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 The Beatles
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 