Girl Talks Girl Talk

Following today's discussion about music on the internet I just had to put in a mention about how some artists are taking it into their own hands.

Girl Talk (aka Gregg Gillis) is a DJ offering his latest album Feed the Animals for virtually free on the internet. I say "virtually" because you can "pay anything you want". His myspace page links to this page, which explains

"any price grants the download of the entire album as high-quality 320kbps mp3s
$5 or more adds the options of FLAC files, plus a one-file seamless mix of the album
$10 or more includes all of the above + a packaged CD (when it becomes available)

Feed the Animals by Girl Talk is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. The CC license does not interfere with the rights you have under the fair use doctrine, which gives you permission to make certain uses of the work even for commercial purposes. Also, the CC license does not grant rights to non-transformative use of the source material Girl Talk used to make the album. "

(One funny thing is that Amazon is still selling it)

Why might he do such a thing? Because Girl Talk is the prime example of a mashup DJ, meaning he basically takes VERY recognizeable, mostly UNAUTHORIZED clips from other artists and mixes them together as his own art. And we're talking WAY divergent sources: Busta with the Police, Elton John with the Pharcyde, the Pixies with Ludacris (Wikipedia has a list of all the clips used in the Night Ripper album).

Many people think its "a lawsuit waiting to happen", but if you ask me he has two of the four provisions of the Fair Use Doctrine of copyright law in his corner: his work really is substiantially different, and it most likely has a positive effect on the original copyrighted work.

And, just as we saw some big gross profits from tours in class today, Girl Talk seems to be doing pretty well by touring. My husband bought two tickets to his last show at Terminal 5 (off Craiglist at a markup because it had already sold out). Place was packed! And I didn't realize Terminal 5 was an all-ages venue...I saw more 17 year olds in tube tops and leg warmers than you ever thought possible.

It will be interesting to see how this type of art will fare in the future as the music industry continues to try to figure itself out. I gotta say - this whole controversy seems eerily similar to what some visual artists (the "appropriationists") took on in the eighties. Sherrie Levine took pictures of other artists photographs and presented it as her own work (sometimes with a wee bit of frame at the edges). She wasn't trying to fool anybody. She would always title the work after the artist she had imitated. The most famous is "After Walker Evans" . Today she is critically acclaimed. We'll see if Girl Talk can't also be credited with provoking a post-modern consideration of originality and authenticity...