Ugh. I began to write this entry while procrastinating a week’s worth of hell, and I finished it doing the same thing. Only this time it was a different week. Regardless, this list took a lot longer than the last, for obvious reasons, and only makes me dread making part 3 (the movies list) sometime in later January in ways that still somehow allow me to look forward to it. Either way, it’s a nice feeling of relief to know I’m done with this, and I like my picks. I’m eager to see how different mine are from Pitchfork. After all, that’s the only reason I wanted to put this out so soon – to beat Pitchfork and to prevent myself from being influenced. Anyway, here goes.
Posts Tagged Girl Talk
Now give me some damn sand; the real Girl Talk review
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.
Phone numbers here, getcha phone numbers; Girl Talk review
So Jonathan Smith has me looking through a bunch of call lists (lists of people to call for donations) to find ones we haven’t called yet, to find ones that we have called so that we don’t call them twice, to find ones who asked for literature so that we can smoke out the spy who has been prevented said literature from being sent. (Really. That is really a job I was asked to do.) I will dream about phone numbers tonight, for sure.
I promise to have a movie review tomorrow, probably of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru. It’s so much easier to listen to music I haven’t heard before than it is to do the same for movies. But for now, let’s turn our attention to mash-ups.
UPDATE: So, charitable commenter too_legit was correct, the version that I heard was, in fact, fake. I didn’t think it was terrible at all, though. Maybe I just don’t have a discriminating eye for these things. Regardless, I will have an abbreviated review of the real version up later in the week. Hey, two for one ain’t bad, right?
Mash-ups are interesting things – some people really love to get down to a mash-up of, say, “Country Grammar” and “Sweet Home Alabama” (that’s a great one, I swear), and some even deny the power of “Bittersweet Symphony/ Dirt Off Your Shoulder”, which is one of my favorites. Regardless of opinion, everyone will agree that the combination of two or more songs in one creates something entirely different. That’s its whole appeal – if not to the listener, than to the artist in making it.
Girl Talk (AKA Greg Gillis) is the king of the mash-ups. As opposed to putting the lyrics of one track against the instrumentation of another, with adjustments for pitch, like most mash-ups, he combines lots of songs in one, with rapid-fire references and drastic changes in effect, like octaving up or down lyrics of one song to complement lyrics of another, while both play over the instrumental lines of one or two more songs. The end result is basically Auto-DJ: hundreds of songs dumped into one album to blast at a party and let the partygoers grin whenever they hear a song they recognize.
As Pitchfork pointed out in their review of Girl Talk’s last album, Night Ripper, pointing out all the songs is half the fun of listening to his music. And it is fun. Oh, is it fun. Is it fun? Regardless, Girl Talk’s new album, Feed the Animals, is just that: fun. I’m not sure if it has been officially released yet, but if it is, then it’s just a digital release for the time being. Either way, I downloaded it…legally. Legally. Legally. Hey, shut up. Listening to it is just a joy for me. But why?
By rights, I shouldn’t like this album. Those who know me know well my total distaste for Top 40 music these days. I just can’t stand it at all and I gnash my teeth and get morose and annoyed whenever I hear it. But there’s plenty of it on here, so what gives? The only explanation I can give for it is two-pronged: a) the total mutation that music undergoes here means that you can’t really compare one version to the other, and b) the songwriting REALLY doesn’t matter here. This is for dancing and head-bobbing. This is club music. People don’t listen to the lyrics in club music.
Feed the Animals gets better as it goes on, and the references get more grin-inducing. My favorite is in the track “Rockin”, when the song “Freak on a Leash” by Korn (yes, that one – don’t tell me you don’t know it, you fucking do unless you’re Kriti) is octaved up so that the lead singer sounds like a freaky chihuahua/midget hybrid, like he’s meant to. That is followed by a sample of the piano figure from “My Moon My Man” by Feist. He really goes everywhere with these.
Other favorite samples include: Vampire Weekend, The Beatles (twice), Outkast (twice – including “Sorry Ms. Jackon), Eminem (thrice), Beach Boys, Jimi Hendrix (with some Jamaican rapper over him [pitch-adjusted Sean Paul, perhaps?]), and the capper, DMX played over Queen and then Black Sabbath in “Watch What You Do”. Now you know what I mean by grin-inducing. I can’t say that this will be at the top of my end-o’-year list, because it doesn’t seem fair to put it over people who wrote their own songs. Then again, I could have a change of heart by the end of the year because of how much fun this is. Just plain fun. That’s the one word you should take out of this review, because I’ll still be grinning from listening to this album when you’re reading this.
I Ate My DVD Collection 