See my niggaz don’t dance we just pull up our pants and, do the Roc-away. Now lean back, lean back, lean back.
Girl Talk, aka Greg Gillis, just wrapped up 48 live shows where he would get on stage, play, mix, splice, and drop samples at a frenetic pace, sweat his ass off, and inspire the masses to dance their asses off.
If you still don’t know what Girl Talk is, I am not talking about a DJ who matches up the end of one track with the beginning of another. I am not talking about a DJ who makes the crowd scream with the drop of “Livin on a Prayer” in the middle of “I Gotta Feeling.”
Greg Gillis applies just as much micro-management and analytic skills that he once applied to his trained field in biomedical engineering, to the intricate weaving and grafting of upwards of 35 samples in one track. Mookie explained just how many samples are used when he reviewed the latest Girl Talk album, All Day, back in November.
You may have noticed two weeks ago when I shat upon the Strokes show that we saw at Las Vegas’ Cosmopolitan. We didn’t know what to expect when getting ready to see Girl Talk at the same hotel. Different venue, but who knew if the same standards for sound and management applied out at the Boulevard Pool as apparently did inside at the Chelsea ballroom? And were we to be standing around the pool? Near the pool? Las Vegas, and this blog, is not stranger to an outdoor pool concert. The space for the Boulevard Pool, at least in the pictures released up to that point, seemed a little more confined.
Oh hell.
Oh shazam.
The Boulevard Pool is the New Standard in wet entertainment in Las Vegas. “Dayclub” is the word to describe the trend that has been developing in Las Vegas over the last few years as cabana culture has tried to find exactly the formula for attracting the bikini and board short-clad folk who are seemingly gainfully employed but able to spare a weekday for a pool party. I can’t even begin to explain all of the amenities amenable to partying that they’ve arranged at this Stripside pool, but check it out. It is a Stripside pool.
Drained for concerts.
All 11 inches of it.
If you want to swim, go to the hotel’s other pools. The Boulevard is designed for the social scene. Foosball, ping pong, cookouts, makeouts, and live music.
I would definitely recommend going to another show. Robyn, Mumford & Sons, Nas & Damian Marley, Cake, and The Flaming Lips are on the calendar for the next couple of months.
Back to Girl Talk.
Our other concern: The crowd. Who were we going to be trying to get our groove on with at this show? Never to worry. Girl Talk’s fans are awesome people. Dancing, throwing hands in air, wearing crazy 80’s getups or wearing noueveau-grunge hipster wear, it’s all good.
The sound was good.
The energy was good.
And do not fret. Girl Talk is only taking a month off. He’s got plenty of festivals and appearance scheduled from late April on through the summer. So hit a show. Hit a few shows in a row. There’s nothing wrong with that.
When discussing the best mash-up artists, Girl Talk is widely considered the King of Kings. Girl Talk, also known as Greg Gillis, is the best there is. The album Feed The Animals is a big favorite of ours here at inALLcaps.com. It’s over 54 minutes of mash-up madness and got played hundreds of times on road trips, pre-party warm ups, and of course was on the playlist of countless trips to the gym.
My friend Jeremy and I had planned on seeing Girl Talk as soon as he was back on tour and within a 5 hour drive from our hometown. We checked for new albums and news of a U.S. tour often; it seemed like Greg was in hiding. I had worried that maybe those copyright lawyers had finally got their claws into our man. All the many uncleared samples he used in his work finally catching up with him. Then again, if that WAS the case, it would be all over the internet.
Then finally, spreading like wildfire, word of a new album called All Day. It wasn’t news of a release date…it was just released as a total surprise!
I found out later that Gillis had begun working on All Day after wrapping up production on Feed the Animals. His need to create more new music while on tour was the biggest catalyst for the material on this new album.
I fly quickly to the Illegal Arts website, Girl Talk’s label site, to grab my copy. Previous albums were distributed using a “pay-what-you-want” model, but I notice this album is just simply FREE! (you can still get your copy for free by clicking here). For hours I attempted to download the album, only to be denied by the overwhelmed site. I did finally get a copy from…well…from that same friend I mentioned earlier. Jeremy was triumphant in his attempt at the download.
I got the tracks loaded up in iTunes and the first thing I noticed was that this album is long! Clocking in at over an hour and ten minutes, this ends up being the longest album Girl Talk has put out!
The album starts out strong! A mash-up of Black Sabbath, 2Pac, Jay-Z, and Ludacris all in the first 1:20 of the first track! Another highlight is the mash-up of J-Kwon, The Ramones, and Slick Rick! Amazing!
Let’s break down a song of this new album. Track 10 is called Steady Shock. Peep it out below.
Click to play Girl Talk – Steady Shock The track illustrates how amazing Greg Gillis is at his artform. Look below to see the breakdown of all the samples in this one track. Keep in mind the track itself is under 5 and a half minutes long.
With over 370 samples that comprise the album All Day, there is plenty of samples you are sure to know well! There are some mysterious ones in the mix. They sound familiar but you are going crazy trying to figure out the original work the sample comes from. Never fear! The internet music geek community created a wiki page within hours of the new album release to identify all the samples used on the album. Check out the wiki article here. A less detailed, but considered more accurate version exists over here.
Now… many of our readers have asked me, is this album BETTER than Girl Talk’s previous album Feed The Animals. It isn’t better. In fact, Gillis’ albums Unstoppable and Night Ripper are better albums. All Day just doesn’t have the energy these previous albums have had. All Day is more like a “party-starter” than the full on party rager. The one thing that I like about All Day is that Gillis lets the samples breathe a bit more. Although this is what actually takes a bit of the excitement out of the album, it ends up making the album seem more mature to me.
Gillis talks about pacing himself in a recent interview with MTV:
“I’m really interested in the rate of change but sticking with the same source material for a bit longer. It’s a little bit more patient, mostly because I’ve spent just about every day working on it, editing it, going over each segment. It’s been a full-time commitment.”
If you still think this album might be better than Feed The Animals, please refresh yo self with this video that mashes up all the source videos that make up the song “Play Your Part (Part 1)”.
I have been on a remixing !KICK!! lately. Desperate to find a new project, I remembered that Trent Reznor had put up stems of a bunch of his tracks for users to remix and upload back to the site. It’s remix.nin.com if you are interested. I decided to start a remix using Capital G and the beats from a Birdman track called Money To Blow. I think it turned out ok:
I was kinda stoked to upload it and share it with the NIN community. I log in…click UPLOAD A REMIX, and get greeted with this message:
IMPORTANT NOTICE: Due to lawsuits way beyond our control, we have been forced to restrict the functionality of this site in a very crippling way. Before any remix can appear on this site, it must be manually cleared by a moderator to ensure it does not contain any copyrighted material. Only once your submitted mix has been approved will it show up on the site. Please see the FAQ for detailed information regarding which materials are unauthorized for use in your remixes. We are not happy with this process, but we have been left with no choice. Our approval process relies on the much-appreciated efforts of volunteer moderators, so it may take some time before your mix is approved. Thanks for your patience and understanding. We’re as frustrated with this as you are, and we hope it doesn’t interfere too heavily with the enjoyment of this site.
It’s a shame, especially since no one is trying to make any money off this particular site or project. It’s just lame and disappointing.
After reading that, I remembered a powerful documentary I watched several months ago but never got around to writing about. RIP: A Remix Manifesto.
In RiP: A remix manifesto, Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers. The film’s central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power, or the Pied Piper of piracy? Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig, Brazil’s Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil, and pop culture critic Cory Doctorow are also along for the ride.
I even wanted to get my cousin, a Copyright attorney, in on the post. I wanted her to watch it and for us to have a dialogue. Although supportive of me and this blog, what we do here must be at odds with her views on the issue right? At least from a professional point of view. Life gets in the way and I don’t think she ever got around to watching this documentary…so no discussion. (I still want her to watch it. I still want to have that discussion. That’s your last friendly reminder, cous!) But you, fellow readers, will watch it…Right? You can pay whatever you want to download the movie.
I had to force TLO to watch it kicking and screaming. I’m not sure why she resisted watching it. Maybe she hates documentaries. Perhaps she would rather watch The Kardashians. Most likely she has some guilt about what we do here on this blog. Giving away the work of artists we respect and enjoy isn’t something we do lightly. We really try to do the right thing. We take down music at the request of bands and labels. We have only been asked to do so twice (well three times now, counting Friday) in a year and a half by the way. Not a bad record for the hundreds of MP3’s we have made available for your perusal.
Once I got her inebriated enough that she had no ability to run away, I threw the DVD into the ‘ole XBOX. I think she liked it? Maybe she will comment and share her views.
I am passionate about music. Maybe moreso about remixes, since I have been involved in DJ culture for a large part of my life. That’s not the point though, not totally. The main focus of the film is Girl Talk after all.
What you realize through the first half of the film is that ALL music is built on the work of the past.
All ART is built on the art of the past.
The entities that own this art will do whatever they can, namely suing the shit out of you, to protect it. These entities are in trouble though. Many big bands are producing and distributing their music without the help of these “entitities”. Radiohead realized they no longer NEED a label. No longer on a label, they offered their latest effort In Rainbows to be delivered from the bands website and to allow the consumer/fan to pay whatever they thought the work was worth. This is like an atom bomb in the ideas war. It changed everything.
The label, in desperation, tried to legally pursue a fan who had decided to remix the album. The label no longer had rights to this new album, so the band stepped in to tell them to fuck off. Which they had to do, tail between. Then Radiohead upped the ante yet again. They offered the stems to Reckoner so that everyone could remix the song.
To lock up this art for the life of the artist plus 70 years stifles creativity or forces it underground. In the film, the director drives the point home in regards to the patents and copyrights involved in medicine. Could these laws be stifling the work on finding real cures for health issues in a timely manner because drug companies patent and protect all their work? Think about that for a minute.
Music might not “save” lives, but in the science world, this impacts us all in a very real way. The Rolling Stones’ stealing all the great blues riffs from the past, but suing anyone else who steals riffs from them seems like a petty issue to some. But suing a drug company because they “borrowed” your scientific R&D to work on a drug to help cure cancer. That should hit home.
The filmmaker even puts the very documentary itself up for “remixing”. You can take any part of the film and rework it, add or tweak the images in the movie as you see fit.
A participatory media experiment, from day one, Brett shares his raw footage at opensourcecinema.org, for anyone to remix. This movie-as-mash-up method allows these remixes to become an integral part of the film.
I was about to write about another album I recently came across. With multiple windows open, including a workout blog from Zuzana over at BodyRock.tv, I just flipped over to iTunes and hit Play. I meant for the slower sounds from my intended album to come out of the speakers. Instead, I heard this:
I had just finished a ball-busting workout from Czech guru Zuzana Light, and when I accidentally played this equally obnoxious song on accident, I was motivated to get up and do just a few minutes more of booty lifts. Put In Work!
For what seems like it can’t possibly be a year already, I have been working out to the brilliant mashups provided by Girl Talk. I never tire of those energetic songs, but maybe Mookie was getting tired of hearing them? He spent an entire day looking for new mashups for me, and came up with Milkman. Milkman is another skinny white kid, but this one is from San Diego, born Gregg Luskin. Circle of Fifths is his second album, both of his efforts having been put out in the year 2008.
The first thing that attracts me to a mashup is a fast, pounding beat that refuses to allow you to remain on your ass. And not all of them qualify. I am very picky when I want DJ/electronica/post-produced music for dancing or working out (which is often one in the same) and I don’t settle for something with just a nice beat. I need all the motivation I can get. The second thing is random drops, often provocative, that I probably haven’t heard before (I don’t listen to a lot of hip hop.) And the third, essential component for bringing it all together, is a subtle sample of a favorite song from my childhood or teen years.
Milkman does a pretty good job of this.
I do it so good I don’t need nobody else
Nah. That’s not true. I have steadily gained a good amount of weight in the last 12 months. Every fat molecule in my body called up all their old lost friends and decided their family reunion would occur just in time for Valentine’s Day, but the party is OVER baby. I am working my ass every day and I need music like Milkman to keep me motivated.
And it keeps me just barely in touch with popular hip hop songs and hooks, without having to sit through an entire album. And suddenly I understand what the hell Mookie is talking about when he says he leans like a Cholo.
My milkshake does bring all the boys to the yard. I could teach you, but I’d have to charge. So get up and move it with me right now. Come on. You know you’ve got an extra inch here and there too.
Right where you are now, no matter what you’re wearing, you can do it just for a few minutes… lift your knees, shake your butt, lunge a bit… Tupac, Kelis, Kilo, Eminem, Britney, Fatboy Slim, even the Fine Young Cannibals are all here to help you out. You want that body back just as much as I do.
Everybody just follow me. We need a little controversy.
