Girl Talk

To me, one of the more interesting things in All Shook Up was exactly how fluid "ownership" was. Dick Clark was named as owning/having rights to hundreds of songs he had nothing (creatively speaking) to do with. Songs were reproduced consistently from genre to genre as part of a strategy to find the widest audience...and it was completely par for the course for Elvis to build his fame from a song that left an earlier performer working as a migrant laborer.

What strikes me as particularly interesting about this trend is that it depends on the artists not only not creating their own music, but not having the rights to it either. A recent article in the New York Times about Girl Talk seemed to relate (at least in terms of the destabilizing and more or less anti-establishment aspects of Rock 'n' Roll):

Girl Talk’s rising profile has put him at the forefront of a group of musicians who are challenging the traditional restrictions of copyright law along with the usual role of samples in pop music. Although artists like the Belgian duo 2 Many DJs have been making “mash-ups” out of existing songs for years, Girl Talk is taking this genre to a mainstream audience with raucous performances that often end with his shirt off and much of the audience onstage.

The way that copyright laws work for and against popular music and the artists/singers/performers that make it seems to have changed significantly as the music industry evolved (though apparently always a step or two behind technology). What does it mean for Rock 'n' Roll to have the kind of constraints it is now subject to, especially in terms of the trend for artists to create their own music? It seems like even music that has been written by someone else and performed by a particular performer still seems more or less dedicated to that one performer, though legally it could be performed for a fee by near about anyone.



(girl talk isn't necessarily that relevant to this; the article just got me thinking)