Sometimes, music critics will try to find something that distinguishes their subject from everyone else. A standard way to do this is to say something dispiriting and cynical about the state of music today, and then to claim that some artist is a shock of fresh air, a mold-breaker, a courageous innovator.
Like a spiritual revival when the reverend arrives drunk, the praising can easily get out of hand: "A harbinger of deliverance for the forsaken music industry." "The last true bastion of authenticity in a world gone mad."
Some might say that uncritical praise is unbecoming of a critic. If you have skepticism for this kind of unfettered kudos, start tensing that upper lip. DJ Girl Talk from Pittsburgh, Pa., burst the very cosmos at its seams from the Ottobar last Friday night, emanating a fizzing, heaving firework of funking, hopping, mesmerizing beats. Collide that fact with the controversial political statement his music and his show collectively represent, and you have a messiah.
Girl Talk, a DJ and electronic music producer who by day is Gregg Gillis, a recent BME grad (Case Western ‘06), is at the forefront of a legally endangered genre of electronic music known as mash-up (or bastard pop) in which artists create new songs by recombining the work of other musicians.
Girl Talk makes mash-up music the way the Romanian dada poet Tristan Tzara wrote verse: chopping up other's people's work into little pieces and rearranging it. Tzara remixed Shakespeare; Girl Talk stews together morsels of tracks from just about every pop music category — hip hop, intelligent dance, trance, R&B and classic rock — into a mesmerizing concoction that drove the 200-something denizens of the Ottobar into a frenzy.
If that poetic allusion isn't moving you, perhaps you could think of Girl Talk's music as resembling an ambitious theatrical experiment, similar to Tom Stoppard's play Travesties (1976), which imagines what would have happened if Tzara, Lenin and James Joyce met in Zurich in 1916. Girl Talk creates a dialogue in music among famous and familiar characters, like Nelly, Kansas and LCD Soundsystem. Each interwoven melody is more than just music; it evokes a rich set of memories, transporting us to other clubs, basements and pool halls where we've heard the melody played. By some act of technological legerdemain, the threads of the listener's musical memory are restitched in a way that somehow all makes sense.
And is fun to dance to.
It's not surprising that record companies are up in arms about this kind of sampling. On the surface, it appears that Girl Talk and his ilk are not creating anything new; they're just stealing the copyrighted material of other musicians to make a buck.
In this legal battle, Girl Talk has emerged as something of a poster child for the creative potential of mash-up music. Last month, mention of Girl Talk was even made in Congress. House Democrat Mike Doyle brought up the topic of his fellow Pittsburghian at a hearing entitled "The Future of Radio." Before the House subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, many of whom probably couldn't even spell AC/DC, Doyle argued that "mash-ups are a transformative new art that expands the consumer's experience and doesn't compete with what an artist has made available [for purchase]."
Mash-up has a parodical edge, revealing the tendency of modern music to recycle musical tropes unadventurously. San Francisco DJ Party Ben, a jack of the mash-up exposé, juxtaposes different pop songs to reveal embarrassingly similar music styles among disparate artists. For example, "Boulevard of Broken Songs", a remix of songs by Green Day, Oasis, Travis and Eminem, reveals that the artists all used the same chords and rhythm in some of their major hits. You might not know that before DJ Danger Mouse became half of Gnarls Barkley, he released a mash-up album in 2006 of Jay-Z's The Black Album and the Beatles' White Album entitled The Grey Album. The album was ruled illegal in the United States. To avoid prosecution, Danger Mouse and his fans distributed the album in one massive download-fest in 24 hours on Tuesday, February 24, 2004, which was dubbed "Grey Tuesday" for the event.
Girl Talk's concert felt alive with a communal energy. Things began every bit within the DJ himself, who hopped wildly into the air around the stage, took most of his clothes off, danced with members of the crowd. Girl Talk's energy was contagious, and soon I felt as though a barrier between the act and the audience had been lifted; I felt simultaneously a part of the music's creation and consumption.
Girl Talk was not the only excellent performer that night. The evening opened with two men, one telling a dark story into the mic, the other, in a straggly clown outfit, silently interpreting the plot with a variety of amusing body movements.
The Pythonesque script seemed also to be reminding us that modern stage comedies are typically a cheap tricks played at the expense of either the audience, or art itself, all for the amusement of the writers. Somehow things are funniest that way.
The next act was Cex, a wheelchair-bound man with enormous ribboned mutton chops, who played some genius electronic dance music that made liberal use of a loud and lengthy sample of a woman moaning in orgasm. As it turned out, Cex was not only a freak show of the nth degree, but also an able-bodied liar who, after he pretended to be healed during the finale of his final song, crowd-surfed semi-nude.
The third act was local electronic-music composer Dan Deacon, who handed out lyrics to the crowd and led us in a rousing, romping sing-along.
