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Capitalizing on an old idea by Coldcut, Pennsylvania-based laptop musician Gregg Gillis, disguised under the moniker Girl Talk, offered hyperkinetic and hyperdemented "plunderphonics" for the dancefloor (in other words, infectious dance music created from snippets old pop hits) on a series of albums starting with
Secret Diary (2002).
Solex and many other musicians had done this before
(and probably a lot better) but Gillis was the one who turned it into a new genre.
Night Ripper (2006) possibly represented the peak of Gillis' collage art.
His gimmick works best when it transforms a genre into another one, for example
Once Again turning hip-hop music into progressive-rock
Bounce That turning orchestral disco music into heavy metal,
or Smash Your Head turning rap-metal into a pop rhapsody,
and when it amounts to a rhythmic effect, as in Hold Up,
Ask About Me,
Peak Out,
and especially Hand Clap.
It was Freud's free-association technique applied to a turntable.
The difference with John Oswald,
Solex and all the others who tried this
idea before is that Girl Talk music was pure fun for clubbers, with no
intellectual or existential frills.
The biggest limit of his method was the over-reliance on hip-hop beats and raps.
Feed the Animals (2008) used more than 300 song snippets, and the
juxtapositions were even wilder, with, for example,
Nine Inch Nails
pasted next to
Yo La Tengo
next to Beyonce (Like This).
At the same time the collagist seemed to organize his sources in an
emotional palette. Thus the whirlwind of Play Your Part (Pt. 1)
ran the gamut from Merseybeat to
Sinead O'Connor in a way that created a
sentimental mood and not just a goliardic gag,
just like the disco delight of Set It Off represented a tribute to
musical hedonism.
Shut The Club Down went back and forth between jovial and sinister
simply by juxtaposing and sequencing stereotypes of each mood.
The Procol Harum's anthemic organ
immediately propels Still Here into a tragic territory, and
the disjointed montage that follows only adds to the poignancy.
More tension builds up in What It's All About, sandwiched between the
driving progression of the
Police's Magic
and metal riffs.
Here's The Thing exudes romantic strain via a progression from shrill
Sixties bubblegum (prominently the Mysterians' 96 Tears)
to a cubistic deconstruction of more recent hits.
Even when the message remains
cryptic (as in the way vocal harmonies evolve into a techno apotheosis in
Give Me A Beat,
or in the way In Step drops the ultimate grunge anthem,
Nirvana's Come As You Are, into
a jungle of disco anthems),
one sense a dark intelligence at work, not just a court jester.
The fragments on this album are more "classic", thus making it easier for the listener to
identify with the emotional shifts that they represent. At the same time
the whole album flows like an organic unit, and the separation into tracks
feels largely like a recording artifice.
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