The Top 30 Albums of 2008: # 17

Girl Talk
Feed The Animals

I hate to do this, but if you're looking for a real review of Feed The Animals, why not just stick with the one Martin Brown wrote for The Factual Opinion a few months back?  After all, what you're getting here isn't going to be as clever, and it's going to be laced with personal storytelling, and if personal storytelling was your bag, you'd be somewhere else most of the time.

I've spent more time over the last six months--Feed The Animals dropped for pay-what-you-will on the Internet back in June--being placed in the unlovely position of having to "defend" this album then I have in my entire life with every other artistic object combined.  (The only thing that comes close is Michael Almereyda's take on Hamlet, which I may be the only person on the planet to have enjoyed.)  In the case of Feed The Animals, it's a little different--unlike Marty, I find it difficult to be a passionate defender for Girl Talk, or, for that matter, the entire mash-up genre.  No matter how seamless they get, and Girl Talk is probably the cleanest of them all, mash-up music requires a certain level of crazy to get into--it's more demanding of attention then noise rock is, for starters.  Feed The Animals is so frenetic, so unwilling to embrace a climactic squall, or any ending for that matter, that the overall experience of a start-to-finish listen is, even with a psychotic embrace of caffeine, an exhausting experience--constantly building, constantly accelerating, forcing the listener to deal with the multiple reference points of distinctive samples that reach into the brain and force acknowledgment; this is "Footloose" by Kenny Loggins, the bass is from the Beastie Boy's "So Whatcha Want" and it's all building to Salt tut-tutting you with a "that's not it!"  Cue Cat Stevens and 50 Cent, together.  Even when one reaches the point where they know what's coming--The Police, Beastie, Phil Collins, Queen and vocals by Busta Rhymes, I fucking got this one--there's never a point where this is an easy, relaxing experience.  It's tough to handle, and when you play it for those who wouldn't choose it--like the way that I, again and again, chose to play it over the company speakers at my office--the response can be a virulent one, and that's when you end up in the position where someone asks "Why do you like this?"

The simple answer is because it's well-made crazy, but the truth is that it is an acquired taste, and it's an acquired taste mostly for people who already have enough of an obsessive personality that the prospect of skeletal anaylsis in music is an attractive one.  Girl Talk, no matter what a DJ might choose to do, isn't very good dance music--it's far too unrelenting, never slowing down for more than seconds at a time, and, as we previously mentioned, it never ends, it just stops when it's over.  That's a problem for many mash-up artists, but Girl Talk takes it even farther than a problem, he embraces it as an inescapable one, and therefore one he can use to build a structure of song-suites around.  Sure, this thing is broken up into tracks--fourteen of them--but what he's actually done is a sort of logical extreme of what the Fabriclive series of DJ curated mix albums play with.  He's made a massive, suite of stuff that you'll spend the first--and probably more--times playing the "what was that, I know that" game that it won't take much to figure out if this is for you.  The cheap way to go is to say that it's "love it or hate it," but that's a statement that doesn't really apply to as many things as people think.  You can be impressed by Feed The Animals, you can even go past impressed and crave the sound, all while still not finding yourself experiencing anything that could be described as "love."

So why, you may ask, should it be here on a list of what's purported to be "top albums"?  Shouldn't everything on a best of list be something that the listener, the writer and the team involved in the construction feels a deep, undying passion for?  Shouldn't everything that's on there not just be well-crafted, but also serve as some kind of palette for enjoyment?

Of course not.  At least this one can't.  See, passion--passion is sort of a feeling, it's not a quantifiable commodity, it's--like all feelings are--too fluid of a thing to build arguments on.  Building a best foods of all time, well, what would you operate from?  Would it be whatever gets you off in a hedonistic fashion, or would you throw on the weird healthy bland shit that you're into, like a good old block of frozen spinach?  Can't a list--shouldn't a list--include the stuff that fascinates you, that interests you, the stuff that speaks to the year of "stuff on lists" but may not find its way to your heart?  Part of keeping up with music is always going to be like that--the struggle to explore the new when the comfort of the familiar remains accessible, all while the review mirror is filled in with all of its untouched classics.  The desire--the feeling--that you'd probably find more pleasure in replaying the Goblin soundtrack to Dawn of the Dead then you will in checking out Detroit noise rock--that isn't a fanciful one.  It's wholly accurate.  Listening to the loved and familiar is comforting--the choice has already been made, the ground has already been marked.  But art shouldn't be a static enterprise, it shouldn't spend all its time rearranging the deck chairs.  And when something like Girl Talk comes along--something that demands the question "Is this music, this combination of a thousand familiar beats," it's a question that's worth the time spent, and one that's worth the arguments that ensue.  That's what makes Feed The Animals so valuable--because unlike everything else on this list, both above and below it, it's the only one that got to stand in 2008 and ask that question.  Whether the answer you find is yes or no, there's only one way to decide.

Listen.

-Tucker Stone, 2008

Comments

[Sean Witzke]

You just summed up exactly why this wasn't on my list but I listened to obsessively. That and way he flips "Sunday Morning" never ceases to blow my mind.

[Kenny]

HELL YES!!!! This is one of my favorite *favorite* albums!!! Every single person I've played it for has demanded a copy of it. I love this music!

[Tim]

I was chatting with an acquaintance recently who knows someone who is an acquaintance of Greg Gillis - third-hand telephone, so to speak. Apparently Girl Talk shows are filled with frat-boy mooks these days, and Gillis doesn't have any idea who these people are or why they come to his shows.

I don't either. I think it's some of the most difficult and challenging music being made. The difficulty you pinpoint is crucial, I think - to a degree I think something like Japanese noise rock or some weird static drone thing on the ECM label is probably easier to digest because, at least with those, you have some kind of expectation of a consistent milieu. I don't understand how this could be "party music", unless the people partying are all professional music critics and PhD candidates in Music Theory programs.

But then, I thought based on advanced reviews that Borat would primarily appeal to NPR-listening older liberals, and play in mostly urban art-house theaters. How a movie about the racial politics of post-Soviet republics and American exceptionalism became a meathead classic is beyond me, much as I refuse to understand Girl Talk's mainstream appeal.