Girl Talk
Night Ripper
If you haven't gone there yet, check out this wikipedia entry on Night Ripper. After that, you'll have a full understanding of what Gregg Gillis has in his record collection. It won't give you much of a sense of the sound, so if you haven't heard the Ripper yet, you'll probably wonder how the hell Pavement, 2 Live Crew and Wings can end up on the same track and be even remotely listenable. You might even say that the album sounds like some kind of bullshit ruse, some clever experiement that shouldn't be examined as music, or as art. On the art tip, you're probably right. Maybe even the music. Maybe Night Ripper, and mash-ups in general, are just another nail in the coffin of decent work in the same way that reality shows are steamrolling documentary filmmaking, or the way commercial news organizations are eradicating ethical journalism.
Maybe. Probably not though: not enough people bought Girl Talk's 3rd album, and like anything, if it ain't profitable, it'll never win a fight. Still, Girl Talk defeated all comers in the fun album of the year, narrowly lost to Scott Walker for most creative, and definitively demolished all but The Simpsons for swampiest arena of pop culture reference. For anyone who ever wanted a team-up between Bell Biv DeVoe, Hum and Kanye West (which should be anyone with taste,) your time has come. Get moving.
-Tucker Stone, 2006
Tucker doesn't like mash-ups, but if you like Hum (and Girl Talk does), you're alright with him. So get out there and pick up Downward is Heavenward and You'd Prefer An Astronaut.
Mash-ups circa 2002 were about context, i.e. if we grafted
the vocals from Christina Aguilara’s “Genie In a Bottle” onto the music from
The Strokes’ “Hard to Explain,” we changed the meaning of both songs. Essentially, mash-up artists drew parallels
between disparate types of music. The
trend became a metaphor for the new way of interfacing with music that Napster
and iTunes provided. But, in practice,
mash-up artistry peaked almost the instant it arrived. With a rudimentary knowledge of pop culture,
one could accurately imagine how an entire mash-up would sound upon hearing the
first fifteen seconds. The novelty of
the actual songs wore off quickly, but the trend created new vocabulary in the
language of pop music. Here were songs
with instantaneous pleasures that also rewarded knowledge; dumb music for smart
people. Yes, Freelance Hellraiser
recontextualized both The Strokes and Christina Aguilara with his seminal
mash-up “A Stroke of Genius”—but only if you knew each song’s context to begin
with.
With Night Ripper,
Pittsburgh DJ Greg Gillis AKA Girl Talk, distills the idea of the mash-up—the
merging of two otherwise unrelated songs into one track that, ideally,
outshines its sources—and makes it listenable by refusing to linger on any one
idea long enough for that idea to become predictable. Night
Ripper unfolds in a series of left turns, packing Missy
Elliott, "Around the Way Girl", Lord Tariq & Peter Gunz,
"Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover," Panjabi MC, "Hate It Or Love It",
Pixies, "White Rabbit", "The Whistle Song," and Neutral
fucking Milk Hotel into a single song. Yet even the most genius marriages on Night Ripper—The Notorious B.I.G. rapping over Elton John, say, or
“Best of My Love” backing “Kryptonite”—aren’t really the show. One can imagine a dedicated mash-up artist
arriving at any of these places eventually, given enough time. But where every mash-up hinges on a single
idea, Night Ripper contains
multitudes.
Strangely, it all works because Gillis rarely samples genuinely dynamic songs. He chooses his sources for a particular sound (Missy Elliott’s “On and On”) or phrase (Cassady’s “I’m a Hustler”) or rhythm (M.I.A.’s “Galang”). In each case, he reduces the song down to its basest component. One gets the essence of Elastica’s “Connection” from the opening guitar riff, for example; one doesn’t need the entire song. So, while pop knowledge and awareness greatly enhance the enjoyment of Night Ripper, the album doesn’t rely on context to create its effect, the way mash-ups do. In other words, this is still dumb music for smart people, but the learning curve has greatly increased. Girl Talk takes a new and problematic genre and accelerates it to perfection. What could be timelier? It’s a bonus that he solves all of the mash-ups problems by giving us more: more ideas, more parallels between more diverse genres and more eras, more ambition, more fun.
-Marty Brown, 2006
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