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Return of the Friday Listening Post: Girl Talk

EDIT: Girl Talk is playing in Winnipeg, June 28th at the Pyramid.

The Friday Listening Post is back after a several week hiatus due to business and busy-ness.

Anyway straight to it: Girl Talk. Mashup artist. Awesome, pop-ish, hip-hop that blends in a tonne of Adam Freedland breakbeat style jamming - generally fantastic, energetic, listenable, danceable, fun - and full of no-doubt non-compliant, un-licensed, fairuse, screw-the-RIAA samples. Big hat tip to Gitta B. for pointing me to GT - thanks, dude!

There’s two MP3’s floating for free: Bounce That and Hold Up. Download and enjoy! Each is full of awesome moments - like when Hold Up breaks into Weezer at 2:30 — killer. This makes me want to clubbing, which I haven’t done for like 5 years.

Girl Talk has three albums: Night Ripper, Unstoppable, and Secret Diary. Each is available for purchase through the deliciously seditious sounding IllegalArt Web Store.

fair use, fairuse, fridaylistening, girl talk, girltalk, mashup, mashups, nightripper, RIAA techfold

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How George Lucas Missed the Boat - Again

Lucas drives me nuts (for many obvious reasons). Both Lucas and the WSJ get a grouchy glare from me this AM for this article on Lucasfilm’s move to make Starwars clips legally available for re-mixing: Lucas for missing the point of social media entirely, Sarah McBride for writing like a press release.

High level summary: Lucasfilm is making a batch (250) of Starwars clips available on Starwars.com to be remixed & shared via technology from EyeSpot.

However: the Lucasfilm business team intends to keep a tight lid on these remixed videos. A team of censors in Costa Rica will screen videos produced (ostensibly for nudity), for example. More importantly, however, Lucasfilm wants to created a Walled Garden in Starwars.com:

“We see what’s going on out there on the Web generally. And we wanted fans to come to Starwars.com as the center of fan activity.”

The ‘Star Wars’ team ‘understands social media and is embracing it,’ he says. ‘This is a way for Lucasfilm to bring YouTube to their backyard.’

Ok - so you want to embrace social media by forcing fans to remix and distribute videos on your site, on your terms, fuelling your adverts, using your tools, and screened by your censors? Boy, sounds like they’re embracing social media alright.

From what I can tell, videos created will be embeddable and “shareable” (via emailed link?) - but I’m guessing not downloadable (no mention of that in WSJ; the Eyespot site mentions downloads in Windows or Mac format [?], but no info about what format that actually is). If so - that clobbers YouTube, and keeps control firmly in Lucasfilm’s hands - a typcially ham fisted big-media-business approach to social media.

How about just releasing a batch of clips in a multitude of formats license free for download so that fans can really put them to use?

NewTeeVee has a more positive outlook. Digital Alchemy tells us that pre-roll ad revenue will be split between Lucasfilm and Eyespot - thanks for sharing the wealth with the value adders dudes!

eyespot, lucas, lucasfilm, mashups, remix, star wars, starwars video

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Friday Listening Post: The killer mashups of Luke Enlow, downloadable MP3’s

TGIF, and time for another Friday Listening post. The first was here (Billy Bragg) - basically, the spirit of this series of posts is that Friday is time to chill and check out some tunes that can be at least vaguely related back to the world of technology.

I’d hoped some other blogs would share some tunes and expand my horizons (just tag your post “fridaylistening” and it will queue up with any others on Technorati) - but no dice so far! How about it, Jason? (couldn’t resist taking the bait somewhere today, though I didn’t follow any rules.)

Anyway - without further adieu: I strongly recommend checking out the audio stylings of Luke Enlow - Bostonian and audio mashup auteur. Lenlow mashes up artists, genres, beats, and riffs into catchy, inspired tunes.

In particular, I recommend (right-click, Save As time):

Mercedes Beck: A spectular mashup of Beck and Janis Joplin - sounds like they were in the studio together.

Get Eastwood: The Gorillaz and Sean Paul in a mix that just works.

Kanye Mahna - Mr. West vs. the Muppets - wicked.

…and pretty much all of the rest of them too. Always creative, always fun, always mashing up - Luke Enlow personifies Music 2.0.

beck, boston, calacanis, fridaylistening, joplin, kanye, lenlow, luke enlow, mashup mashups

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