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In print | Published November 5, 2009

On August 22, 1990, a young man named Robert Van Winkle released a seminal hip-hop track that was at once a monumental mainstream success for the genre, a colossal affront to the integrity of the art form and an act of blatant thievery. Better known to the world as Vanilla Ice, Van Winkle’s song “Ice Ice Baby” sampled the bassline of the 1981 Queen and David Bowie collaboration “Under Pressure” without crediting the original composers. One lawsuit later, Vanilla Ice was forced to hand over $4 million and songwriting credit to Freddie Mercury and Bowie.

The reason we bring up “Ice Ice Baby” is not to renew memories of a song that Blender Magazine once ranked fifth in its list of the 50 Worst Songs Ever, but to preface the many arguments lodged against the mash-up artist Gregg Gillis, better known as Girl Talk, who will be the main act of this semester’s Large Scale Event. Girl Talk’s musical creations have also come under fire for being popular despite being derivative, and many question both his legitimacy and his originality as an artist. Vanilla Ice stole only a bassline from Queen and David Bowie and was forced to pay $4 million; Girl Talk’s repertoire consists solely of, as a 2008 New York Times review states, “a collage of hits, recent and old, that are instantly recognizable to just about everyone in the crowd.”

With four albums released since 2002, all under the appropriately named label Illegal Art, Girl Talk is enjoying success while still under intense scrutiny. If critics are not concerned about the legality of his work, then they question the morality of it, and many challenge the very notion that Girl Talk is a musical artist at all: as a 2006 Stylus Magazine review of his album “Night Ripper” scoffs, “Gillis … deliver[s] decent, low-fiber escapism and … cheap thrills.” Arguments in these veins are easy to make, but they definitely require further exploration before anyone quickly denounces Girl Talk’s work.

To begin with, consider the legal worries surrounding Girl Talk. There are four factors that guide “fair use” under United States law, three of which can be applied to the controversy: purpose and character of the use, amount and substantiality of the use, and effect of use on original value of the used work. Supporters of Girl Talk will argue that his music is transformative, but there are equally strong arguments that he falls short in the first factor. Fair use can be attributed to educational or critical works, neither of which Girl Talk qualifies for. His music is hardly a parody of anything else, either, which would be permissible under fair use rulings — he is simply mashing together tracks, after all.

Girl Talk’s proponents may go on to say that his music only takes short samples from others’ material, which does not constitute copyright infringement. While this is true in some cases and not in others (he lifts entire verses from rap songs for some of his own tracks, for example), this argument is potentially irrelevant. In the Harper & Row vs. Nation Enterprises case of 1985, the Supreme Court ruled that even a short sample is illegal if the sample is “key” or important enough. (So Vanilla Ice might have been guilty of copyright infringement even if he had just used the “Under Pressure” bassline for a couple of bars, since the riff was the foundation of the song.)

On the final point, defenders of Girl Talk (and, indeed, the man himself) contend that the original artists’ songs have hardly been devalued as a result of the mash-ups. If anything, borrowing from some older songs has reinvigorated their appeal. But while there is enough gray area in the law to favor Girl Talk, obviously there remain convincing arguments against him from a legal standpoint.

From an ethical standpoint, Girl Talk’s detractors also have plenty to say. There are those who question the morality of taking other artists’ work and adding nothing original to it, and then passing it off as new material. It seems, however, that making that argument ignores the inventive nature of Girl Talk’s music. Mashing up tracks sounds easy to do, but to fit the beat from a hip-hop track to the vocals of classic rocks and the backing melody of a trashy ’80s pop song is definitely harder than it sounds. And it is not as though Girl Talk is pulling a Vanilla Ice and claiming credit for the songs he borrows from (it also helps that Girl Talk is not putting out garbage like “Ice Ice Baby”); on the contrary, Girl Talk explicitly disavows credit for the source material and does not charge for his music, which can be found online.

Yet there he is on stage, raking in the profits from live concerts. Surely there is something wrong about achieving success based completely on other artists’ songs without even giving them so much as royalty checks. But this argument sounds weak. Maybe some do feel strongly that Girl Talk is obliged to pay the hundreds of musicians he borrows from, but to feel as such would be to ignore the undeniable fact that people have demonstrated a great willingness to pay for Girl Talk concerts specifically without regard to whether the artists he cribs from are compensated. If people are willing to give up money for his performances, what right does anyone have to push any kind of nebulous moral argument against him?

At the same time, the copyright worries crop up again even for Girl Talk’s live shows. Clubs, for example, have to pay licensing fees to play music for partygoers’ enjoyment; Girl Talk, as clearly established, has paid no fees in the creation and subsequent presentation of his music. Until the legal ambiguity is resolved, though, this remains a fairly weak point.

What is not a weak point is the argument concerning the integrity of the music he mashes together. Somehow, it does not feel right to blaspheme “Bohemian Rhapsody” by mashing it with “Umbrella,” or, worse, the aforementioned Vanilla Ice, both of which Girl Talk does in the track “Set It Off.” And then there are the politically or socially powerful messages that some songs project; mash-ups, it would seem, horribly cheapen these messages. Girl Talk might as well play Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech over “Crank Dat (Soulja Boy).”

Nevertheless, the overarching point that must be made is that, musically or ethically or otherwise, Girl Talk does retain a measure of ownership over what he has created. There is an excellent Malcolm Gladwell article in The New Yorker from 2004, in which the journalist muses on the nature of plagiarism and deriving from others’ work, having been the “victim” of plagiarism himself. Called “Something Borrowed,” the article reveals Gladwell’s inclination against so quickly condemning those who take from others’ material and then expand upon it, sometimes in completely new directions. “Old words in the service of a new idea aren’t the problem,” Gladwell writes. “What inhibits creativity is new words in the service of an old idea.”

In Girl Talk’s mash-ups, then, what we find surely are new and innovative ideas presented through an amalgamation of old words. To deny him the musical ownership — if not his legal ownership — of the creations would be to deny the very nature of art itself: a constant reframing, remixing and reviving of previous progressions. Whether or not an individual enjoys the dance tracks produced from combining Golden Age rap and alternative rock and R&B is irrelevant to the conversation on Girl Talk’s musical validity.

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