Sorry I didn’t post a review yesterday, but I had to get to bed early to fix my car. (Thanks, parents. Big help you were. Second time that this tire has gone flat since I’ve been home, and they were both your fault.) You know how it is, life intervening with blogging – it has a pesky way of doing that. This one shouldn’t be a long review, hopefully after my scheduled break tomorrow (anyone want to post one in my absence? Anyone? Bueller?) I will be back on the wagon with a review of old-skool King Kong.
My last Girl Talk review was a real review of a fake album, so here’s a fake review of the real album. Ben told me while we were listening to a couple tracks off the fake that he could recognize that it wasn’t Girl Talk’s work. I was taken aback, for two reasons: how could any rapid mash-ups be recognizable from others, as long as they’re done with any competence, and how was Ben a Girl Talk connoseiueiuoer? I will answer the first question, and you can ask Ben the second if you care to find out.
There’s a very good reason Girl Talk, AKA Greg Gillis, seems only to release albums during the summer. These albums are perfect summer jams. But then, what is a summer jam? I think I’d like to define a summer jam as a track you can play at a beach party with your friends (and probably some substances) and feel really glad you did. Tracks or albums that could fit in there need to combine pure danceability with a lack of depth (you don’t want to think at a beach party) and a sense of catharsis. You can listen to Girl Talk for less than 30 seconds and know it satisfies the first part, and probably for 30 seconds more and do the same for the second.
The third part is trickier, after all, musical catharsis is tough, and anyone can spot and frown at a moment of catharsis that isn’t earned. But there has to be some sort of release that makes the listener go, “fuck yeah!” or something to that effect. You can feel catharsis in your upper chest when it’s good enough. That’s why Girl Talk makes Top 40 rap good – instead of just shitty rhymes over repetitive beats, Girl Talk mixes and matches until he gives you that catharsis. See “Shut the Club Down” – near the end, I have no idea what that rap is, or what that 80’s music is, but they work so damn well together. A better example is in “Still Here”, when Blackstreet’s “No Diggity” (hey! that’s actually a good song!) is preserved pretty well, and you get some head-bobbing going, and then you hit the chorus, and it’s played over FUCKING RADIOHEAD. It works so well, and it’s a “fuck yeah” for sure. The best example (though it doesn’t involve hip-hop) is the last 40 seconds of “What It’s All About”, and I just can’t spoil that for you. You’ll have to hear that one yourself.
Feed the Animals is a better album than Night Ripper, pretty easily. The mixes are tighter, the flow is better (Gillis lets the songs get up a head of steam before he switches them) and listening to the two back-to-back showed me how much more enjoyable the former is than the latter. I said before that I would have reservations about putting Feed the Animals in my year-end list; I have no such reservations now. It’s hard to imagine that too many albums will be ahead of this one. At any rate, this has “summer jam” written all over it, and that counts for something.
I Ate My DVD Collection 
Kriti Godey said
People don’t want to think at beach parties? Really? Maybe I should try that.
Also, where did you get the fake album?
Ben said
You don’t need to be a Girl Talk fanatic to recognize pretty poor mashup-making; the fake album was pretty bare bones, and demonstrated none of the expert mixing and electronicness that make the real thing enjoyable.
Helena said
Hm, interesting. I read about this a while back…perhaps I’ll check it out.
Matt Rothstein’s Favorite Albums of 2008 « RADIOBON said
[…] The Animals – Speaking of summer albums…I referred to this as a perfect summer jam way back when I reviewed this (man, that was really long ago, come to think of it), and I stand by […]