Girl Talk: Walking a thin legal line
Girl Talk is the name sampler extraordinaire Greg Gillis works under; his songs are either sheer genius or the cheapest of tricks. When sampling began to take center stage in the hip hop world, long ago, the best examples of it were revelatory and thrilling all at once; recontextualized riffs and hooks that both made something new and changed your understanding of the originals. The practice at once grew more sophisticated (with the collagist work of Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad production team) and cheesier (MC Hammer, Puffy).
Girl Talk takes it all to a new extreme; his works are entirely collages, but collages made up almost entirely of recognizable choruses and central riffs of other recordings. They are at once impressive and irritating, ineffable but somehow suspect.
Sure the guy puts a lot of work into constructing the things, but in the end the main pleasures you get from them come not from his work, but the riffs themselves. A typical example is the song “Once Again,” the beginning of which has Ludacris rapping over a sample from an old Boston rock track. But the samples aren’t quick; they are long. And, particularly with the Boston part, the force of the song comes not from Gillis’s creative sampling, but the dynamics of the original. The song continues, and then we get another long sample, this from the Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony.”
Anyway, I was thinking about all of this because the Daily Swarm linked to a NY Magazine’s web site interview with Gillis. Gillis doesn’t clear his samples; the legal dynamite he’s playing with is obvious. The strategy he and his label, Illegal Art, have adopted has two parts. The first is mumbling something about fair use:
You sample some of the biggest artists in music on this record. How concerned are you about getting sued by one of them?
I feel morally sound that we shouldn’t be sued — I feel like the music’s transformative; it doesn’t negatively impact anyone. And there’s a thing called Fair Use that protects work like that. It’s definitely a concern, especially with the increased level of press this album is getting, but I feel sound about it and I think there’s a whole academic and legal movement supporting more creative and open exchange of culture and ideas.
There’re a lot of movements out there doing a lot of things that have no legal basis, and this is one of them. The courts have repeatedly said that samples need to be cleared with rights holders, period. And I think Gillis is going to find that Allen B. Klein isn’t going to be impressed with the moral soundness of his convictions.
Their second gambit is talking about how they aren’t making much money from the recordings; here’s the head of Illegal Art, who goes by the name “Philo T. Farnsworth,” making his case to Billboard:
What money Illegal Art has made in the last few years is reinvested into the operation. “It’s very similar to a typical book publisher,” Farnsworth says. “They’ll make money off one book but lose money on four others. We kind of operate the same way. We’ll make money on Girl Talk, but we reinvest everything we make. We’re interested in promoting what we do rather than pocketing money.”
Gillis, too, talks about how he doesn’t look after his business affairs very well. This isn’t going to get either of them anywhere in court. (And the Billboard story notes in any case he’s pulling in $25,000 a night for his shows, which consist of him and a laptop playing his songs, though he’s not required to get licenses to perform the samples publicly.)
The pair are aware they are in a very grey area:
At first, Illegal Art and Gillis were mulling a sliding-scale royalty system, where sampled artists would receive a small percentage of revenue. One idea was to enact a system that mirrors the compulsory license fee for a cover version, where each track would earn 9.1 cents in royalties. Another was to open the whole thing up to fan voting to decide how much a given artist would receive. Should an act decide not to claim its royalty, Illegal Art would donate it to charity.
“One of the things we’re wrestling with is that if we were to put forward a royalty system, are we implying that the work isn’t or shouldn’t be classified as fair use?” Farnsworth asks. “If it is fair use, which has always been the ground we’ve stood on, then there is no need for a royalty system.”
But the whole concept was eventually scrapped, after Illegal Art’s lawyers “advised us that it would weaken our fair use position if someone took us to court,” according to Farnsworth. He still sees fair use protection as “a big deterrent” against potential legal action, but admits, “We’re a very small organization. If someone wanted to make our life miserable, they could.”
I’m in favor of sticking it to the man as much as the next guy, but I find Girl Talk’s work pretty exploitative. You’re not getting a new collagist creation; at best the effect is generally more like two radios scanning through various pop stations at the same time. And at worst it’s just like all those cheesy bubblegum rap songs, where some guy is rapping over an old pop hit. He does use snippets as well as longer samples; but in most of his tracks, the drive and attraction of them comes from the original songs, not his repurposing of them.
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I’m totally a fan of Gillis/Girl Talk, but I find it amazing he hasn’t been sued yet. Though didya ever notice the lawsuits seem to happen years later? Maybe Gillis’s saving grace is his underground status. Years from now a granddaughter of someone from Boston will play grandpa Girl Talk and the shit will hit the fan for Gillis.
I wonder if one reason artists aren’t suing Girl Talk is because of his status as an anti-copyright hero. Making an issue over illegal use didn’t work out so well for Lars Ulrich’s reputation, after all…
But then again, labels have been lawsuit-happy since forever. It just puzzles me that he hasn’t faced any challenges yet. There is no way some of the artists he’s sampled haven’t heard him, especially with two acclaimed albums under his belt.
I think those are both good theories. It’s hard to tell him many actual CDs he has sold, but he does sell them and is obviously making money by performing live, so he’s a sitting target.
I don’t know how long his anti-copyright hero status will last, though. I want to make clear; I think a lot of the crazy copyright stuff going on right now is excessive. But Gillis’s stuff, while fun, is really just Stars on 45 with a sampler.
No one’s going to tell him he can’t do it, just that he needs to get clearances.
Bill, I don’t think you’re being fair in describing what Girl Talk actually is. There is a LOT going on in these songs. It isn’t like what Hammer and Vanilla Ice or Puff Daddy did. After reading your post, I decided to listen to the new release on my run last night. I spotted so many little samples. Like a few beats of the drums from the intro to Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy.” Or Huey Lewis going “Dt dt dt dt, ” as in “Dt dt dt dt dt dey say the heart of rock and roll is still beatin.” It’s so much more than just putting a hip hop vocal over a Cher track. Or something. And for the record I LOVE the transitions, often within a single song. The one that gets me from this record is the transition from The Carpenters to Metallica. And, again, unlike Puffy or Hammer et al, the samples here seriously do not go on for more than 5-10 seconds, and most are a LOT less.
BTW, if I’d have know he racks in $25K a night DJing, I would not have paid $13 for his new CD under his Radiohead-like pay-what-you-want scheme. Seriously.
You misquote the Billboard article which actually says he “can now command upwards of $20,000 for a 90-minute set” That means that he often makes less, and in fact making that much or even half could be rare. Booking agents typically ask for more than they really expect and I think that Billboard figure comes from an isolated event (they don’t cite their source). Also any figure may not take into account costs (booking agent fees, venue %, travel, equipment damage, etc.). All around it is very misleading and not substantiated in the article.
Also, he doesn’t just play his songs. He’s constantly triggering new layers and juxtapositions in a live concert. He’s regularly preparing new samples and clips to put into his show. There are plenty of other musicians who show and just go through the same songs as they exist on the record every night. I think Girl Talk is at least attempting to create a new experience every night. I have never seen him just go through the motions and play each mix exactly as it was originally constructed.
While there may be court cases that say you can’t sample without permission, those generally didn’t take a strong fair use defense. Very few legal teams know how to effectively defend fair use. Most Intellectual Property lawyers aren’t even that well versed in fair use law. It’s often not even brought up in sampling cases (see the Slate article titled “Why hasn’t Diddy tried to save music sampling”). Effective fair uses defenses have been done, though, for other forms of expression. A prime example is the defense for Jeff Koons’ Niagara piece. And there are very strong parallels between Koons’ visual collage and Gillis’ audio work.
There are plenty of people who do not appreciate what Gillis does, but there are also a lot of critics and fans that hold it in high regard. The general feeling is that he is doing something unique and transformative. A court could decide otherwise, but when you get into the amount of detail that is in his work, it’s pretty incredible. The fact that it can trick your ear into thinking it’s much simpler than it is, is part of the artistry. There are fairly accurate listings on wikipedia that detail the number of samples in each track. And that doesn’t even account for other subtle manipulations (pitch and time) done to the samples.
You do make a good point, though, that what propels any moment is someone else’s creation, but that is part of Girl Talk’s concept. He couldn’t make his art without taking the heart of other creations. One of his points is that all popular music, regardless of genre or target demographic, essentially pushes the same emotional buttons. There is purpose behind his work beyond just pleasure. While his work isn’t parody, there is commentary embedded in what he is doing. And if the Supreme Court has said that parody has to take the heart of the original to makes it point, a parallel argument could be made for Girl Talk.
I suspect one answer to why Girl Talk hasn’t been sued yet is that the labels are more worried about losing their entire industry (and rightly so). The petty “you sampled one phrase of our catalog” lawsuits of 5-10 years ago are more of a legal gamble than taking 12-year-olds to court for digital bootlegging (admittedly the RIAA’s hobby rather than individual labels). And there’s also the court of public opinion — the music industry is incredibly unpopular right now; more disliked even than the US Congress, President Bush, or urinary tract infections.
- TradeMark G.
(The Evolution Control Committee, another legally dubious sampling band)
[…] by Big Content—but also thinks that Girl Talk is something of a sham, for reasons detailed here. I don’t think the lengthy borrowings he makes qualify as fair use; while not every sample is […]
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