We’re going to be talking about musical mash-ups in class today, so here are several videos were going to be using in conjunction with this.
Here’s the opening sequence from the film Girl Walk // All Day, based on Girl Talk’s album All Day.
Lots of different songs and raps being mixed together there. Let’s take a look at what’s happening. Here’s a link to a visual breakdown of “Oh No,” the first track of All Day.
One of the big questions that get raised here is whether mash-ups are “stealing” the work of other artists. I can’t answer that question directly, but let’s get started here with the first episode of of Kirby Ferguson’s brilliant series, Everything is a Remix.
Part 1: The Song Remains the Same
To throw back to your previous post on ‘75,000 people are viewing, playing a single game of Pokemon Red online’; that entire phenomenon is a remix.
Along the way an anonymous Twitch user decided to take two original forms (Twitch streaming and Nintendo/Gamefreak’s Pokemon) and remix them into a new way of experiencing the game – TwitchPlaysPokemon. From there users remixed the content of their adventure with religious and political imagery to develop and entire mythology behind their experience. This phenomenon has extended to remixing forms of music, webcomic, artwork, and more. Now more than ever our culture is broken down into meme-sized chunks relating our experiences to other experiences which came from somewhere else entirely to begin with.
Twitch Vice President of Marketing Matthew DiPietro recently said TwitchPlaysPokemon was “one more example of how video games have become a platform for entertainment and creativity that extends WAY beyond the original intent of the game creator.” The same can be said of all remixes and the more quickly we blur the lines between stealing and remixing (within reason), the sooner we’ll find ourselves in an entirely new era of creativity – which honestly may already be upon us.
Here’s some legal information regarding mashups. There’s a link to the full paper which is quite interesting.
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/media_law_prof_blog/2012/03/mashups-and-copyright.html
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