Girl Talk
Feed The Animals
Around The Factual Opinion’s offices, your trusty music columnist still spends a large amount of time defending his favorite album from 2006—Girl Talk’s Night Ripper. Unsurprisingly, when the second Feed the Animals, the follow-up to Night Ripper, dropped on Thursday, it began scrambling to outpace Vampire Weekend’s debut as the most divisive album of the year. Both Vampire Weekend and Girl Talk have a tricky relationship to pop music; Vampire Weekend and Feed the Animals are essentially pop albums dressed up as something else. But, where Vampire Weekend comes off as pretentious because the band (especially lyricist Ezra Koenig) paint themselves as far more intelligent than they actually are, Girl Talk’s intelligence often gets buried in seeming novelty.
Night Ripper and Feed the Animals provide perfect metaphors for the current way we consume music. In our everyday lives, genres and sounds cohabitate and wrestle one another, and no longer can one genre define any one person. Girl Talk reflects that new sensibility, and therefore sounds like hyperkinetic iPod shuffling, or listening to every radio station all at once. And, though it’s a little weird to talk about artistic progression under these circumstances, Feed the Animals represents an interesting next step for Girl Talk.
Night Ripper contained a staggering number of ideas, and it sounded like Girl Talk mastermind Greg Gillis laid everything he had out on the table. But a good number of those ideas came from mash-up staples and therefore sounded at least vaguely familiar (see 2 Many DJ’s As Heard On Radio Soulwax series and The Illegible DJ Caps & Pandemonium Jones’ incredible Moving In Stereo.) Feed the Animals sees Gillis rethink his approach from the ground up, without losing the foundation of his sound. He seems less interested in sampling the most iconic moments of songs, and more interested in crafting new pop songs out of subtler references to great songs. There’s more call and response, more electric guitar, and a lot more air than on Night Ripper. The result is an album that is more wildly inconsistent, but strangely more sustained. Night Ripper lost a lot of its momentum after track 8 or 9; Feed the Animals has more rough spots, but holds attention until the very end.
But the really weird thing is that, by concentrating less on the most blatantly iconic parts of songs, Gillis is potentially knocking his audience askew. Presumably, most people find their way to Girl Talk because of the novelty of the music, but Feed the Animals has significantly fewer obvious entrance points than Night Ripper. Either he’s trying to reward the more pop-versed listeners (or the critics—see last column’s statement about artists reading Pitchfork); or he’s genuinely interested in song craft—which makes me feel even more like I’m backing the right horse; or both.
That may be one reason for the divisiveness. Early reaction to Feed the Animals seems split between Girl Talk loyalists and those who have a problem with the mash-up genre itself. One critic immediately dismissed Feed the Animals, saying, “I personally like party music that doesn't change its beat every twenty seconds”—which pretty effectively misses the point. Sure, Feed the Animals should be held up to closer scrutiny than Night Ripper—it’s not the breakthrough album. But let’s talk about what’s actually going on with the album rather than just knocking the type of music Girl Talk makes. Because there’s a lot going on.
You may or may not dig on Girl Talk’s choices of mash-ups. One critic thinks that Gillis is taking the piss when Lil’ Mama’s “Lip Gloss” rides on the guitar riff from Metallica’s “One”. I, on the other hand, think it’s brilliant. Gillis needed to put a repetitive song over that riff to make it work, and “Lip Gloss” is a much feistier and relevant choice than, say, “Milkshake” or “Hollaback Girl.” But that kind of debate mostly comes down to taste. For every couple of winning mash-up ideas, there’s at least one that falls short (Young Gunz’ “Set It Off” sounds like a lazy choice over “The Message,” for example.)
But, again, the mash-ups aren’t really the show here. It’s the moments when four or five songs clash with one another. It’s the joy of equalizing disparate genres. It’s the frenetic hopping from beat to beat—you’re either in or you’re out. It’s the transcendent moment that Aphex Twin’s “Girl/Boy Song” unexpectedly drops into the mix. It’s the connections drawn between generations of music—the way a line from “Ms. Jackson” sets up The Jackson 5’s “ABC.” It’s “I want you to want me” answered by “Put that pussy on me.” It’s the possibility of listening a thousand times and reasonably having a surprising new favorite moment every time. It ain’t The Album of the Year, but it’s throwing down the gauntlet.
-Martin Brown, 2008
Lovin both these albums!
Posted by: Squidhelmet | 2008.06.25 at 00:43