The Crier
Dada-D-Don’t Stop the Beat
How Girl Talk’s abuse of musical pastiche makes originality seem, well, unoriginal
Selbert Archer · Featured · Feb 12, 2007
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NewsvineThe music of Greg Gillis, the mash-up phenom who performs under the name Girl Talk, is ecstatic and reckless. His most recent album, Night Ripper, is nearly an hour of non-stop, patchwork-pop pulse constructed from industry samples. Anybody who has heard it knows that Girl Talk is fun. But it’s also deceptively profound.
Gillis’s songs lace together culture bombs like Marcel Duchamp, laying waste to pop’s tenuous shell and defiling the corpses of its heroes. Remember when Duchamp set out a urinal in an art gallery? Why was that art? Presentation.
That urinal questioned the nature of art. With a Girl Talk song, you’ve already heard every single note — pissed on it, probably. Listening might have only been incidental, floating on the hissing treble of passerby’s headphones or in muted murmurs through a neighbor’s wall. But most of the time it’s directly familiar, since 25-year-old Gillis shared in the progression of musical milieu that enveloped and imprinted every fun-loving, red-meat-scarfing member of our generation.
It’s like pop music reaching transcendental self-consciousness and then having a stroke; a being that, confronted with itself, explodes.
Gillis adds the synth kick to our collective musical lifetime. It’s like Marcel Proust hosting a junior high dance. Forgotten relics come rushing back with the lucidity of a rediscovered memory. Once upon a time, these sounds were in a music video, tied to an industry personality, and meticulously marketed with an appearance designed for appeal. Whatever that appeal might have been, it’s been overtaken by the progression of culture.
The juxtaposition of these elements in Night Ripper is cohesive even though each of its parts is a jarring mess. It’s like pop music reaching transcendental self-consciousness and then having a stroke; a being that, confronted with itself, explodes.
And god, it’s beautiful.
Girl Talk is the pure joy of absolution from objects of culture as they were intended to appear. Critical theorist Theodor Adorno claimed that only art could accomplish this, but he didn’t seem to consider that we might actually enjoy the process.
Moreover, Girl Talk pulls a negative dialectic like Adorno never imagined possible. It’s the antithesis to a staggering array of cultural theses all at once. Adorno realized that everyone in the thrall of the culture industry was more or less aware of it. The genius (and horror) of the matter is that we’re too numb to find it problematic.
Adorno wrote that the culture industry is so insidiously omnipresent that it’s impossible to conceive of a world without it. That might seem extreme, but he lived in Los Angeles during World War II. As a German refugee and staunch Marxist in such a place, you’d be really confused, too. Adorno concluded that only avant-garde art can undermine everything awful about the late capitalist world. He might have been thinking of Duchamp and his urinal.
Come and get it, copyright lawyers. Just try and take my Grammy, Jagger. I dare you.
Girl Talk, in a time of intellectual property chaos, continues this assault on the notion of originality. This isn’t the same old question of the legitimacy of sampling — even your mother knows that Endtroducing… is a masterpiece. Within 90 seconds in the first track of Night Ripper, “Once Again,” Gillis inserts the controversially sampled string line from “Bittersweet Symphony” along with the smarmily whispered threat, “Wait ’til you see my dick.” Come and get it, copyright lawyers. Just try and take my Grammy, Jagger. I dare you.
Even if Girl Talk doesn’t win a Grammy, he should win the Nobel Prize. There has been no more brilliant expression of cultural savvy in decades. This is revolution against the ideology surrounding creativity, a sneer at marketed material that manages to also reclaim it. This reclamation took more originality, more compositional subtlety than any of its parts could hope to claim.
Girl Talk will set you free.
Girl Talk is performing at the Michigan League Ballroom on Friday, February 16th. Doors at 8:30. Wolf Eyes is opening — if you managed to read this whole article, you will like them.
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