Yesterday on Fresh Air rock critic Ken Tucker did his Top of Pop 2008. He had this to say about Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals:
One of my favorite albums of the year was one I didn’t review on Fresh Air at all because it was so gleefully profane and so resistant to brief synopsis. The DJ, Greg Gillis, who uses the stage name Girl Talk, put out the album “Feed the Animals.” It consists of literally hundreds of snippets of songs from those of Metallica to the Carpenters to create a densely layered slab of pleasure. Anywhere you cut into this rich cake, you come up with delicious morsels.
The NYTimes reviews a Girl Talk performance:
Girl Talk set off instant pandemonium as its set began at Terminal 5 on Tuesday night, the last of three sold-out shows there. Dancing girls swarmed Girl Talk — Gregg Gillis and his laptop — within moments, knowing they would be welcome onstage. The video screen overhead had already been flashing images of the cover for Girl Talk’s fourth album, “Feed the Animals” (Illegal Art), with the flaming letters GT on a suburban lawn; the crowd had already been yelling, “Girl Talk.” From the stage Mr. Gillis’s helpers were shooting streamers out onto the audience. “I’m gonna party,” Mr. Gillis shouted, and he did.
Mr. Gillis aims to please. His music is a collage of hits, recent and old, that are instantly recognizable to just about everyone in the crowd….Technologically Mr. Gillis has it easy. Not long ago D.J.’s combined songs by combing their music libraries for coincidences to find matching keys, tempos or phrase structures. The art of the D.J., from hip-hop pioneers like Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa to latter-day mashup specialists like 2 Many DJ’s, was based on having an observant ear and a special kind of memory, in the eternal search for another potential mesh or segue. On top of that D.J.’s needed to be dexterous enough with turntables to cue up the right moments and keep them in sync.
Mr. Gillis has bypassed those ear and motor skills. His computer does the pitch shifting and beat matching, and it can lock his combinations onto the beat so that with a little preparation, anything can mesh with anything else. His main physical challenge was getting to his laptop, reading the screen and hitting the right keys amid the crowd of dancing, shouting fans, some of whom were eager to massage him as he worked. Every so often he’d set a combination going and abandon his computer to plunge into the melee and dance; there were even enough people onstage for him to crowd surf.
HERE’S MORE — YouTube: Girl Talk Creates a mashup, Microsoft ad: He’s a PC (and is no longer so clean cut having quit his biomedical engineering job to do music full time in 2007), Venues Magazine: December interview with Gillis, Techdirt: Who will be the first to sue Girl Talk?, NYTimes: Mash-Up Model, Wikipedia: Girl Talk (musician), NPR: Day to Day, Girl Talk Chops Pop Music To Pieces, All Things Considered, Sex, Gender Equality In New Girl Talk Album, Open Source Cinema documentary.