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Last night, my friend Joyce and I went to the Meat Beat Manifesto show at the Great American Music Hall. I’m not usually a big electronica fan, but it was a truly great performance.

What made it so exciting? Live renditions of electronic music are usually boring to watch, consisting of a few guys triggering samples and twisting knobs while shuffling back and forth. If you’re lucky and you’re at an Amon Tobin show, you’ll get some Winamp-like visualizations on a screen behind the knob-twister.

Here, though, the visuals were spectacular. Cut-together clips from movies, TV shows, educational films, space-age stock footage, a few shots of rapidly counting nixie tubes, and (my favorite) a montage of the covers of old albums by Otto Luening, Vladimir Ussachevsky, and Pierre Schaeffer.

And it all had to be illegal. Thousands upon thousands of individual infringements — each sample from a movie or TV show, each uncleared photograph and film clip, without which the music would have fallen flat and the visuals would have disappeared.

The evening strengthened my belief that fair use should privilege this sort of transformative art, even though I don’t think it’s privileged under current law.