Girl Talk uses comparatively primitive software for his mashups, so his process is labor-intensive. If you want to make life easier for yourself, get a hold of Ableton Live. Once you get a hang of the user interface, it’s a wonderfully versatile sampling and remixing tool. Before I got Ableton, I used a combination of various audio editors, Recycle and Reason, which worked well enough, but was a pain. Ableton is better.

Original question on Quora

While Girl Talk tracks have way too much information in them for my tastes, I could easily imagine having a rich musical life just unpacking their possibilities. Pop-oriented hip-hop over thrash metal! Gangsta rap over buttery piano ballads! Mixing prog and teeny bopper pop and classic rock! Teasing out the ideas suggested in these pairings could launch a thousand bands. In my own life as a musician, mashups have been the richest source of inspiration imaginable. Girl Talk lights the way with his fearless transgression of all boundaries of taste and style and copyright; it’s up to older and mellower musicians like me to pick up all the loose and tangled threads and knit them into something a little more coherent and structured.

Mashups by ethanhein

Why do some people like Girl Talk?

Let’s say one of the umpteen copyright holders sampled by Girl Talk decides to go after him. Greg Gillis is white, nerdy and well-educated. He’s a generally sympathetic, press-friendly defendant with a rabid online following. If the copyright holder wins, the internet will rise up as one in protest, resulting in a public relations disaster that’ll cost way more than any amount of money that could conceivably be wrung out of Gillis. If the hypothetical copyright holder loses, it opens the floodgates to unlicensed sampling under Fair Use, which right now has tenuous status at best as a legal argument. Rights holders prefer the status quo, where the law is murky and everyone is so nervous that they mostly license their samples. Girl Talk might be popular, but until unlicensed mashups dominate the pop charts, the music industry will probably just keep ignoring them.

I should add that Schwimmer himself owns and loves all of Girl Talk’s albums. I think Gillis is pretty safe.

Original question on Quora

Many mash-up artists seem unaware that their work implicates any rights at all, and copyright owners may be reluctant to alienate fans with copyright restrictions. Artists such as Girl Talk remain outspoken against copyright restrictions on mash-up culture. Individual copyright owners, such as the owners of Star Wars, have adopted terms of use for mash-ups.

Is fan and other mash-up activity important to enrich our culture? Are existing allowances for fair use adequate? Should mash-up artists and fan fiction publishers have any right (legal or moral) to complain when others copy and redistribute their work? What is a copyright owner or licensee to do when it has contractual obligations to third parties in connection with their contributions? How should these issues be resolved?

The panelists: Professor Sonia Katyal of Fordham Law School, Professor Shaka McGlotten of Purchase College, Martin Schwimmer (Partner, Moses & Singer), and me! The moderator is Jay Kogan (DC Comics and MAD Magazine).

February 24th, 2010
12:00 p.m.-12:30 p.m.: Cocktails (cash bar)
12:30 p.m.-1:00 p.m.: Lunch
1:00 p.m.-2:00 p.m.: Program
The Princeton Club, 15 West 43rd Street, New York, NY
Cost: $65.00 (members) $75.00 (non-members)

SPEAKERS (besides me):
SONIA KATYAL is a Professor of Intellectual Property, Property and Civil Rights Law at Fordham Law School. Her work focuses on intellectual property, civil rights, and new media, with a special focus on art and freedom of expression. Katyal was awarded a grant from the Warhol Foundation for her book, Contrabrand, which studies the relationship between art, advertising and intellectual property. Her new book, Property Outlaws, (co-authored with Eduardo M. Penalver), which studies the role of civil disobedience in property and technology, was just published from Yale University Press, and her work on fan fiction focuses on how copyright affects the representation of gender and sexuality. Her scholarly work has appeared in prominent legal publications, including the Texas Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the UCLA Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal. She received her A.B. from Brown University and her J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.

SHAKA MCGLOTTEN is an Assistant Professor of Media, Society, and the Arts at Purchase College, where he teaches courses on media, ethnography, and digital culture. His research focuses on the intersections of media technologies with categories of gender, sexuality, and race in particular. He also works in what might be broadly called “affect studies,” or the study of the ways feelings are central to our individually lived and shared social experiences. He is currently at work on a manuscript that explores these themes. “Virtual Intimacies: Media Cultures and Queer Sociality” examines a range of media sites DIY porn, online gaming, gay chatrooms to examine the mutual intensification between digital media culture and the creativity of queer sociality.

MARTIN SCHWIMMER is a partner in the New York law firm of Moses & Singer, practicing trademark and copyright law. He publishes The Trademark Blog, the nation’s oldest blog devoted to IP law. He is a fan of the Mets, the Jets, Arsenal, Lost, Fringe and Arrested Development. He has all of Girltalk’s albums.

MODERATOR:
JAY KOGAN is Vice President Business & Legal Affairs and Deputy General Counsel for “DC Comics” and “MAD Magazine”, where he serves as the companies chief intellectual property counsel. Jay is also an adjunct professor at New York Law School, where he teaches Intellectual Property Licensing and Drafting. Jay received his J.D. and Masters Degree in Mass Media in a dual degree program at Boston University School of Law and his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Connecticut.

Sponsored by the Copyright Society Of America

Glenn Gould wasn’t necessarily being prophetic. He was just paying attention to the long history of music before the relative eyeblink of the twentieth century. The always perspicacious Wayne Marshall says:

Only in the relatively recent past — within the last century — have songs, in the “fixed” media form of audio recordings, been so strongly regulated as pieces of property whose use by others might be strictly limited. An examination at the level of cultural practice — that is, how songs as audio recordings have been used by people — demonstrates that even in such “fixed” form, songs have continued to serve as a commonplace site of sharing and creative interaction (also known as remixing). This becomes particularly evident in the use of playback technologies such as turntables as creative instruments in their own right (aiding the emergence of hip-hop and disco in the 1970s), an approach powerfully extended by the tools of the digital age.

I’m a child of the cassette era. I loved making mix tapes in high school, for myself and whoever among my friends would listen. It was a pain, but still worth it. I still remember burning my first CD, sequencing the tracks with Toast before the half-hour long burn session during which the computer couldn’t do anything else. I’ve said farewell to albums with little sadness. It’s nice to listen to Graceland or Abbey Road in their original sequence, but for the most part, I do a better job of sequencing tracks for my own needs than anyone else can.

What’s true at the multiple-song level is even more true within a single song. Writing a song is really sequencing together a “mixtape” of licks, scale fragments, chord progressions and beats. When I learned how to play the guitar, I became free to string together whatever song fragments I could get under my fingers. It was fun being able to freely collage songs together, constructing segues and suites. All “new” compositions are really mashups you make in your head. Any creative undertaking is less like conjuring out of thin air and more like making a salad. As a sampler and remixer, my freedom of musical choice is total. Making mashups is a delightful blend of writing songs and putting together mixtapes, except that the pieces of music are shorter and layered simultaneously.

Mashup and remix culture isn’t new. Club DJs have been mashing up songs on the fly for decades, intermixing hot dance tracks with hooks and breaks from other well-known dance tracks. Girl Talk has nothing on “The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel” or Double Dee and Steinski’s “Lesson” mixes. Creating popular music is a ruthless evolutionary process. You sort through idea after idea, looking for the hooks. The best mashups take the Darwinian process to the next level, mating the hooks together into ultrahooks. My favorite mashups of the moment are the United State Of Pop mixes by DJ Earworm. He takes the top twenty-five singles from a given year and boils them down into single, devastating tracks.

United State Of Pop 2007

United State Of Pop 2008

There are plenty of other high-concept mashups like these, and some of them work as music, but a lot of them are gimmicky and annoying. In order to work, there has to be some musical resonance between the source tracks. The more unexpected the affinity, the better. My favorite Earworm mashup combines Django Reinhardt’s performance of “Brazil” with Paul Simon’s “Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes.”

Brazilian Diamonds

Who would have guessed that the bouncy rhythms of South African pop as filtered through the mind of a Jewish folksinger from Queens would mesh so well with the bouncy rhythms of samba as filtered through the mind of a Belgian gypsy jazz guitarist? This kind of discovery is only possible via a lot of trial and error. The growing ease and plummeting price of audio editing makes trial and error a lot less onerous than it used to be.

One of the great pleasures of sample-based music is encountering something familiar in a strange context. Sometimes the recontextualization can be jokey, like Ludacris’ ironically grandiose “Coming 2 America” which combines quotes from the Eddie Murphy movie with themes from both Mozartâ’s Requiem and the last movement of Dvorak’s New World symphony. Sometimes it’s playful without being jokey. Mozart’s “Queen of the Night” aria from his opera The Magic Flute shows up in “Like You” by Kelis, and it makes me wonder why every R&B song doesn’t include coloratura soprano.

The mixtape-mashup analogy isn’t perfect. Mixtapes are linear, with each song usually appearing once. If you make a mashup in this linear way, with each sample appearing only once, it will probably be annoying. Within the parameters of a song, repetition is crucial to enjoyment. This is why Girl Talk gets on my nerves. He runs a sample four or eight times and then forgets about it. His tracks are too much like watching someone else flip channels on TV for my tastes.

I’m especially interested in musicians who use samples of themselves as the basis of new works. The first Nas song I heard was his biggest hit, “Nas Is Like.” The chorus is based on samples of his earlier song “It Ain’t Hard To Tell.” When I heard the original, it sounded like it’s full of samples of “Nas Is Like.” This confusion of time sequence is one of the central pleasures of sample-based music for me. The meta-recursive hip-hop prize probably belongs to the Fugees, whose song “The Score” includes samples of every other song on the album of the same name.

The mashup doesn’t belong exclusively to music. The video mashup is coming excitingly into its own. I would have expected that combining two songs in 5/4 time might be too clever, but in this case it works:

The video mashup’s answer to DJ Earworm is Kutiman, who stitches together multiple Youtube videos. Check out “The Mother Of All Funk Chords”:

Jonathan Lethem’s essay on literary mashup culture, “The Ecstasy Of Influence,” is itself an amazing literary mashup. There are visual mashups too, I have a collection of them on Flickr. An intriguing random visual mashup maker is the Ad Generator. Its makers explain: “Words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans are remixed and randomized to generate invented slogans. These slogans are then paired with related images from Flickr, thereby generating fake advertisements on the fly.” It works uncannily well.

The fan-made advertising mashup shows the potential to become an entire new artistic style unto itself. Dig this trailer for an as-yet nonexistent Green Lantern movie made entirely out of pieces of other movie trailers:

Sasha Frere-Jones says in his essay 1 + 1 + 1 = 1:

See mashups as piracy if you insist, but it is more useful, viewing them through the lens of the market, to see them as an expression of consumer dissatisfaction. Armed with free time and the right software, people are rifling through the lesser songs of pop music and, in frustration, choosing to make some of them as good as the great ones.

This very blog post is a mashup of Glenn Gould and Wayne Marshall and DJ Earworm and Grandmaster Flash and Kutiman and uncountable others. I know there are plenty of copyright holders out there that regard any kind of derivative work as stealing. I think it’s a misplaced form of anxiety. I think mashups are natural, healthy, and the best vector to get your ideas circulating through the memepool long after you’re gone. As I was writing this post, I discovered someone did a version of my Michael Jackson sample map with Michael Jackson on it, and I couldn’t be more flattered.

Long live DJ culture, across whatever media!