I was going to compose this review of Girl Talk’s new album out of
“samples” of other reviews—both of Girl Talk and the albums he
samples on Feed the Animals. There’s plenty of good source
material out there—among them Jason Fine’s Rolling Stone review of Aphex Twin’s Richard D. James Album (from which Girl
Talk mixes the synthetic strings of “Girl/Boy Song” under the vocals
from Rich Boy’s inescapable ride-pimping anthem “Throw Some Ds”):
For anyone raised on rock & roll, the new world of electronic
music can seem like a strange and forbidding place. From trip-hop to
techno, acid house to drum and bass, the myriad styles and subgenres
bear names far more exotic than “punk” and “grunge,” and the music
doesn’t play by rock’s rules. Songs rarely follow verse-chorus-verse
formulas, they don’t often have singers, and even when you get a guitar
riff, chances are, it’s been sampled off an old record and distorted
until it doesn’t sound like a guitar anymore. But if there’s no room
for guitar gods in the electronic age, new heroes are emerging.
That’s just begging for a comedic detournement, no?
Anyway, it’s a project that will have to be undertaken by a critic
with more time on his hands. Turns out, what Girl Talk does with music,
no less so when applied to text, is incredibly time consuming, maybe
more so than just writing something without borrowing from other
sources. (Additionally, the idea may simply be more amusing than any
execution; all my drafts just read like badly jumbled music
criticism—there is, undoubtedly some serious skill in Girl Talk’s
cut and paste.)
Still, it’s the sort of exercise Gregg Gillis (aka Girl Talk) might
really appreciate. As much as Feed the Animals, like last year’s
surprise smash Night Ripper, shows Gillis to be a studious
pop-music obsessive, so, too, does the album reveal him as a student of
the art, history, and politics of sampling. Some of the album’s finest
moments are clever little odes to that art, in which Gillis samples
songs that themselves are built on samples—songs that are, often,
more famous than their sources. Len’s “Steal My Sunshine,” for
instance, is, at least for a certain generation (Gillis’s), probably
far more well-known than the song from which it takes its hook, Andrea
True Connection’s disco sex romp “More More More.” (There are other
less notable instances of this throughout Feed the Animals:
Afrika Bambaataa’s Kraftwerk-sampling “Planet Rock,” Kanye West’s
Michael Jackson–jacking “Good Life.” And who would recall, until
looking it up, that the Prodigy’s 1996-ruining “Firestarter” sampled
the Art of Noise?)
There’s also the moment where Gillis combines Radiohead’s “Paranoid
Android” with Jay-Z’s “Roc Boys (And the Winner Is…),” lending a
menacing anxiety to Hova’s celebratory pusher anthem—when Jay
thanks “most importantly, you, the customer,” you can’t help but feel
bad if you didn’t pay anything in Illegal Art’s pay-what-you-want
download plan (itself something of a Radiohead sample).
But maybe the funniest bit of Gillis’s intellectual-property-rights
commentary is when he smashes the Rubinoos’ “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend”
up against Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend,” a song that bore so uncanny
and unlicensed a resemblance to the former that the Rubinoos sued
Lavigne (and more to the point, her songwriters) for copyright
infringement. (They settled out of court.) Maybe it’s playing to the
music-critic cheap seats, but that shit is hilarious.
Of course, if Feed the Animals were merely a referential
in-joke, it wouldn’t be Girl Talk. Gillis, for all his geekery
(tellingly, he runs his samples not on prosumer-grade apps like Ableton
Live or Fruity Loops, but on the hardcore nerd programming platform
Max/MSP), aims for nothing so much as mass pleasure-center stimulation.
Listening to Feed the Animals is, in a way, exhausting. You
break your neck trying to trainspot everything. You can’t keep up with
the beat. But it’s fun to try.
It’s not entirely without fault, though, and there are two moments
in particular that leave me wanting literally more from a song. The
first is that blend of “Girl/Boy” song with Rich Boy; Gillis samples
just the swelling and plucked strings, never letting the song break
into Aphex Twin’s frenetic drum machine splattering beat. Similarly, he
later brings in the ambient intro of Born Slippy’s lager-spilling
Trainspotting anthem “Born Slipp (Nuxx)” without ever letting
its fist-pumping beat drop. Such omissions, for fans of the originals,
can feel criminal and cause you to go running right to your CD rack for
the source. Still, these are minor complaints, and more than anything,
you can’t wait to hear him pull these combinations off live. Maybe
he’ll even let those beats drop. 