More talk about Girl Talk
The NYT looks at the Girl Talk phenom. If you’ll recall, Girl Talk is Gregg Gillis, who constructs sound collages almost entirely based on snippets from mostly popular songs. He says it’s fair use, but he and his record company are both aware of the legal diciness of what they are purveying and have taken steps coherent and incoherent to minimize their liability.
Hitsville thinks what sane people do—that the nation’s copyright laws have been hijacked 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 used this way, a lot are.
Take “Pump It Up”—the most distinctive and forceful parts of the songs are clips from “My Humps,” “Carry On Wayward Son” and “Tears of a Clown,” and in each case the fun comes not from his purposeful de- and then re-contextualization of a parts of a song, but rather … the fact that he’s using the whole damn “Clown” riff.
Most fair people when listening to the Girl Talk tracks would concede that a lot of their force or enjoyment lays in the hooks or dynamics of the originals.
In other words, while he sometimes offers a transformative force in the collages, a lot of the time he doesn’t.
From the NYT:
Fair use has become important to the thinking of legal scholars, sometimes called the “copyleft,” who argue that copyright law has grown so restrictive that it impedes creativity. And it has become enough of an issue that Mr. Gillis’s congressman, Representative Mike Doyle, Democrat of Pennsylvania, spoke on his behalf during a hearing on the future of radio.
“You have to look at the length of those samples,” Mr. Doyle said in a phone interview. “Case law gets built as cases are brought to court, and I think that more case law is going to fall on his side as this becomes more mainstream.”
Not all lawyers agree. “Fair use is a means to allow people to comment on a pre-existing work, not a means to allow someone to take a pre-existing work and recreate it into their own work,” said Barry Slotnick, head of the intellectual property litigation group at the law firm Loeb & Loeb. “What you can’t do is substitute someone else’s creativity for your own.”
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Previously in Hitsville:
Girl Talk: Walking a legal thin line
Some perceptive comments on the item here.
6 Comments so far
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> Most fair people when listening to the Girl Talk tracks would concede that a lot of their force or enjoyment lays in the hooks or dynamics of the originals.
Ah, “most fair people.” Someday I’d like to meet these most fair people.
Anyway, if this is true, then why aren’t GT fans just listening to Smokey instead?
A cynical reply might be that GT is a badge of hipness and Smokey is not, and in some cases perhaps there’s truth to that.
But it’s also true that the pleasure of GT isn’t JUST the Smokey riff or whatever. It’s hearing it in a new context in which the original “dynamics” are almost completely reworked (since dynamics, after all, are all ABOUT context, no?).
It’s also unfair and inaccurate to imply, as you do, that the context is just a background hip-hop beat ad infinitum. There’s much more going on in a typical GT track than that.
Arguably TOO much going on, even — I certainly have plenty of reservations about GT myself. But my own reservations are strictly aesthetic, not ethical (as yours seem to be).
GT’s ‘recontextualizing’ is part of the rush, but I agree that using 32 beats of a song [the Kelly Clarkson sample must be that long or longer, among many of the others] can’t possibly be considered fair use. GT’s contribution should be recognized and rewarded but he leans too much on the original creations to claim innocence of responsibility for compensation. And any arguments about all music’s use of similar ‘emotion triggers’ or whatever is wholly bunk. I don’t even think there’s much genuine recontexttualizing going on, and regardless of how hard GT worked or how much he sweats on stage, his work is not his own. Pay up, mr ex-biomedical engineer!
Thanks for writing. It’s a super interesting question. I’m still thinking about all of this. I think
a)that he should be getting permissions and that what he’s doing is probably outside his fanciful assertion of fair use;
b)that his aesthetics aren’t good enough to warrant going to he mat for him; and
c) that paradoxicaly, we don’t want judges making aesthetic decisions, which is probably why he should have gotten permissions in the first place.
There *is* a lot going on the a typical GT song, but—there is too much *not* going on, by which I mean, here is a lot of simple lifting of long passages from cool riffs from famous songs.
Finally, when I talk about dynamics and such, I mean that he retains enough of the original songs that a lot of the pleasures of his tracks come from the dynamics or riffs of the originals. Check out the long Boston passage I mentioned: it starts off soft, then gets really loud. The GT song totally rocks *because the original Boston song did*. Or take the call-and-response piccolos (or whatever they are) on “Tears of a Clown.” He’s not using the call *or* the response—it’s all of it!
Listening to Girl Talk was the single most disappointing musical event of the year. Feed the Animals is literally just a DJ set; maybe a good one, but it’s just someone spinning and mixing someone else’s music. I do think a lawsuit is inevitable, but aside from the legality of the work, the quality is just . . . well, it’s not something new.
Basically I just want my $2.50 back.
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