From the sampled-based hip-hop of Run-DMC and De La Soul to Gregg Gillis' lift-happy releases under the moniker Girl Talk, creative borrowing has been at the center of a musical copyfight cyclone that threatens to underwhelm us all.The song remains the same, so to speak: We call it recycling. The man calls it stealing.
Last year, Gillis (pictured), 27, released one of the densest repurposings of all time: Feed the Animals, the fourth Girl Talk album, was built on more than 300 samples.
The fact that Feed the Animals became one of the most acclaimed releases of 2008 is instructive, given that the disc was built wholly from digitally rearranged samples of pop music's hottest hits from across the temporal spectrum.
And it's not like it was hard to spot them: From Ludacris and Outkast to the Spencer Davis Group, the samples stuck out like sore virtual thumbs. That was, after all, the point.
The copyfight mechanism that has claimed Pittsburgh-based Gillis as its center is explored in the forthcoming movie RiP: A Remix Manifesto, which lands online and onscreen March 15. The film, billed as the world's first open source documentary, analyzes the current strain of creative borrowing and capitalization with the help of Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig, Gilberto Gil and more.
Wired.com caught up with Gillis by e-mail to chat about RiP, copyfight, tour vlogging and why he's advertising that he's a PC rather than a Mac.
Read the rest of the story here.
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