taking products that are FINISHED and SUCCESSFUL and using other people’s success to garner notoriety for himself.
In fact, I doubt that GT has used any UNKNOWN artists to create his “music.” If he did, people wouldn’t care about it or even know, would they? So, he is absolutely banking on the investment of hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of dollars in production and promotion of multiple artists to create a product he calls his own. So, it’s not just a question of whether or not he’s a musician. It’s also a question of whether or not he’s co-opted dozens of bankable brands/bands. And that is what will ultimately get him in trouble.
August 10th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
I’m willing to drop money on the bet none of you will be listening to GT in two years. Will be forgotten. It’s pointless arguing taste but I didn’t hear anything particularly new in his last release (which I paid for on Dave’s recommendation and deleted halfway thru), just a sharpening of trends and methods we’ve already heard from others. And now it’s reached a dead end with GT’s admittedly fine workmanship. None of it stands on its own as good music. Relies too much on the audience being in on the joke, and the effect of the joke will wear off soon.
An example of an act using samples to build real new songs that stand on their own? Lemon Jelly, I suppose. Listen to “‘79 aka The Shouty Track” off _’64-’95_ album. Recognize that sample? Nice if you do but does it matter?
August 10th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
Perhaps we should all revisit Byrne and Eno’s ‘My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts‘ album, probably the world’s first sample and mashup recording from 1981. No computers, just field recordings, found sounds, loops and edits of African and Arabian musicians mashed on to white boy rhythms back in a studio in New York.
Jon Pareles now the New York Times Chief Music Critic wrote when he was at Rolling Stone –
“What’s the difference between using evangelists’ rhetoric as lyrics (for “Once in a Lifetime” on Talking Heads’ Remain in Light) and using the voice of New Orleans preacher Reverend Paul Morton in “Help Me Somebody”? Plenty. “Once in a Lifetime” is obviously Byrne’s creation, complete on its own terms. “Help Me Somebody” is a falsified ritual, with its development truncated and its rhythm deformed. A psuedo-document, it teases us by being “real.” Even more annoying is “The Jezebel Spirit,” which utilizes a recorded exorcism. Byrne and Eno latch onto the rhythm of the exorcist’s dry laugh for the backup, but they fade out before we find out what happened to the possessed woman—which would have been a lot more interesting than the chattery band track. Blasphemy is beside the point: Byrne and Eno have trivialized the event.”
Pareles accused Byrne and Eno of cultural imperialism. Blasphemy and trivialization back in 1981 now revisited by Girl Tal in 2008. Nothing’s changed except the technology.
August 10th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
I say Greg is a really damn good producer with a good ear. I think that is more rare a talent than being a ‘musician’ (someone who plays an ‘instrument’). Of course, I’d argue his laptop becomes a live instrument the second he starts engaging an audience with it, which technically makes him a musician. You can then argue he didn’t ‘write’ his own parts but I could then point out that many so called ‘musicians’ don’t write their own parts either. Sid Vicious? There’s little point arguing anymore—software is an instrument—something that makes sound is an instrument—it’s all moot now as the human brain is the real instrument anyways (and always was all along). At least that’s what I say…
Fun topic.
August 11th, 2008 at 5:17 am
GirlTalk’s days are numbered and here’s why: there’s already a legal precedent set on all this via the Negativland U2 single. Island sued them into oblivion and the financial trouble it brought the band for lasted years afterwards. It’s not that GT has no artistic merit—but it will only take one artist out of those 300 samples to ruin him. Being sued, regardless of the outcome, is an expensive and time wasting process. Add to that the fact that the labels that may wind up suing GT have big legal departments and a seeming endless supply of money (for now, heh).
There’s only one way GT can avoid being successfully sued–by not selling his work.
As for the debate over whether GirlTalk is a musician or not, maybe he should change his name to R. Mutt and go into the toilet business….then people would get it.
August 11th, 2008 at 7:16 am
A person with a bunch of talent in video editing could put together the best, most exciting sporting event by combining clips from different sporting events.
They may be good at editing, but they are no athlete.
If you can actually play the music, you are a musician.
August 11th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
@Foster–they said the same thing about Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain…but it’s still doing the job today. I think the fact that we’re even having this debate is a critical part of what GirlTalk is doing regardless of whether he meant to do it or not.
Who is the musician in a situation where you have a composer with a score and an orchestra performing that score? Aren’t the members of the orchestra merely aping what’s been put down by somebody else–music made to order? Is this REALLY music or is it just work-for-hire like a bunch of interior decorators?
Or is the whole argument completely moot? There are sounds coming out and there are molecules being vibrated at specific frequencies. At the end of the day, we’re back to Duchamp and John Cage and the real measure of all this should be whether, as Frank Zappa once said, you think it’s “bitchin” or ir “sucks”.
August 11th, 2008 at 11:56 pm
Carri Bella, you sound like the kind of person who stands outside Amoeba records handing out the Drum Machines Have No Soul stickers to anybody who’ll take them (not many these days). I suppose you’d also stare at a Pollock and simple see paint splatters. After all, a TRUE artist should know how to work his paint and brushes. Maybe Warhol should be relegated back to rip-off con-man as well, since all he did was appropriate other peoples images. Then again just shove Paul’s Boutique back in the racks since it’s not worth a listen due to all the samples they used (uncleared as well. at the time it was “legal”). You know, music is just something that comes out of the fucking speakers man. Don’t get all wrapped up in where it came from, how it was made, and if the person making it knew what they were doing. If it moves you, it’s music. If it doesn’t then move on and don’t judge or criticism. Clearly Girl Talk has struck a chord with plenty of people…and Foster, I don’t think a video editor would claim to be an athlete. That’s a pretty stupid analogy, work on it and come back tomorrow with a better one.
August 12th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Bring da Noize, you couldn’t be more wrong. On my CD, my producer/friend (who is a digital wizard) has already used PROFESSIONAL samples of some instruments to fill out some of the arrangements. The key here is that this is EXACTLY what those samples were created for; the people who originally played on them were PAID for their work, as was the company that publishes them. And none of those samples are pre-fab songs; they’re instrument tones (or hits) that a REAL musician or composer can use to CREATE a song.
I’m not anti-drum machine. I’m anti-ripping-people-off.
August 15th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
[...] it right, getting exposed. A comment on the Girl Talk post, left by a user named ‘Natron’ led me to a web site for Happy Prescriptions, no doubt [...]
August 20th, 2008 at 9:48 am
[...] Related Post: Mashups, Girl Talk and Me [...]
August 20th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
Not to rehash, but to get the last word in…Carri you’re logic is flawed. So you’re saying that it becomes music (ergo art) because someone was PAID for the sample? Reread my post. Music is sounds, something that your hear live or comes out of the speakers. While the process of making it may be of importance to you, most listening couldn’t give 2-shits less. It lives or dies on the music itself. So argue that you don’t like the music, but don’t say it’s not music because he didn’t use a canned “professional” sample CD. Sure your stuff sounds great btw…..