Hello World

Today’s song is so epic that I had to take a day off of blogging to prepare for it. That’s my official explanation for missing yesterday’s scheduled post. Okay, let’s get to it.

Girl Talk. How somebody can go from this complete pile of crap to the best album of 2008 in just two years is utterly beyond me, but Gregg Gillis (aka Girl Talk) managed it with the life-affirming Feed the Animals. Girl Talk takes the mashup mentality to one of its logical conclusions: why just put two or three songs together when you can put the best eight-to-fifteen seconds of a few dozen songs together instead? This strategy is risky, to say the least — if the samples aren’t awesome, if they don’t mesh well, if the listener is sensitive to the rampant obscenity Girl Talk favors, it just comes off as a horrible mess (see Girl Talk’s aforelinked 2006 album Night Ripper for just how bad this can get). But with Feed the Animals, which incidentally has a fascinating commercial history (it was originally sold In Rainbows-style but now can (and should) be purchased at Amazon’s MP3 Store), Girl Talk managed to make an album I’d put up there among the very best of the last five years. It’s lively, funny, artful, and assertive, and incredibly compelling. And, for what it’s worth, it’s the best music to run to (up-tempo and continuously changing).

Now I think I’ll let my judgmental friends over at Pitchfork say a bit: Continue reading »