Girl Talk
All Day
On the surface, a mash-up sounds simple. In the most basic version, two seemingly contradictory songs are chosen. One is stripped of its vocals; the other is stripped of its music. The two remaining things are spliced together to create something that sounds both foreign and familiar, a song displaced from context by its newly acquired lack of affiliation to genre or audience or purpose.
That displacement puts a lot of subconscious demands on the audience. Each of the original songs carries with it a relationship between itself and the listener—one based in personal taste and cultural context. As soon as the two songs merge, not only does the relationship between them transform, so does the relationship between each one and the person on the other end of the headphones. That’s a lot to process. Regular songs rarely ask you to have an opinion on their component parts.
So when you listen to Girl Talk, whose just-released fifth album All Day contains a reported 372 recognizable samples over the course of its seventy-one minutes, he’s asking a lot of you. Foremost is recognition itself. In a lot of sample-based music recognition is a passive act, if it happens at all. Artists like DJ Shadow and The Avalanches use samples to evoke the feelings their sources captured; but their work is impressionism, while Girl Talk’s music is collage.
On the other hand, songs carried by a recognizable sample may find commercial success—like Puff Daddy’s use of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” for “Been Around the World” or Jessica Simpson appropriating “Jack and Diane” for “I Think I’m in Love With You,” just to think of two egregious examples—but often unwittingly highlight the superior quality of the source material along the way. The buyers simply put up with the artists because the sample is so good. Again, Girl Talk’s Greg Gillis does something different. He uses recognizable samples of beloved songs, yes. But, while the music is composed of recognizable chunks, it’s not really about those songs. It’s about the conversation between them.
On All Day and the albums that preceded it (especially 2006’s Night Ripper and 2008’s Feed the Animals), the samples come at an unhinged, frenetic pace. Within a thirty second window on All Day’s “Down for the Count,” you hear fragments of Young MC, Kylie Minogue, Denis Coffey, Usher, The Rapture, The Temptations, and two songs by Trick Daddy. That’s music from the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and 00’s; rock, rap, pop, R&B, and dance music.
With each clip of a song that comes in, there’s a series of connections that happens. There’s a level of recognition that’s different for each snippet. Some are immediately recognizable, some vaguely familiar, some unknown. Each sample has a relationship with its source—the song it came from; the listener’s history with that song, the artist, its genre and era. In this new context, each sample also has a relationship with each of the other samples, and with the composition as a whole. Gillis has clearly stated that All Day is meant to be listened to all at once, which means 372 samples over 71 minutes, each with an exponential number of connections firing off every time a new one drops in.
That’s all to say that there’s a certain amount of work that goes into listening to a Girl Talk album. Gillis is making music that is experimental in the most fundamental way—in the demands and challenges it places on listeners. And yet, this is experimental music that sounds like pop music. In fact, it sounds exactly like pop without actually being pop. It’s experimental music that’s intended for a pop audience—and not only that, but an audience that’s willing to commit to it up front, willing to suspend its potential distaste for certain songs or styles in exchange for the possibility of enjoying them in this new context. We all know that “Party in the USA” is crap, but here we’ll give it a try.
Because Girl Talk makes populist art, this all tends to get taken for granted. There’s a common assumption that he’s sampling songs that appeal to his audience’s nostalgia or its previously held tastes, or that he’s simply crowdsourcing his material by looking at the iTunes charts. In reality, his work is more delicate than that. Each of the 372 samples on All Day provides a possible way into the album, but each sample also provides a way to opt out of it. The second you begin to question whether or not you like a song that Girl Talk is sampling, the whole experience of the album changes—and that’s nearly impossible not to do. Plus, dude happens to be making his music at a time when more people have more opinions on more music than ever before. All Day is fighting an uphill battle.
And he’s winning. When All Day dropped last Monday, it completely eclipsed this week’s other major music news story: The Beatles on iTunes. Somehow, people know about this guy. His relentless, weird-sounding, profanity-laden, cheesy, funny, irreverent music has gone as close to mainstream as a free album on a label called Illegal Art can. He’s not making any money off the album, but he’s selling out concerts within hours of announcing them. This is a guy that doesn’t sing, doesn’t play an instrument, is not a producer in the traditional sense of the word, and he keeps selling a mainstream audience on a difficult idea. It’s pretty impressive.
As an album, though, All Day is actually Girl Talk’s least challenging piece of work. When Night Ripper blew up, it had two large bits of cultural context going for it: the abundance of music at our fingertips, and the critical reevaluation of pop. To put it into Malcolm Gladwell terms, Night Ripper filtered through the mavens, then the salesmen, then the connectors, in the space of a couple months. When Feed the Animals dropped two years later, it proved the guy had more than one album in him (a feat in and of itself) and capitalized on the groundwork laid by Night Ripper. Artistically, both benefited from Gillis working out his process within the music itself—first, by trying to do something unique; then, by trying to top it.
Now, Gillis seems to have a handle on what he’s doing, and the music suffers because of it. Where Night Ripper and Feed the Animals were thorny and relentless, All Day is somewhat stagnant. It lays back in the cut. Gillis lets the samples play out longer, with less interruption, so All Day has less in common with his last two albums than with 2 Many DJ’s As Heard on Radio Soulwax, Vol. 2—which was a watershed album back in 2002, but sounds dated now.
Sometimes his confidence pays off, as it does in the opening minutes of All Day, when a drum fill from 2Pac’s “How Do You Want It” cuts through a liberal sample of the opening to Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs.” More often, Girl Talk’s assuredness results in formula. The first four tracks follow a similar pattern: Two songs play against each other—say, the lyrics from Jay-Z’s “Can I Get a…” over the music from General Public’s “Tenderness.” After about a minute, they transition. The music leads; the rap follows. Then, the new pairing continues for about a minute.
It’s a classic case of an artist misunderstanding his own strengths. Gillis got so much acclaim for a stretch of Night Ripper where The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Juicy” synced up over Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer,” that now he tries to achieve that kind of magical pairing on every song. But the Juicy/Tiny Dancer mash-up didn’t succeed on the basis of the pairing alone; it worked because of its placement within the composition of the album. Night Ripper took 12 minutes to build an immense amount of tension—tons of samples, relentlessly cascading off of one another; plus, this was an introduction to Girl Talk’s M.O., so it took a great deal of time to get acclimated. After 12 minutes, when a dense thicket of samples opened up into Elton John’s flowery piano riff, it was a well-earned moment of release and beauty. Nothing on All Day achieves that kind of grace, precisely because everything tries for it.
Girl Talk the artist has backed off in favor of Girl Talk the craftsman. On the prior two albums, the arrangement of the samples was the show—where they popped up, how they answered one another, how Gillis tweaked them. Here, the show is the samples themselves. It’s like he’s a table maker, and he used to make elaborate, ornate, conversation pieces; but now he makes things that are completely utilitarian, places you set your Eggo waffles and read the New York Post.
That’s where he gets into trouble. Song choices can only make or break the success of a Girl Talk album if Girl Talk chooses to let them. By taking the emphasis off of his work, and putting it onto the samples themselves, he’s giving his listeners every opportunity to back out of enjoying the album itself if they don’t like one of the songs he uses. That's where he gets into trouble.
Of course, Greg Gillis is an incredible craftsman. Take a look at the transition into the early mash-up of Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On” and Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop”: Gillis leads with a series of Blitzkrieg Bop “Oh!”s that run counter to a series of “Uh!”s nicked from Cali Swag District’s “Teach Me How to Dougie.” Then he inlays a little bit of the Ramones’ vocal, punctuated by tiny bits of The Doors, Slick Rick, Trina, N.W.A. and Aaliyah. Finally, he lets the song’s immortal “Hey ho let’s go” opening launch, and Blitzkrieg Bop’s guitar riff and Missy Elliott’s rap commence. Thing is, after all that, the actual pairing of Missy and the Ramones is a little deflating. It feels rote. We’ve already heard plenty of other stuff like it, out there in the world. We don’t need Gillis to introduce it to us.
Throughout All Day, it’s the transitions themselves—the actual work that Greg Gillis is doing—that have the juice in them. The actual mash-ups are the least interesting part, but they’re given the most room. There’s plenty of admirable stuff packed into the song choices—like how the lyrics of “Can I Get a…” are antithetical to the feeling of “Tenderness;” or how M.O.P.’s declaration to “take rings off” runs right against Beyoncé’s admonition to “put a ring on it”—but, for the first time, they’re running the show.
In its function as a party album, All Day succeeds—and it’s important to note that that’s what he’s going for. It succeeds because there’s an incredible breadth to the material, a variety of textures and voices, and plenty of surprises. Greg Gillis is still offering music that no one else is really putting out—at least, not with the level of technique, attention to detail, and wealth of ideas that he is. Yet, most of the people who’ve been keeping up with him since Night Ripper blew up in 2006 will probably feel underwhelmed by All Day. There’s a sense that he’s toned down the experiment in order to reach a wider audience. The party’s bigger, but less special. We’re stuck hanging out with his samples, when it’s Girl Talk we came to see.
-Marty Brown, 2010
Yeah, album didn't quite feel like a leap forward like his previous albums did.
My favorite track is #2 - Let it Out when they have ELO's Mr. Blue Sky.
Posted by: Phil Dhingra | 2010.11.22 at 16:23
Beautiful review.
Posted by: Prickle | 2010.11.28 at 16:38