You hear the opening chords to The Beatles' "Let It Be." The progression is familiar: slow and marching with a three-chord cadence at the end. As the final chords ring, you anticipate Paul McCartney's familiar vocals, but instead a different line comes in: "Honey came in and she caught me red handed / Creeping with the girl next door / Picture this we were both butt naked / Banging on the bathroom floor."
What you're hearing is a mash-up, the latest musical trend whose popularity been on the rise thanks to popular artists such as Girl Talk, - who is currently selling out shows on his international tour - and Danger Mouse. Danger Mouse's 2004 release "The Grey Album" combined a number of tracks from The Beatles' "White Album" and Jay-Z's "The Black Album" and introduced the public at large to the genre.
Mash-ups are created by combining elements from multiple songs, usually from radically different genres. Despite the differences between the original pieces, the ultimate goal of a mash-up is to create a song that flows and can stand on its own.
Even with the rising popularity of mash-ups, there has been legal controversy over sampling, the technique upon which they are based. This method involves taking a portion of an original sound recording and reusing it in another recording, usually another sample.
The problem that many mash-up artists face is that they have not obtained permission from the copyright owners of the work they are sampling, and therefore may encounter problems with U.S. copyright law.
This code states that only the owner of a copyrighted work has the right to reproduce or authorize others to reproduce the work, but it also outlines standards for "fair use," which include cases of comment and criticism. Artists argue that their work meets fair use standards, and the copyright holders maintain that what the musicians are doing is infringement.
An early battle over fair use ensued more than 10 years ago, when Illegal Art Records, the label that now owns Girl Talk, released "Deconstructing Beck," a compilation of 13 songs created entirely from Beck samples that were not legally approved by his recording label. Despite threats from Beck's label, Geffen Records, Illegal Art's pseudonymous founder, Philo T. Farnsworth, stood his ground on advice from his lawyers, who told him that the letters from Geffen were only threats, not real court orders. Eventually the legal threats died down, but the publicity that Illegal Art had received earned the record company infamy.
Farnsworth views the continuation of his company as a political statement.
"Releasing our music is a form of civil disobedience, except we're not really doing anything wrong," he said in an interview with The Eagle. "Sampling is perceived as being illegal, but really, it's just a gray area, and we'd like to challenge these boundaries as much as possible."
Farnsworth expressed his distaste for the fourth part of the statute, which concerns the effect of use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. According to Farnsworth, sampling should be protected by this rule.
"If you create something that doesn't impact the same market as the original, then why should anyone care?" he said.
And although pressure is being taken off of sampling because of the legal behemoth that is online downloading, sampling is receiving heat within the musical community for trying to legitimize itself as a genre. So the question must be asked: are mash-up artists truly musicians, or are they just glorified DJs?
Farnsworth stands behind his art.
"DJing is just mixing tracks; the typical DJ plays most of a track, whereas sampling just takes a smaller bit," he said. "It's transformative, and in the end it becomes its own entity."
And while he goes on to support the legitimacy of the genre and praise the abilities of his label's golden child, Girl Talk, those immersed in music and club culture tend to disagree.
Lauren Keating, a Kogod School of Business graduate student, is a DJ who spins at local clubs such as UltraBar. She describes her work as technical and mathematical and believes that not only do DJs play music that people want to hear but take it to another level by creating new beats and manipulating sounds.
She said she disagrees with Farnsworth on the question of sampling.
"I think that sampling isn't legitimate," Keating said. "It's basically cutting and pasting, and anyone can do that."
Cody Steele, a freshman in the School of International Service, said he thinks an ideal mash-up is not a big-name DJ but rather "a kid in his basement messing around with things that shouldn't go together." Although he has a great respect and appreciation for mash-ups - his collection consists of a couple hundred, including the Justin Timberlake/Muse mash-up "Sexymassive Black Hole" - he does not believe in defining those who create these works as artists.
"To define those people as such would be taking credit away from the real artists who created the original pieces," he said.
Despite disagreements within the community, all parties seem optimistic about the future of music. Keating said she hopes eventually music fans will come to crave something new, preventing people from thinking, "Where have I heard this already?" and leading them to say, "I don't think I've ever heard this before."
You can reach this writer at thescene@theeagleonline.com.
