I took this picture in an abandoned elementary school in New Orleans. It had floated from the stage and landed in the aisle.I've been listening to Girl Talk on repeat since I got Nightripper last night (two months late, I know). My friends sometimes tease me for frenetically tapping my fingers against my leg, desk, wall, wherever I am. Girl Talk is as close to a manifestation of that nervous energy as possible. The sampling is, I'm pretty sure, five deep at times and takes from most pop genres of the last five decades. I'm not sure if it works as dance music, exactly, he doesn't let you get into the the rhythm before changing it, but more as an audio art collage. In a way, this saves Nightripper from being just another hipster dance mixtape.
Girl Talk also confirms what I've been thinking about pop music for a while now. I used to think the ideal mashup (don't laugh) should take diverse samples and create an original composition fundamentally different from either of its parts. This way, the more obscure and manipulated the source material, the purer the final composition is. I realise now that this approach is naive and leads to indulgent music (DJ Shadow come on). The brilliance of Girl talk is that the listener, (if she/he's anything like me) should recognize every sample, triggering a sense of nostalgia which the DJ then subverts by mixing in other samples and topping it off with some booty rap. It's about recontextualising familiar sounds and phrases and just blowing your head off. Some purists might call it lazy, but there's nothing lazy about composition on this level. It's post modern music, where DJ meets composer meets computer and I can't stop listening to it. It's like that 22 year old itch in my brain is finally getting a vigorous scratching. Eventually it'll get raw but right now it's such a relief.
Girl Talk - Overtime
Girl Talk - Smash Your Head
My friend Marco Extended Drum Solo sent me what he thinks is George Martin (the Beatles producer) trying his hand at a mashup. From the latest Beatles release:
The Beatles - Within You, Without You/Tomorrow Never Knows
And finally here's me fooling around in garageband:
The Swords of Righteousness Brigade - Bad Luck
5 comments:
As I said yesterday, that's a good theory. The Beatles stuff was done by George Martin and his son, Giles.
"Audio collage" is a faggy but functional term.
"Audio art collage" is really faggy but no better.
Take out "art".
But how useful is it, really? What procludes my answering machine message, background noise included, from being so classified?
Girl Talk works as dance music. Exactly. It's quality that prevets it from being just another mixtape.
More neo-post-poststructuralist than postmodern, I think. Postmodernity is over.
I apologize for my spelling.
Of course, preclude not proclude.
I'm a first year joke at heart.
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