Apropriation or theft?
or both?
Your thread might have a better chance of getting off the ground if you explain what the Hell a “mashup” is.
The mashups I’ve seen usually involve taking the audio track from one source and dubbing it onto a completely different video. Also, I’ve seen/heard mixing two different musical pieces (like Jay-Z’s “The Grey Album”).
Well, a copy of John Lennon’s Imagine mashed up with Britney Spears’s Toxic isn’t much of a substitute for either one, so I wouldn’t call it theft. I think that the art of the mashup is clearly the magic of the mash- not the music that it begins with. So it’s not plagiarism. I guess that leaves art.
What kind of world do we live in where people spending hours using pop culture to make art in new and amazing ways (and it is pop culture at play- nobody makes mashups of songs nobody has ever heard of) are called theives?
As an underground phenomenon starting about a decade ago, a mash up was literally mashing two full tracks together, then manipulating one or the other do they sync’d up better in terms of rhythm, melody, vocal, etc…
I have a mash up of Salt n’ Pepa’s Push It and the Stooges’ No Fun that flat out rocks! Who woulda thought to combine those two, but it works - hard.
If done poorly - it is appropriation; if done well, it creates a whole new thing from two disparate roots - like the one I mentioned…
Mashups are cool.
I love that one can hear both songs simultaneously.
The JayZ/D.J. Dangermouse/Beatles grey album is sort of the bench mark for audio collage/mashups. D.J. took the beats and melodys from the Beatles white album and the vocal tracks from JayZ’s black album and matched and mashed them together.
Song for song each one distinct and crazy. I guess yall know where I stand on this issue. Though the problem of “small” artists not getting royalties is problematic.
Intersted to hear what you all have to say on this.