Most discussions around music probably don’t involve some politician from Pittsburg, but a recent debate in Washington has interjected one into the conversation. And in a positive light, to boot.

It just so happens that the mashup artist Girl Talk lives in the district of a congressman who sits on the Committee that deals with the issues surrounding music copyright. The politico has been using Girl Talk’s music as an example of why using other people’s music to create your own should be considered a valid form of art in the eyes of the law.

Newsweek recently had the Congressman, Mike Doyle, sit down over lunch with the man who is Girl Talk, Gregg Gillis, and talk about what kind of laws could be passed that would allow artists like him to thrive. (Girl Talk’s music has been pulled from eMusic and iTunes over legal concerns.)

Gillis said that he’d try to find a middle ground where some samples were OK because of fair-use provisions in the law and others paid for by a reasonable fee. The congressman listened, but admitted the odds were long for a Mash-Up Relief bill. "Some members don’t even want to understand it," he said. "They just get a call from the industry saying, ‘Bad’."

A Mash-Up Relief bill… classic.

iTunes is now the third largest music retailer in the country in terms of albums sold, according to NPD Group, a market research provider. iTunes lags behind only WalMart and Best Buy, and leads Amazon and Target.

(In order to compare iTunes to the more traditional outlets, NPD counted each 12 tracks sold on iTunes as the equivalent of an album sold elsewhere.)

With iTunes commanding so many sales, it may put more pressure on Apple to allow those songs to be played with competing technologies. European regulators are already trying to force the company to do so. The vast majority of iTunes music can only be played on the iPod or on iTunes. But Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, recently blamed this on the technical difficulties of adding copyright protections to those songs, which most of the music labels demand.

A friend of mine named Waer created this mash up a couple months ago using Jamglue.

Mum’s 2000 self titled album was heavily funk influenced and more rhythmic than its more recent spacey, chill out stuff. The shining achievement on this album is the first song; “Zero Gravity,” the song remixed here. Coming with a tuff hip hop structure, it was perfect for the sample play of mashing up an Obama speech with music.

He chose Obama because of the ease of access to MP3s of his speeches (and because the bar he worked at was throwing a fund raiser for him.)

So, enjoy. It’s not bang you over the head with his political views or anything. It’s still unfinished, he only finished one "verse,"so the second half of it is just the original "Zero Gravity" song.

Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University wants you to learn. He created this video mash-up below to help explain it you – and to poke fun at Disney.

“A Fair(y) Use Tail“

Design Observer – Via Core 77

Oh, and on the subject of intellectual property: possible changes in patent law around the corner. According to the Wall Street Journal, the federal government’s aim is to make patents harder to get and easier to challenge in an attempt to help spread ideas throughout society.

The changes come in the wake of recent lawsuits like that of Microsoft vs. Alcatel-Lucent. In that case, a judge ordered Microsoft to pay $1.52 billion dollars for its use of the MP3. Yeah, the MP3. Apparently, Microsoft licensed the technology from a different organization, but Alcatel claimed they had a part in developing it, and thus deserved a cut. Now other companies that use MP3s are at risk of similar suits.

On Flykiller’s rusty surgical table lay the rhymes and hook by someone resembling a Gothic version of Blondie. Intensely focused, Flykkiller stitches these onto a sample of Dead Prez’s “Hip Hop,” and for good measure, adds glitched-up slide ruler and eerie piano key melodies.

Waiting intently in the silence of a dark abandoned operating room, lightning finally strikes and brings alive “Peroxide” with a burst of electric decadence.

Flykkiller, made up of Stephen Hilton and Pati Lang, manage to invoke the recent nostalgia of a benchmark song, and then take into into a new, more wounded realm and claim it as their own. I can’t understand most of what Lang’s saying, but her delivery and voice are on point.

Peroxide just dropped yesterday, and is available for purchase on the group’s MySpace profile.

(Learn why they are so dark after the jump.)

the jump » »

Remember – back in the day – when you could actually listen to the radio and find new music? Sure, now we have the internet, but radio died long before most people figured out how to use it for music, and many still don’t.
Now the Federal Communication Commission is proposing new rules that will allow companies to own even more media outlets than before, putting more stations (as well as newspapers and TV stations) into even fewer hands.
Take a second to write them and tell them you don’t like the idea by clicking here.

Don’t read? Watch this video from Consumers Union. The “big media tower” is creepy as hell with its lord of the rings floating eye.

The ice rappers floss might come from some bad shit, and this documentary takes a look at the illness that has resulted from the trade of diamonds used to support warfare in Sierra Leone. Not that most heads say they’re exactly moral dudes, but this is some vile shit. This documentary has a couple graphic shots, if you can’t handle that, just read the articles available on the website.