Girl Talk

One of my favorite musicians out there right now, Mr. Gregg Gillis, otherwise known as Girl Talk, is perhaps one of the better known figures of appropriative creation in music today. For those of you who don't know who he is, Girl Talk is a DJ/mashup artist that takes bits of other songs and remixes them into new songs. He was featured in both of the documentaries that I blogged about earlier. You can check out his process below:


Girl Talk's music has come up as part of this issue of fair use. Fair use, according to the U.S. Copyright Office is determined by four main factors:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
2. The nature of the copyrighted work
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work

You can read more about fair use on their website here.
This issue of fair use in Girl Talk's music is a difficult one to navigate since both sides of the argument make sense (creative freedom and progression vs. the law) - so much so that there's even a mock trial of what might go down between Girl Talk and the owners of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" (which Gillis has used as a sample in one of his albums).

Regardless of the legal nature of Girl Talk's music, it's still fun stuff to shake the booty to. I got to see him in concert when he came to Gainesville last spring. At one point I was so close to him that he and I joined hands and danced to the music he was playing.

Before this post gets too long, below is a video of a class project that was done in conjunction with the Remixer's Manifesto documentary and the Open Source Cinema Project. The media communications class from Concordia University rotoscoped a sequence of performance clips of Girl Talk. It sort of looks how you feel at a Girl Talk concert, colorful, sweaty, dazed, and confused....