Monday, August 4, 2008

Music Mandate

I have followed/bought/been obsessed with - Girl Talk for a while now. Gregg Gillis was a biomedical engineer in Pittsburgh while he worked on his creations, now spanning 4 albums with the recent release of Feed the Animals (name your price), he has created something that is hard for Millennials to turn away from. Girl Talk creates mash-ups of hip hop, indie rock, dance, pop, and dozens of subgenres together.

Girl Talk's last album, Night Ripper, is a mash-up masterpiece. Composed of 16 continuous dance tracks featuring 167 artists and dozens of subgenres, the album's samples are so subtly integrated that they are often difficult to discern. One track seamlessly splices indie rockers Neutral Milk Hotel with rapper Juelz Santana; another fades James Taylor's "Your Smiling Face" into 50 Cent's "In Da Club." Rolling Stone,Spin, and Blender magazines put Girl Talk on the national scene in 2006 when they included Night Ripper on their "best albums of the year" lists.

Girl Talk embodies the Millennial Generation like no other artist.  An archaeologist from the future could find no greater musical artifact than Night Ripper or Feed The Animals, which feature music from the 80s (new wave, gangsta rap), 90s (grunge, Dirty South) and 00s (emo, crunk).  Much of the fun is recognizing songs you haven't heard since middle school.  But his albums aren't just nostalgic soundtracks; their ingenuous genre-blending makes them far greater than the sum of their parts.  And Girl Talk would hardly have been possible without the generation-defining Internet.  Online file-sharing allowed him to get almost any song for free.  Editing software on his laptop (which he uses at live shows) allowed him to splice and dice music without the need for expensive studio equipment.  And of course blogs and websites made word-of-mouth and distribution far easier for an amateur with a day job.

Also, I can't help but notice parallels between his music and the cultural atmosphere surrounding Obama.  At age 46, Obama certainly isn't a Millennial.  But his campaign -- buoyed by young fans and volunteers -- embodies that generation in so many ways, as does Girl Talk.  Obama is a young, diverse, and unique politician running an innovative, grassroots campaign that thrives offs the Internet.  Similarly, Girl Talk is a young, innovative, Internet-based artist whose level of sampling is unique and incredibly diverse -- racially and stylistically.  And both Obama and Gillis draw from the same demographics: African-Americans and young liberal whites.  Plus, they both put on killer live shows.  (Incidentally, nearly half of the songs on Obama's iPod -- including Jay-Z, Elton John, and the Stones -- are sampled on the last two Girl Talk albums.)

More from Chris  here


Girl Talk Videos - enjoy