Pittsburgh’s Attention-Discotheque-Disordered and hipster-beloved DJ Girl Talk’s new album, Feed The Animals, given a nothin’-but-’Net release last week by record label Illegal Art, bookends its 14 tracks with sister cuts titled “Play Your Part (Pt. 1)” and “Play Your Part (Pt. 2).” And that, for as many reasons as Animals has samples, is quite a loaded twin christening.
Released with an In Rainbows-style pay-whatever-you-want deal (even $0 gets you a 320kb copy), the notion of “playing your part” here could shallowly be interpreted as: 1. paying something for the record; or 2. simply downloading it. But one-man show Gregg Gillis, the audio collage artist behind Girl Talk’s four sample-based LPs and sole captain of GT’s manic live shows, is actually asking you for—and giving—much, much more.
2006’s Night Ripper, you see, presumptively made titular reference to the man behind the laptop. Gillis was still a 9-to-5er when Ripper, his break-out mega-mix/mash-up album, was released. Putting in regular hours at a biomedical firm, the Gillis who made that record was but a white-collar professional during the day, albeit one who drastically alter-ego’d in the after hours: extracting and gamely disassembling CD audio to later reforge as 42 minutes of joyfully perverse Biggie-meets-Elton or Pixies-meets-Puffy pop pastiche, Gillis was, literally, a night ripper. But, quitting his desk job as Girl Talk’s legendary live shows required substantially more of his time, Gillis’ focus exclusively became his audience, those rabid animals he titularly feeds with his new 52-minute sampledelic free-for-all.
Yet it’s worth noting here what he hasn’t fed you: hype. The most fascinatingly overlooked aspect of “The Radiohead Model”—an album announced and just as quickly released online for wholly-optional payment—is that it sidesteps the months of build-up that normally accompany big album releases, and metaphorically EQs critics and fans at the same levels on the cultural mixing console; there’s no even pretending that advances will be supplied to gatekeepers only—radio, publications, bloggers—or that popular opinion need disseminate outward from them.
Which is nice, believe it or not, for me. With Feed The Animals’ economic and exclusivity issues largely off our table, critics like myself get a chance to offer up something more substantive than instructing yuppies with disposable income how best to rid themselves of it (“should you buy this?” is not a question I’m generally excited, or flattered, to answer).
And so on the music: Feed The Animals is, paradoxically, both what you expect and what you don’t. Any Night Ripper fan will know the rules of the game: take exhilarating pop, hip-hop, or rock instrumental passage, lace with explicit Top-40 Rap boasting, enjoy for 20 to 30 seconds, swap out and repeat non-stop for a little under an hour.
The formula remains intact for Animals, but the unknown and constantly shifting particulars, thankfully masked under hush-hush tracks titles like “Hands In The Air” don’t betray the small euphoria of hearing The Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning” smothered with an account of Flo Rida’s “Shorty gettin’ low” til it’s already underway. Sometimes the worst part of a mash-up (though GT doesn’t just mash-up, he more accurately makes smash-ups) is it’s lack of surprise—already knowing you’re about to hear Jay-Z bust out over “The Sweater Song” for three minutes can make it frustratingly mundane once it actually plunks down on your desktop.
Gillis knows how to mix and match, and seldom missteps; he’s generally on point enough to serve as a syntactic reminder: the common mash-up operator “Vs.” is actually a misnomer, at worst defamatory. “Blackstreet + Radiohead” utilizes the proper connective (listen for it, it’s in there), whereas you probably wouldn’t want to hear something accurately labeled “Lil’ Wayne Vs. Red Hot Chili Peppers” (one of Animals’ few sonic blunders).
Where the record falls short is generally not on Gillis’ conscience necessarily, but rather on all of ours. Bypassing the too-obvious jabs at America for its short attention span, the broader problem here is how brazenly masculine/hetero/misogynist we turn out to be when our music is prepared together in one big melting pot.
Eminem describing champagne room-level strip club antics in-between bouts of bathroom vomiting over top of Yael Naim’s gentle “New Soul” piano (it’s that MacBook Air ad jam, if you don’t know) might be, from a technical standpoint, the most surprisingly transcendent thing that gets fed to the animals here, but it’s also among the least tasteful. Gillis is surely joking with his constant and deliberate grabs from rap’s most un-PC catalog, but if you think about it, letting Dr. Dre and Spank Rock rhyme raunchy objectification-of-women punch lines over pop classics is, potentially, subversion at its ugliest.
In fact, the dual “Play Your Part” tracks are named from an Andre 3000 lyric, herein cribbed from the splendid UGK/Outkast collaboration, “International Players Anthem.” That statement from Andre, taken from a larger verse in which he genuinely big-ups marriage and monogamy, both opens and closes Feed The Animals, which is perhaps not a coincidence but, rather, a dab of conscience.
I might have said I wouldn’t tell you what to spend your money on, but Gillis and I are both telling you to hear between the lines: Play your part.
Released with an In Rainbows-style pay-whatever-you-want deal (even $0 gets you a 320kb copy), the notion of “playing your part” here could shallowly be interpreted as: 1. paying something for the record; or 2. simply downloading it. But one-man show Gregg Gillis, the audio collage artist behind Girl Talk’s four sample-based LPs and sole captain of GT’s manic live shows, is actually asking you for—and giving—much, much more.
2006’s Night Ripper, you see, presumptively made titular reference to the man behind the laptop. Gillis was still a 9-to-5er when Ripper, his break-out mega-mix/mash-up album, was released. Putting in regular hours at a biomedical firm, the Gillis who made that record was but a white-collar professional during the day, albeit one who drastically alter-ego’d in the after hours: extracting and gamely disassembling CD audio to later reforge as 42 minutes of joyfully perverse Biggie-meets-Elton or Pixies-meets-Puffy pop pastiche, Gillis was, literally, a night ripper. But, quitting his desk job as Girl Talk’s legendary live shows required substantially more of his time, Gillis’ focus exclusively became his audience, those rabid animals he titularly feeds with his new 52-minute sampledelic free-for-all.
Yet it’s worth noting here what he hasn’t fed you: hype. The most fascinatingly overlooked aspect of “The Radiohead Model”—an album announced and just as quickly released online for wholly-optional payment—is that it sidesteps the months of build-up that normally accompany big album releases, and metaphorically EQs critics and fans at the same levels on the cultural mixing console; there’s no even pretending that advances will be supplied to gatekeepers only—radio, publications, bloggers—or that popular opinion need disseminate outward from them.
Which is nice, believe it or not, for me. With Feed The Animals’ economic and exclusivity issues largely off our table, critics like myself get a chance to offer up something more substantive than instructing yuppies with disposable income how best to rid themselves of it (“should you buy this?” is not a question I’m generally excited, or flattered, to answer).
And so on the music: Feed The Animals is, paradoxically, both what you expect and what you don’t. Any Night Ripper fan will know the rules of the game: take exhilarating pop, hip-hop, or rock instrumental passage, lace with explicit Top-40 Rap boasting, enjoy for 20 to 30 seconds, swap out and repeat non-stop for a little under an hour.
The formula remains intact for Animals, but the unknown and constantly shifting particulars, thankfully masked under hush-hush tracks titles like “Hands In The Air” don’t betray the small euphoria of hearing The Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning” smothered with an account of Flo Rida’s “Shorty gettin’ low” til it’s already underway. Sometimes the worst part of a mash-up (though GT doesn’t just mash-up, he more accurately makes smash-ups) is it’s lack of surprise—already knowing you’re about to hear Jay-Z bust out over “The Sweater Song” for three minutes can make it frustratingly mundane once it actually plunks down on your desktop.
Gillis knows how to mix and match, and seldom missteps; he’s generally on point enough to serve as a syntactic reminder: the common mash-up operator “Vs.” is actually a misnomer, at worst defamatory. “Blackstreet + Radiohead” utilizes the proper connective (listen for it, it’s in there), whereas you probably wouldn’t want to hear something accurately labeled “Lil’ Wayne Vs. Red Hot Chili Peppers” (one of Animals’ few sonic blunders).
Where the record falls short is generally not on Gillis’ conscience necessarily, but rather on all of ours. Bypassing the too-obvious jabs at America for its short attention span, the broader problem here is how brazenly masculine/hetero/misogynist we turn out to be when our music is prepared together in one big melting pot.
Eminem describing champagne room-level strip club antics in-between bouts of bathroom vomiting over top of Yael Naim’s gentle “New Soul” piano (it’s that MacBook Air ad jam, if you don’t know) might be, from a technical standpoint, the most surprisingly transcendent thing that gets fed to the animals here, but it’s also among the least tasteful. Gillis is surely joking with his constant and deliberate grabs from rap’s most un-PC catalog, but if you think about it, letting Dr. Dre and Spank Rock rhyme raunchy objectification-of-women punch lines over pop classics is, potentially, subversion at its ugliest.
In fact, the dual “Play Your Part” tracks are named from an Andre 3000 lyric, herein cribbed from the splendid UGK/Outkast collaboration, “International Players Anthem.” That statement from Andre, taken from a larger verse in which he genuinely big-ups marriage and monogamy, both opens and closes Feed The Animals, which is perhaps not a coincidence but, rather, a dab of conscience.
I might have said I wouldn’t tell you what to spend your money on, but Gillis and I are both telling you to hear between the lines: Play your part.
