I may be late to this party, but DJ Gregg Gillis has me laughing, dancing, and marveling at the same time. I’ve been a huge fan of mash-ups ever since I got my first Best of Bootie remix from my sister, but Girl Talk takes it to a new level.
A recent article in the Kentucky Kernel, Music mash-up DJ Girl Talk creates art amid controversy, comments perfectly on the Girl Talk phenomenon,
“He’s definitely electronica,” said WRFL General Manager Ainsley Wagoner, an interior design senior. “He plays to the Twitter generation. He condenses dance tracks into just the hooks.”
Describing one of his albums,
It bangs as a continuous mix packed with wildly disparate Top 40 genres and eras. Current hip hop hits, soft rock radio standards, party classics, grunge masterpieces, R&B singles, glossy club-shakers, and rock anthems are all layered and pieced meticulously together into one non-stop celebration of pop and excess. Only Girl Talk’s magical touch could please both dance-crazed teenage masses and mashup geeks with equal love. Mark Hosler of Negativland has declared it “a plunderphonics party record.”
It’s true, I will wager if you are at all into pop music, you will immediately love any and all tracks from Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals, despite its electronica label. And, while the music and video mash-ups are cute, it’s the economics of his schtick that intrigues me. His album is selling pay-as-you-like off his website.
But does it pay the bills?
I’m going to guess his sponsorship by KIA Motors says yes. But to be clear, giving your stuff away as your only artist marketing strategy is putting the cart before the horse. Really, watching the cart roll down a hill, if you do not have the audience development skills Girl Talk has been cultivating for years. At this point, giving away his CD is part goodwill (which, if you are familiar with corporate finance, has an intangible value and gets its own line-item on a balance sheet), and part “traditional” profit.
So, Girl Talk shows he works his ass off (literally: he strips for many of his college shows) and whether or not you like his musical taste, his mash-ups really are remarkable, not just for content, but because of the nature of the content. Mash-ups are, by definition, stolen material, so Gillis plays the edge of copyright and supposedly pisses off the artists he samples. But you have to think that what’s good for Gillis is good for Kanye, (whose Flashing Lights I just YouTubed, inspired by a GT Mash-up) the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and even Avril Lavigne.
Gillis contends his music is protected by the fair use doctrine on the grounds that the amount of material he pulls from each song is not large enough to constitute copyright infringement.
The fair use doctrine contains four main pillars, and Gillis must be able to argue that he is protected against the other three to be safe from lawsuit. Courts take into account whether the infringing work is being used for profit, the nature and content of the infringing work, and the effect on the market value of the copyrighted work.
Gillis’ argument has the edge in the legal community, and he has yet to be the target of a copyright lawsuit. Peter Friedman, a University of Detroit Mercy Law School professor, said in a July 2009 article on the Web site techdirt.com that he would advise the RIAA not to sue Gillis.
“Gillis’ argument that he has transformed the copyrighted materials sufficiently that his work constitutes non-infringing fair use is just too good,” Friedman said in his article.
Artists, take note.
