The Suburban Soundtrack: On Why Gregg Gillis’ Girl Talk is the new (sub) urban art form

here's an older piece i found today.
it was probably written 6 months ago or so.

Whether a conscious decision or not, Girl Talk’s new album, Night Ripper, is a perfect portrait of suburban life. It is art less than beautiful and it is something that will be added to the great “indie rock canon” of sorts. What someone like Nic Harcourt will never understand is the Generation Y lifestyle. Almost everything we worship is urban in one way or another. The city is where life takes place and we know it. Urban art forms like graffiti have invaded our lives. Mixed media is another art form that is very prevalent with young people. Collages have always been one of my favorite methods of expressing myself because it wasn’t limiting. I could paint if I wanted to, but if someone else had already done it better, I could just use what he or she had and add it to something else I like. This isn’t for everyone, obviously, but I think it’s kind of cool. This is exactly what Girl Talk is all about.

Girl Talk is the new face of “bastard pop,” which started out in the UK with “mash-ups,” but Girl Talk is more than just two songs haphazardly tied together; Girl Talk is all about mixed media. It is colorful and meticulously thought out. Each of the 16 songs on Night Ripper contains samples from several songs from very different schools of thought, which is the real genius behind the album. The songs sampled are the very best from popular hip-hop, modern rock, pop and even “indie.” The interesting thing is looking closely at the samples contained therein. The ingénue of the internet has provided us with a magnificent tool called Wikipedia, and the entry for Night Ripper has a fairly comprehensive list of samples. Anyone from Yin Yang Twins to Smashing Pumpkins to M.I.A. to Neutral Milk Hotel is sampled. On one level, these things have nothing in common and truly don’t deserve to be “mashed” together into one song, but when you take a step back and look again, you realize that all of the songs contained create a soundtrack of sorts, a soundtrack to suburban America.

Ever since the inception of dance music in this same vein, each new artist has tried to outdo the other in some way, be it having more bass, being more obscure or even referencing the right musicians. These head nods to favorite musicians, be they of the same genre or not, are very cool. Taking parts of songs and putting them together has always been questionable in the sense that audio plagiarism is just as bad as written plagiarism, but is much easier. If someone’s already written it, why should you have to? Is it plagiarism to mashup or is it the respectful head nod? In the case of Girl Talk, I think it’s a little of both, but in a very good way. Gillis has constructed some of the sweatiest, high voltage dance music constructed from other songs and on some level, it is cheap and somewhat fad-induced, but what isn’t? It does take a great amount of musical talent to put together mashups and they’re just damn cool. To even know about a certain musician enough to namedrop is a lot; you have to know a lot about their music to know where it should be placed in a bastard pop song and by extension that is a form of respect. Real musicians will tell you that it is the highest form of respect.