This is just dumb fun, a static albeit danceable hum. An amalgamation of the cultural stream, both current and past. People who don't like to have fun, or hate themselves, or have myriad other personality defects / deep-seated emotional issues, will, without a doubt, abhor novelty music. But mostly it just makes us normal people smile, captures zeitgeists, connects broad segments of culture both swiftly and simply, that sort of stuff. It's harmless.
That said, to call it a great, or even an important artistic statement is bullshit, too. Even Girl Talk's first record, or whoever the first dude was to 'mash two songs together' (Destiny's Child / Nirvana?) doesn't merit that kind of praise. Mashups today, in general, as a novelty item / genre, are becoming outdated. But they've always been the stuff of novelty. This is a fact. Mashups are the same as what Parry Gripp does is the same as all non-parody 'Weird' Al songs is the same as 92% of all white people rapping, etc*. While we wait ever so patiently to see if P4k gives Girl Talk another 8+ review, the real question is, should we be reviewing this product at all?
Because it's hardly a product, in the consumer/capitalist sense. That's the main thing. It's the endgame of Girl Talk's personal brand as a DJ, his life's work even, and it is certainly the reason he gets gigs / makes money, but he doesn't make a penny off of the downloads (in fact, he might even be paying for it).
(So, before I go any further, the real point of my words here, and any future words I may write under the auspicious banner of rock criticism, is that Robert Christgau is an idiot. "My body already knew what my powers of distinction told me when I replayed the Pittsburgh DJ's 2006 breakthrough mashup Night Ripper, which is that this is the one that goes for the jugular," he writes in his 40-word, "A"-graded "review" of GT's 2008 Feed the Animals. He gave Night Ripper an A-, by the way. As if that doesn't make my entire point. How is one album 3-6 percentage points better than the other? It's the exact same thing, just with different samples, right? If a rock band released such *similar* albums they'd be crucified. But what do I know? My name isn't the 2nd result when you Google "rock criticism." Fuck. I like his little bomb icon though.)
As I am a fan of most novelty music, I do like Girl Talk. There is no one better at doing this than him. He has an uncanny knack for figuring out what popular rock and pop songs will mesh with popular rap songs. ("That's a talent?" I imagine my Mom saying. "Sure it is, Ma," I retort.) And he obviously has an elite technical mastery of the software needed to do this. You can't just say, "Oh, I really like the song "Our House" by Madness and [popular hip-hop song released in the past 8 years]" and then open up GarageBand and make it happen. It doesn't work like that. There is a proficiency at hand here that, even with my vague understanding of the inner workings of the sausage factory, so to speak, I recognize as being the best. Girl Talk is the Michael Jordan of mashups, or the Thomas Edison of mashups, or whatever bad analogy. He's great!
It's enjoyable on several levels. Kind of like Inception except not fucking horrible.
Level One - Dance Party!
At its core, it's just fun to listen to. Shocking that an musical omelet made of the most beloved tunes in the last fifty years would be so delicious to your ears (sorry). But yeah, that is indeed the case.
Level Two - Name That Tune!
At its most gimmicky, it works because you can listen along with your most music-obsessed friends and see who can recognize the most songs. (Note to my friends: I will kill you at doing this.)
Limbo
Your name is Robert Christgau (did you know there is entry on Wikipedia called "Xgau" that reverts to Robert Christgau's page? are you not Facebook friends with this scary Facebook page? or this one? Xgau4life? )... So Your name is Robert Christgau and you are just (simultaneously) cumming all day listening to Girl Talk and slowly dying (waiting for the next Girl Talk release). You know, no big deal. You are in Limbo.
Honestly, my biggest problem with this (the album), as I stated before, is that it is exactly the same shit as everything else he's ever done. I get and appreciate that he is "getting better at doing it," but I also can't ignore that it's just a bunch of different songs spliced together in an extremely similar way. Let's be honest, while it is good and fun and super easy to enjoy, rarely does it ever not sound like two recognizable songs playing at the same time in an aurally pleasing fashion. Obviously, that is what a mashup is (duh), and that's fine, but let's accept the fact that it's little more than the FM radio dial on 'seek' mode.
There was only one moment in the entire 70+ minutes where I felt something 'new' had been created. For whatever reason**, two minutes into Track 10 ("Steady Shock"), when Bone Thugs-n-Harmony is rap-singing over Supergrass: that sounded like a "new composition." Most of the time, though, you are just chilling out in...
Level 3 - Where's the Motherfucking Chorus Yall?!
This really works for me personally because there is like a cock-tease thing happening that my masochist side enjoys. I'm less concerned about who is rapping over the top of Toadies' "Possum Kingdom" as I am about whether or not GT will let the track get to the "Do you wanna die?!" part (he does). Sometimes a song will pop up for like a single bar or two (The Dead's "Casey Jones," Lady GaGa's "Bad Romance," for example) and that's annoying because A) it highlights the most gimmicky part of this whole thing, and B) it's almost never done smoothly***; it's like GT just wants to make sure you know that these songs are good/cool/recognizable. Something for everyone.
***
The URL mashupbreakdown.com is pretty much the end of all this. This was created by a guy (@brahn (?)) who is not Girl Talk, or affiliated with Girl Talk in any way, but who has managed to trump the thing that Girl Talk does by visually IDing the samples in real time along with the song. (You should probably go to the site so I don't have to really explain it.) It is the perfect example of its novelty appeal.
This is striking because I feel it both shortchanges the effort, and somehow glorifies it. I have no feel for how popular this music actually is (is it played in 'night clubs,' college dorm rooms, shit like that? I have no idea). I know people go to see him (I might check him out in February), and I guess they like dance around him or something, and he just plays remixed versions of the mashups which are sort of already remixes, but the actual appeal: I have no clue. I can listen to his albums, straight-through, a max number of three times. Then I am completely turned off. What I think the website does is actually enhance the experience (listen to the album for the first or second time via that site) but shorten the shelf life (after "seeing" the music like that, it would feel stupid to, for instance, "listen only" on my iPod or something).
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Notes:
*This isn't to say there is any kind of overlap between the people who like Girl Talk and/or Asher Roth and/or stupid meme-memorializing YouTube videos. There might be, but it's not a prerequisite for being novelty. Just like someone who buys a Barrack Obama Chia Pet might not also own one of those singing fishes you hang on the wall.
**I think this is because of auto-tune but I'm not sure. Also, and I could be dead wrong here, but I feel auto-tune is hardly used here at all. Possibly, not using auto-tune, was like a self-imposed constraint to help make the music feel more "natural." If that's the case, I think that's pretty silly. There really shouldn't be any "rules" to tweaking these tunes so long as the new tune is good and the old ones still recognizable.
***The single bar of "Casey Jones," which bleeds into INXS' "Need You Tonight," is not exactly a clunky transition, it's just unnecessary. Occasionally, when a song lingers underneath without getting to the chorus: that works because of the whole cock-tease thing. But I found the real tiny snippets irritating.
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