Gregg Gllis, better known to fans by his stage name, Girl Talk, released his fifth album, All Day, last month. The album is composed of 373 overlapping samples of other artists’ songs.
Fair use? Or copyright infringement?
In 2008 the NYTimes famously called Gillis, a 29-year-old Pittsburgh native and former Case Western Reserve University biomedical engineering student, a “lawsuit waiting to happen.”
In an interview to be published later this month, Michael Gallucci asked Gillis about getting sued:
With each release, I anticipate it: What’s it going to be this time? How much bigger is this project gonna get? How many more people are going to hear it? Is anyone gonna be offended by it? I do believe it should be legal, and I do think it should fall under fair-use. But, simultaneously, it’s a gray area. You don’t know. You may be challenged. Even if it is legal, I don’t want to go to court to fight it if I don’t have to. It’s on my mind, but as the days go by after the release, it fades away a little bit. …
On [2008’s] Feed the Animals there’s a bit of Metallica. And on this one there’s some Prince. A lot of the heavy-hitters have been sampled. I literally put it out and hope for the best. So far, the majority of artists have probably heard of it, or at least their labels have, and I think a lot of people can see the benefits of it. It’s not really creating any sort of competition. It’s probably turning a chunk of my listeners on to new artists.
Gillis fans have come up with a number of ways to visualize his latest work (download it for free). Using the album’s SINCE REVISED Wikipedia page, where users have identified and cataloged most of the songs sampled, Mashup breakdown has put together a color-coded timeline (image below) and alldaysamples.com has an annotated timeline.
The music is intended to be listened to as a whole, but is broken up into individual tracks for easier navigation. If you’ve yet to sample his music, here is track #5 from All Day, “This Is the Remix.” It includes samples from 34 different songs, among them music from Justin Timberlake, Bananarama, Lady GaGa, Simon & Garfunkel, the Jackson 5 and Snoop Dogg.
RELATED: Phoneix New Times also has a short interview with Gillis.
PREVIOUSLY from me on Girl Talk: They Say That I Stole This Song, ‘Feed the Animals’ Top of Pop and RIP: A Remix Manifesto. I use my own remix of Remix as a copyright primer for the students who work for me: