Girl Talk - Not Your Typical ‘Mash-Up’ January 21
Time for another music review/tirade/lesson. As you will eventually guess if you stick around this blog long enough, I have somewhat diverse taste in music. I listen to everything from Hip-hop to Punk Rock to Alternative Country to Electronica and anything in-between.
About a year ago I learned of a guy who records under the nom de plume of Girl Talk. He is really a DJ and Mash-Up artist and not so much a singer/songwriter or a musician but in some cases he makes some great music just the same.
Though his latest album is a masterpiece, some of his earlier stuff is pretty bad. “Secret Diary” from 2002 is difficult for me to listen to. If you want to hear something really awful or feel like punishing your cube-mates, blast some of that, really it doesn’t matter which song.
With “Secret Diary” and on into “Unstoppable” you can see the seeds of what eventually became “Nightripper” which he released in 2006. With “Nightripper”, Greg Gillis aka Girl Talk combined all of those great samples he must have catologued in that head of his into something musical. With the first album, he had some great samples but wasn’t really sure how to put them together musically and instead strung them together with lots of noise, a lot of times sounding like someone was turning a radio dial, and sometimes sounding like someone running their nails across a chalkboard. Like I said earlier, this one can be painful to take.
On the other hand, if you want to listen to an example of what Mash-Up artistry really is take a listen to “Night Ripper”. This album combines riffs and samples from a huge variety of songs, from Elton John and Cyndi Lauper to 2 Live Crew and Eminem, into one cohesive collection of actual musical noise. In my opinion it is really a work of genius that can only be fully explained by listening to it. In this album he takes all those great samples and instead of putting them together with random noise, incorporates them into actual songs. I’m pretty sure I said that he wasn’t a musician, but anyone who can write songs like this has got to be classified as a musician, don’t you think?