Protest Music

By Annalee Newitz, AlterNet. Posted July 7, 2004.

By waging a war of litigation on file sharers and copyright infringers, the Recording Industry Association of America has unwittingly created a new kind of protest art. Mash-ups – digitally knitted-together compositions made up of two or more popular songs – are anti-authoritarian folk music for a generation whose "establishment" is represented by corporate intellectual-property owners.

Now that perennial scenester David Bowie has sponsored a mash-up contest and there's a show devoted to the genre on MTV Europe, some of the DJs and producers who create these millennial bootlegs are going mainstream. But most of the scene retains an underground nerd-outcast sensibility. "We're not supposed to be doing this – it's like prohibition," says Mysterious D, a DJ at San Francisco's all-mash-up club Bootie. "But at the same time, we're not going to be limited by copyright laws when we create something."

Often called "bastard pop" or simply "bootlegs," mash-ups are as easy to perform as a rip-off of a Bob Dylan tune. Cheap audio software allows anyone with a half-decent computer to convert the act of copyright infringement into something undeniably gorgeous and amusing by turns. Australian masher Dsico – who has been repeatedly threatened with legal action for his work – traces the style back to modernist art: "Much as Duchamp once drew a mustache on a copy of the Mona Lisa, bastard pop artists deface mainstream pop music." New York University professor and copyright reformer Siva Vaidhyanathan calls the movement a combination of innovation and infringement, adding, "Some of the greatest innovators of the past 100 years were accused of being infringers."

The very structure of the music itself is a direct response to the conditions under which it's made: lovingly assembled from pop sifted down off P2P networks, a Dsico creation like "Compton Magic" (NWA vs. Olivia Newton-John) seems to echo the mixed-up, black-market cacophony of an eDonkey addict's music collection.

Dodging lawyers' cease and desist orders, mash-up DJs often change their names and move their music from host to host in order to keep serving it up. But they soldier on, sharing tips and litigation horror stories on Brit mash-up site Get Your Bootleg On (gybo.proboards4.com), partly in the hope that one day their efforts will change copyright law. "I would love to see a form of copyright where as long as money isn't changing hands, everything is up for grabs," San Francisco mash-up DJ Adrian says.

Grey Tuesday, a recent mash-up protest organized by anti-RIAA group Downhill Battle, inspired more than 100,000 people to download copies of DJ Danger Mouse's dubiously legal bastard pop creation The Grey Album (a mash of the Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album). "There's a public interest served by making this album available," protest organizer Holmes Wilson argues. "If people can't hear works that the copyright regime suppresses, they can't make an informed decision about what these laws should be."

More interesting than Wilson's considered stance are the sometimes-fantastical copyright theories of the DJs, promoters and activists who make up the bootleg community. Without a legal background in how copyright works, mashers feel free to develop a whole range of ideas about why their music is legal or illegal. For example, Adrian told me that as long as he plays mashed-up ASCAP music in an ASCAP-licensed venue, it's OK.

Unfortunately, it's not: Mash-ups are derivative works (a big I.P.-law no-no). Adrian also argued that since he's crediting the artists he mashes and giving away his mixes for free, he isn't hurting anyone. This theory wouldn't hold up in court, but it's far more commonsensical than current I.P. law.

Mash-ups also spawn social mixing that mimics the genre's political agenda: At a recent mash-up event in San Francisco, famous underground hackers mingled with locally known drag queens and wide-eyed indie rockers. And many bootlegs are explicitly designed to create mixes that cross racial or sexual identity lines – thus, a mash-up might combine a Village People song with something by Public Enemy. A kind of political hopefulness or idealism seems to animate many of these mixes.

As a masher on GYBO recently posted, "Everything is illegal." Under an I.P. regime where artists feel like nothing goes, it seems that everything could. The infringement generation aims to mash up copyright law in pursuit of better music. But it also has a chance to challenge social divisions more profound than the distinctions between hip-hop, rock and electroclash.

Annalee Newitz (monstermash@techsploitation.com) is a surly media nerd who once mixed the soundtrack from an episode of Wild Kingdom with the visuals from Cops. Her column also appears in Metro, Silicon Valley's weekly newspaper.

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