If you've never listened to Girl Talk, the first time is probably going to be the most confusing. The mashup kingpin crafts his albums with a certain urgency that makes one wonder why is it that everyone on the net says Girl Talk is such good party music? Certainly changing the beat, melody and lyrics five or ten times a song doesn't seem like the best way to keep a party moving.

Perhaps party is the wrong word to use, as the most successful setting for presenting the album seems to be in a small gathering of music fans.This is where Girl Talk's obscene slices really show their grits, because at the very least, if someone doesn't like the sound of the songs, it can still keep the room's attention rapt in a game of guess the sample.

What is most curious about Feed the Animals relative to his earlier releases—in particular his 2006 breakout album Night Ripper—is that Gregg Gillis, the man otherwise known as Girl Talk, is now widely recognized as a producer and hence has some impetus to start addressing such criticisms as those discussed above and making offerings that are a little more internally consistent. This shift is clearly visible in the details of Animals, where Gillis appears to have toned down his earlier method of sampling the most widely-recognizable licks and raps—mostly from singles off culturally important albums—for a more refined sampling of more obscure songs (from the same big albums, but, still...) that fit the structure of the mashup better.

This isn't entirely fair: Night Ripper's cast list of member songs is long and complex, featuring many artists and songs that will come as a surprise (take a look, I'm serious when I say it's long). The difference is that Animals (whose component song list isn't any shorter, really) seems to use surprising songs as the rule rather than the exception.

Another thing Animals watches much more closely than Gillis' previous mixes is the distribution of samples. Whereas Night Ripper typically only has three songs happening in any given half-minute, Animals is a much more textured effort, offering the keen listener a trail of bread-crumbs in the form of ever-more-present samples to alert them where they are heading next.

In the end, none of this does much to quell the first listener's confusion over the album's presentation and apparent widespread success. Nothing will, either, until the central challenge of Girl Talk—and to some degree that of all mashup music— is addressed: what is the cultural value of mashups? It might be a quaint intellectual endeavor to slip the chorus of Avril Lavigne's “Girlfriend” on top of the background music for Jay-Z's “Big Pimpin',” but does it really add anything to music as a whole? The decision is yours to make. And if the long and short of it comes up more short than long, at least you have an updated playlist for you and your pretentious friends to play guess the sample with.

Girl Talk's Feed the Animals is available to download at his website using a similar purchasing scheme as Radiohead's In Rainbows.

       

Written by :

Chip Dingo