I Could Listen to This Masterful Mash-Up All Day

Who says the newspaper's not good for anything anymore? In yesterday's Dallas Morning News, I found, courtesy of its sister publication Quick, a brief Q&A with mash-up artist Gregg Gillis, who plies his craft under the name of Girl Talk. His newest effort, All Day, references 373 songs in just a little over 70 minutes. And musically, it's all over the map:

Ludacris raps over the power chords of Black Sabbath. Dallas rapper Dorrough's verses from "Ice Cream Paint Job" are made warmer by the backing track from "Strawberry Letter 23." Rick Ross, Bananarama and Lady Gaga work together during a few seconds of danceable bliss. And so on.

And how in the world did he license all those songs? Well, he didn't:

Gillis has managed to get around any major copyright-related setbacks by contending that what he does with the samples constitutes fair use. And it doesn't hurt that many of the artists sampled are thrilled they've made the latest Girl Talk mix. North Texas rockers the Toadies even posted and tweeted about the use of "Possum Kingdom" in a key section of All Day.

I downloaded it last night--hey, why not? It's free!--and I'm listening to it as we speak. So far, I'm quite impressed; Gillis does a great job of mixing everything together, and it's amusing how seamlessly a lot of these songs go with each other.

If you want to download it yourself, go here. (And be happy that the big rush is over; evidently, listeners pretty much broke the Internet downloading this on the day it came out.) If you just want to read the staggering list of tunes sampled, it's here.