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Originally Posted by dubman
i think girl talk takes that initial experience and augments it, gives it depth, by not only being oriented towards a culturally aware audience but directly engaging with it by moving at speeds that render many of its parts indecipherable, sometimes refusing a focused or deliberate style, forcing a majority of listeners to constantly feel a familiarity with what they're hearing without being able to place it (but also reaching checkpoints that are easily identifiable). in a sense this one-ups even sampling, since we now have the benefit of relevantrecontextualization, having source material for which we were around to for and know being mangled in this way. i think girl talk explicitly transcends being clever and connecting things by how its discordant nature connects nothing at all, but to me seems like a coherent and enthusiastic work.
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I don't know. A lot of this argument seems to operate under arbitrary presumptions: Girl Talk's speed isn't utterly indecipherable to me, only irritating; it's precisely because I
am able to follow his manifold juxtapositions and am consistently confronted by yet another switch-up that I find his strategy deflating rather than profound. You may call it transcendent, on account of its being
different; I just find it cowardly and unsuccessful in a relatively new way.
I'm also not sure what you mean by a "relevant" recontextualization. It can't be assumed that everyone knows this source material, just as it can't be assumed that in "proper" sampling (I'm not sure there is actually a distinction to be made between this and Girl Talk's sampling) that the audience
isn't expected to catch the references (Kanye West immediately springs to mind). Again, you may call the music's discordance profound, but I just call it ... weakly ironic and ironically weak, whether or not it claims to be un-ironic.
But honestly, if it feels enthusiastic to you, then by all means be enthused. I'll just note that your reading of his approach's significance is as subject to debate as the effectiveness of his music.
And Animal Boything (I like your name by the way), I'm not sure the "making his own music" card works, for all the reasons I outlined in my previous post. The Avalanches and DJ Shadow
are enormously informed by a DJ sensibility, and their music
does formally and conceptually hold much in common with the standard DJ set. Girl Talk's music especially
can't be taken on its own terms, because its cleverness is based on dot-connecting.
Sampling, no matter how creative (again, not creative enough in this case IMHO), will never suddenly become
creating--and that's not the point. I would argue that the Avalanches' and Shadow's music utilizes the capabilities of computer-based sequencing and sampling much more extensively than Girl Talk. One analogy that comes to mind: the former two would twist the words in a given sentence into new catchphrases, while Girl Talk simply rearranges them and renders them gibberish. This may seem to contradict my above claim that Girl Talk is
not indecipherable, but it's more the effect of being able to
read the collection of words, which never congeal into a full sentence. Not to take the hackneyed concept too seriously, but there's quite literally no "statement" being made here.
Still--it's perfectly fine to appreciate the consistency of his execution, but I tend to think of that as a perfection of an exercise, or a
craft, rather than a creation of something new (sampling or not), i.e. a full art. I guess I'm just picturing a certain line that he definitely does
not cross, precisely because he takes this one approach so far (to little consequence, IMO).
As a good friend of mine put it, "T.I. is the party album of the year".
