“Consider that all of humanity is built one brick on top of the next. Everything around us is built on what has already come before, the mashup just personifies that,” says Fletcher. Modern copyright maintains ownership (usually through a record label) of a piece of music for up to 70 years after its composer’s death . That’s a long time to wait for a piece of music to become public domain! Most of the best mashups use old music, which is already part of mass consciousness anyway, so why shouldn’t we be able to utilise them in bootleg mashups?” rails the demonstrative DJ. “Here’s some historical perspective: Disney was one of the initial companies that really pushed for the present copyright laws to be passed. Consider that a good deal of the early Disney movies drew heavily from classic, traditional fairytales from other cultures. What they were essentially doing was remixing the concept and claiming the stories as their own. And then lobbying for stringent copyright laws that would make them the owners for virtually all of time. Consider also that a band like the Rolling Stones built their music copying the same motif employed by many of the wailing blues artists of the time. But when it came to people ripping into their music for mashups, they got all shirty about it!” Occasionally, mashups do get grudging respect from the artists they’re ripping off, if they’re anywhere half decent. A prime example is ‘Ray of Gob’ that combines Madonna’s ‘Ray of Light’ with The Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’. Both Madonna and The Pistols gave it the thumbs up. Mashups are seldom sold. The mashup makers mostly prefer to remain anonymous (lest the copyright holders come knocking), hiding behind names like Yigytugd, Jamie CG74, TizWarz, CopyCat and Electric Priest. They create purely for the kudos they receive from others who might play their mashups in their sets, or to gain popularity through mass downloads. It’s a lot like dealing drugs. If anyone is making money from it, no one is owning up to it. With today’s range of software so easily available (either
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legally or less so through the pirate channels), anyone can make a mashup. “My gran can do it,” maintains Fletcher. If everybody is creating, who is consuming? And if the Internet is flooded with a brazillion new mashups every day, where is the creativity going? “The ongoing creativity is in the lateral thinking,” opines Fletcher. “It’s not the material that’s scarce, it’s the ideas. The real gem of a mashup is the one that uses songs that no one else has thought of putting together. “The entertainment value is important, not the source of the material,” says Beadon. It probably would be possible for mashups to be made legal, given a sort of Creative Commons rethink on the whole copyright issue (which desperately needs to happen, anyway), but what would be the fun in that? Mashups also invalidate the need for a record company. You don’t need a distributor, because your distribution is the Internet. You don’t need a fancy recording studio, because it’s all in your PC, in your bedroom. You don’t need a record label, because you do it all yourself. What of the future for the mashup? Fletcher predicts that logically, the mashup will move into other media. Software programs like Ableton Live allow users to create video mashups to go with audio mashups in less than the time it takes to make a cup of tea. Already, people have started mashing together scenes from different films, with hilarious results. The “ultimate post-modern pop songs”? “Culture jamming in its purest form”? Innovative interventions against bland commodity culture? Or inauthentic, and illegal, derivative moments of throwaway fun, simple jest, the logical extension of a 1980’s throwback obsession with the sample taken to its dumbest extreme? You decide. Or you and you and you make it ice ice baby.
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The most famous mashup of all is an unauthorised album-length project called The Grey Album. Made by Brian Burton (a.k.a. Danger Mouse), it features the vocals of Jay-Z (off songs from his The Black Album) and the music from The Beatles’ White Album.
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