When I was a senior in high school, Girl Talk and Man Man played a show together at Club 770 in Union South. The pairing seemed natural at the time. Girl Talk was understood as a manic computer whiz who let Neutral Milk Hotel count off the time signature for Juelz Santana to flow over a Steely Dan riff in an avalanche of three decades that lasted all of 20 seconds before he thought of something different. It was like riding a roller coaster with a blindfold on. It was a cacophonous orchestra that didn't sound all that disparate from the full-throated, Tom Waits-on-amphetamines garishness of Man Man.
I was a total sucker for Girl Talk's album Night Ripper, which was released that year. It was hyperactive, beat-heavy and completely novel for young Kyle. Plus, the man behind the name, Gregg Gillis, had to be rad because he spells his first name with three G's like my older brother. But more than anything I was fascinated by how culturally discordant it could be while actually amplifying the individual significance of each. On ""Smash Your Head,"" Elton John's ""Tiny Dancer"" swells while Notorious B.I.G. tells the story of his ascension from humble upbringings. And when Biggie ""blows up like the World Trade,"" Elton's ""hold me closer"" reaffirms the intimacy of Biggie's story and makes you feel like you've learned more about B.I.G. from Girl Talk than you did from the man himself.
And when Clipse raps about being ""On the block / Posted up like a mailbox,"" Phantom Planet's ""California"" adds a relatable, suburban element to the drug dealing—though most of that is probably the result of Phantom Planet being the blow horn for ""The O.C.""
Girl Talk's newest album, All Day, which was released for free download on the Illegal Art website a few weeks ago, is the same collage of pop radio, but it's more tempered and meditative. Instead of chucking mixes at the wall and waiting for the good ones to stick, he lets each develop into itself—which more often than not turns out to be a monotonous flow of uninspiring mixes. All Day is the kind of record you'd hear during a scan of a pool party at Summer Roberts' house.
If you're keeping score at home, that's the second allusion to ""The O.C."" I've made in as many paragraphs—because that's what Girl Talk means to me. When I was in high school and Night Ripper was nestled onto my hard drive, I spent a lot of nights watching ""The O.C."" For me, Night Ripper is inextricably linked to memories of high school, because those are the pieces of pop radio that went into making it.
Which raises the question: How much of mashups are wound up in cultural baggage? Or, really, why the heck do we like this stuff?
The majority of these mashups require prior exposure to the sampled material, and the ones that don't at least benefit from them. For the most part, all Girl Talk does is juxtapose different elements of popular radio and lets us marvel at how they interact. When successful, it lets us observe how music works on a grander scale. More often than not, though, it lets us marvel at the vast discrepancies in tonality and texture by showing us a trainwreck of genres. And when pop radio moves on, these kinds of mashups will, too.
Contrast that with Endtroducing..., DJ Shadow's 1996 album. Shadow is featured rummaging through a basement full of forgotten records in a Nashville record store on Doug Prey's documentary ""Scratch,"" and his obsession with digging for rare vinyl makes his source material not just unpredictable but unidentifiable—which in turn makes it immune to the zigs and zags of popular radio. His groundbreaking debut sounds as fresh today as it did in '96.
Endtroducing… owns the Guinness World Record for literally being the first of its kind (recorded solely from sampled sources), and thus far it seems like it might be one of the last. RJD2 came close to replicating the crate-digging genius on Deadringer, but even he seemed like he'd given up when he shifted gears for the entirely self-produced The Third Hand.
And if the predictability of All Day tells us anything, it's that Gillis has reached the limit of his musical knowledge. He's run out of music history to sample and he doesn't dig crates as well as Shadow. Anyone can be a DJ, you just need to know more about music than everyone else.
But you know, mashup artists like Girl Talk are just like college students. They take other people's songs and try to make their own music. We take other people's research and try to write our own papers. Next May, I'm graduating and hopefully finding a job where I get to do all my own stuff and make real money. So when do mashup artists graduate?
