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So Amazing, So Illegal
Jamie gave me a nice writeup of a mashup where the writer shares some random youtube mashup video that you maybe have seen before called the Mother of all Funk Chords. It's a pretty amazing artistic achievement and probably worth at least a quick glance of your time. But the larger point should be taken seriously. He says "If your reaction to this crate of magic is 'Hm. I wonder how we'd go about suing someone who "did this" with our IP?' instead of, 'Holy crap, clearly, this is the freaking future of entertainment,' it's probably time to put some ramen on your Visa and start making stuff up for your LinkedIn page. Because, this is what your new Elvis looks like."
I write music... well, modest little piano pieces. I haven't uploaded any videos of me playing to youtube (yet), but I would be THRILLED to find that my stuff had been reworked into something like this.
Then again, I have considered issuing my tunes as open source (there's some places to do that online.)
This space available.
Kutiman, the artist who did the Thu-You audiovideo compositions, did a marvelous job. As other posters have noted, these songs are generally good compositions, beyond the novelty effect.
But, seriously, there isn't that much new here. These really aren't even mash-ups, because such extensive editing has happened. The classic mash-up, Dark Side of The Moon played against The Wizard of Oz retains the originals in great part, and while their combination brings a sum that is greater than the individual parts, it would be difficult to argue that it would qualify for fair-use exception from copyright protection.
The Thru-You project deconstructs the source material into individual components and re-assembles as an entirely new whole. There is no question of copyright violation because it is clearly a derivative work. It's an exceptionally cool idea, and in this case done very well, but collaging isn't new, even within the music industry.
There are entire genres of popular music that are devoted to construction of new songs from sampled components of other songs. Perhaps the first genre where this happened with distinction was House music, starting, what, 20 years ago? Of course, the more technology advances, the more deconstructed-reconstructed the music can become, but still, someone like club master Stephane Pompougnac has been publishing his Hotel Costes line of recompositions for 10 years now.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Future generations will look back on this time in history and wonder why the recording industry was so hot to protect top 40 crap-pop.
Probably not. I suspect future generations will look back and ask, wide-eyed, "Wow, they could just steal arbitrary two-note sequences from other artists dead less than the full millennium required by Disney? Didn't they worry about getting the death penalty?"
There's nothing new or illegal about this.
This is what subsampling law is explicitly for; the law even goes as far as to say how long each clip can be and still be legal (and he's way, way in the clear.) Intellectual property law explicitly allows things like this in the United States as long as they're within guidelines, and this is well within guidelines. This is how the TV news and rappers get through their day.
As far as new, bands like White Noise, James Tenney and The Beatles were doing this in the early 1960s; your choice of "The New Elvis" is particularly apropos, as this was determined legal in 1961 regarding James Tenney's Collage #1 ("Blue Suede"), made out of Elvis samples (though some would argue that there are earlier examples.)
This is what my old Elvis looked like.
But the video is freaking epic, that much is true.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Go listen to Frank Zappa and the Mother's 1966 "Return of the Son of Monster Magnet", one of the most groundbreaking tracks of the twentieth century. It's "what freaks sound like when you turn them loose in a recording studio at one o'clock in the morning on $500 worth of rented percussion equipment" -- pretty much something they conceived in a dark room.
I'm pretty sure that Beethoven, Mozart, et. al. conceived some of their music in dark rooms.
Yes, live improvised music, or composed music varied in response to the crowd, is great too. But the fact that live stuff can be great doesn't preclude stuff conceived in a dark room by artists working alone also being great.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
It ain't just the chords. Proof. "Best" listened to with headphones.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
If your reaction to this crate of magic is 'Hm. I wonder how we'd go about suing someone who "did this" with our IP?' instead of, 'Holy crap, clearly, this is the freaking future of entertainment,'
what if your reaction is "this looks and sounds like ass" ?