Comments on RIFF MARKET: THEORETICALLY UNPUBLISHED PIECE ABOUT GIRL TALK, F...

I'm so glad to have stumbled on a review of Girl T...

2009-03-30T18:25:00.000-04:00

I'm so glad to have stumbled on a review of Girl Talk that actually sounds informed, instead of dazzled and vaguely intimidated by all the hipitude.

I was just listening to one of my favorite albums, Cooking With Lasers, by the Baldwin Brothers, an album built on a sturdy foundation of samples. However, it sounds like music...probably because the BB actually *were* musicians who could compose and record unique tracks to mix with the samples. Consumer software like GarageBand made music recording and mixing more accessible to more people. On the down side, it lowers the bar for craft and aesthetic judgement, just the way Photoshop makes good photography seem quotidian.

Funny thing is P-fork gave Plunderphonics a 10.0
2009-01-07T02:41:00.000-05:00
Funny thing is P-fork gave Plunderphonics a 10.0

Gillis has some sublime moments, but he refuses to go with them, and I think this is antithetical to dance music. He makes you have to think about it and I think this is too cheeky. People call it party music, but I guess I feel if you put this on at a party and people were old enough to know the songs, it would just become Trivial Pursuit.

Fave bit on "Night Ripper" is Donnie Iris' "Ah Leah" and Juelz Santana from the "Run It" remix. Lasts 15 seconds, if that and you wish it were an entire song. The rest sounds kind of tinny and numbing.

how much does gillis' position affect the context ...

2008-12-31T13:07:00.000-05:00

how much does gillis' position affect the context of the argumentation?.. if we do a parallax shift: if for example gillis was aware of this critical position you present (nostalgia-ridden whatever, pop optimist), then gillis suddenly embodies some kind of pop accelerationism. is this some kind of ontic peak where all this standardized pop music (think of the 'undead', a music where its death is fully alive in it already, like a zombie) does something? explodes? implodes? i dont know..

several issues with this article, but just one to ...

2008-12-30T04:59:00.000-05:00

several issues with this article, but just one to start: the implication that "uniformity" is somehow a "new" phenomenon "unique" to corporatized pop music of late 20th century.

wrong: traditional and indigenous music of all cultures are much more "uniform" than western modern pop. look at any millenia old tradition, for instance: almost all indian classical ragas use exactly the same compositional structure, the same instrumentation, the same scale, and duration. the same goes for regional traditional music from Africa, Indonesia, Russia.

it is said that state Gamelan did not change for 500 years prior to the 20th century because it does not have to: the music is simply perfect, needed no improvements, and most importantly allows infinite variation and improvisation within its formal boundaries.

and the negative light under which the "uniformity" of pop is cast is of course stemming from the romantic, modernist, western "disease" of originality.

but of course pop commodities are cookie cutter in ways that are very much different, and function very much differently, from the canonized high official styles of traditional cultures...

but thanks for the article, was a good read.

If you consider his first two albums in relation t...

2008-12-29T01:53:00.000-05:00

If you consider his first two albums in relation to his two more recent ones, there's an obvious shift (especially prominent in Feed The Animals) in the way the songs are structured and the general aesthetic of the sound. That is, his first two albums were much more abstract and "indie"-sounding than Night Ripper and Feed The Animals. This reflects a change in Gillis' entire approach. He got fed up with the whole indie scene and the way that in the indie community, as things (artists/albums/songs) became popular, they would suddenly become low-brow. As a result of this, he started to create music that didn't just manipulate Top 40 songs in an effort to gain the attention of some Pitchfork-fiending indie geek, but celebrated them and the culture surrounding pop music. Thus, his songs became much more focused on the "recognizability" of the samples. He hated the way that indie artists were heralded one day and then dismissed another... Oh wait, kind of like what the indie community is doing to him now?

last paragraph reminds me of a quote from knifehan...

2008-12-28T14:15:00.000-05:00

last paragraph reminds me of a quote from knifehandchop in a vice interview:

...“Dancemix2000” (which mashes up everything from Eminem to Vengaboys) is a meta-commentary on the staid, unimaginative state of pop: “I want to mix these pop styles together that have nothing to do with each other and make them sound perfect together so people will see how there’s no difference in what they’re listening to right now. They’re just pop songs. Right now Blink 182 sounds a lot like Eminem, or Pink, or Destiny’s Child. If you put them on top of each other, they’ll still sound fine.”

great piece, but i'm a little unsure on something ...

2008-12-28T08:04:00.000-05:00

great piece, but i'm a little unsure on something - can you clarify?

to me, your thesis is simply that Girl Talk reflects the serialised/standardised nature of pop music back to us, in 'concrete' form as it were. but you're attempting to argue FOR pop music, right? that Girl Talk is making a "wildly insulting comment ... about pop music" (ie. that it's interchangeable/disposable/nostalgia-defined).

but then you happily note that rap singles, pop's current apex, is "come with an instrumental and a vocal a cappella; the verses are mostly all the same length, about 16 bars; the choruses are all more of less the same length of time too".

so what's your argument for the value of pop music? because if all Gillis does is re-present one element of it (it's all similar/sound design) that you seem to agree with, then who cares? Why not let's talk about other elements?

Or is it something in the fact he has now raised this practice to an 'Art' that pisses you guys off? Because that is like the kind of ultimate end of pop's repetitiveness?

Apart from this, I'm also a bit unsure on your deployment of technology in the piece. You (rightfully) slam that Slate guy for saying something about the 'iPod era', but then you are equally as guilty of the technological tail wagging the socio-cultural dog when you seem to say that synthesizers CREATED house music? That's just as deterministic as iPod guy, no?

Maybe the go then would be to look behind the technology and see the wider structures - which are essentially corporate; the music industry (and its driving force, capital) is the one that has pushed standardisation (with slighy variation) for 25 years, because it's profitable.

So there I go getting all Adorno, though - I'm not necessarily agreeing that corporate pop = standardised, but if you're going to argue against Gillis and then agree with pop's serialisation, you've basically backed yourself into a corner into that very argument, no?

Hopefully this gives you guys some things to think about. And please correct me.

I actually didn't read the entirety of your piece ...

2008-12-26T11:34:00.000-05:00

I actually didn't read the entirety of your piece because... well to be honest I'm not sure Girl Talk is worth that many words, but I don't see what he's doing that better, more clever, or anything like that to the millions of other mashupers releasing stuff on soulseek everyday or the fakers posting lil wayne the leak V files etc. I guess he's just indie and the other mash-uppers are still "ravers" or whatever. I also do agree that Clayton's stuff is much more clever and interesting, and more importantly it's got that post-colonialist neuvo-cosmpolitianism avant-garde thing going.

this is brilliant. best piece i've read in years....

2008-12-25T00:56:00.000-05:00

this is brilliant. best piece i've read in years.

i also think this is the best piece of music criti...

2008-12-24T18:56:00.000-05:00

i also think this is the best piece of music criticism all year, and made my response the first post on my new blog, if anyone's interested in continuing the conversation:
http://bassandsuperstructure.blogspot.com/

Gillis is like PT Barnum: 90% of his success is ma...

2008-12-24T13:28:00.000-05:00

Gillis is like PT Barnum: 90% of his success is marketing. By positioning himself as an artist and not a DJ, he raises his product halfway out of the novelty muck and earns a level of consideration not typically accorded to DJ mixes. That other 10% is the problem. There's no argument that Gillis, if he's not doing something completely original (Plunderphonics, Dust Brothers, Jason Forrest, etc.), he's doing it in such a brash, inventive manner that college kids lose their shit when he rolls into town to rock their auditoriums. Most of this is obviously the nostalgia flavor, but I think it would be uncharitable to say that Gillis' ear for recontextualization and his aesthetic bent (repositioning rap lyrics against pop/rock backgrounds to unveil - or invent - emotional subtext) does not constitute a kind of art unto itself. This isn't to say that GT's art is qualitatively identical to the artistry of the people he's repurposing; we can argue all day about whether or not the curatorial can be considered artistic or what level of original contribution is necessary to make someone an artist rather than a DJ.

I also think it's freighting GT with more weight than he can bear to assert that his project, whether accidentally or by design, suggests that pop music is an undifferentiated mass that can be pulled apart and reassembled in whatever formation Gillis prefers and be identical content-wise. If we grant that Gillis' success is attributable in large part to the nostalgic, name-that-tune quality of his work, well, that nostalgia comes from somewhere. Listeners have built up emotional attachments to the songs Gillis is Cuisinarting; hence the ecstatic reaction of his fans to each clever beatjack. I don't think the average GT listener views what he does as much more than a sensationally well-executed parlor trick. In fact, I think that the positioning of Girl Talk as a "serious artist" (the pejorative quotation marks signal disdain for the phrase, not GT) derives mainly from Gillis himself and the critics who see him as both a Fair Use Moses leading the way into a promised land of IP recycling and the celebrant of the ultimate poptimist sacrament - mixing the high with the low and drawing out the undergirding commonalities. These views reek of self-justification, as if his records could not plausibly be considered worthwhile if everyone admitted that Gillis is an extremely gifted spaz whose success is largely attributable to his willingness to run so blatantly afoul of our present copyright regime.

It's tempting to defuse this conversation with a big "so what"; so what if Gillis thinks he's an artist, or so what if you think that he isn't. However, I think it's worthwhile to try and suss out a distinction between the taste-making and the art-making, if only because there must come a point where merely juxtapositioning is no longer creating; indeed, the pro-GT counterargument would be that there is a point where juxtapositioning does become creating. I appreciate what Gillis is trying to do in terms of elucidating connections between artists and genres; it's an extremely abbreviated version of what Greil Marcus tries to do when he writes a book presenting Pere Ubu, Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, and Twin Peaks as thematically interrelated. However, there's a difference between the guy who paves the road, the one who drives on it, and the one who sells the GPS. Figuring out in which one of these categories, if any, Gillis fits into is all the fun.

I've got to say, if Girl Talk inspired anything, i...

2008-12-24T02:22:00.000-05:00

I've got to say, if Girl Talk inspired anything, it's this great article. Seriously, one of the best pieces on music I've read in a long time. Way to really think about it and not just compare it to something I've heard of.

But let's not start sucking each other's dicks just yet... (know that jam?)

where you say: "Just as bloggers have two basic options — write original content or become a central link warehouse..." I think you just nailed it on the head. That's pretty much the whole story.

The question is defining the difference. And, to quote Robert DeNiro in Ronin, "If there is a question, there is no question." You're article, on the other hand, (to repeat the former reference) is decidedly original. So is the the role of the Girl Talk's and the BoingBoing's of this brave new internet world? To keep pop culture gargling its own shit for our 2:45 long laughs, until we're motivated to get off our asses and do something about it? Who's going to record a Girl Talk diss-track?

But that's the great thing about pop culture and its drive to keep selling itself as either the real deal, the latest irony, or that throw-back: it hates silence, and will keep echoing until someone steps up and takes the needle off the groove and smashes that shit against the wall.

But then again, we all gotta dance to something, right?

Dammit, I woke up thinking about this further.
...

2008-12-23T13:36:00.000-05:00

Dammit, I woke up thinking about this further.

Nothing has been sacred for a long time now. Why is it a personal affront to see the pop culture icons of our youth be bastardized by a clever YouTube bit or savvy ad campaign? These icons were—almost to a one—created only to sell us something, so why the sentimentality? Same goes for the pop music of our youth. It was meant to be consumed and forgotten; some of us hold onto it more dearly than that, to our own peril. Just like the notes and chords Skynyrd loots and mashes up for "Sweet Home Alabama," it's all up for grabs.

As for the quality of said mashups and their aesthetic value, that will be debatable forever.

The college-age kids and early 20-somethings who comprise the majority of Gillis' audience have an easier time enjoying the smashing of their mass-produced idols. They grew up in a YouTube world where nostalgia for yesterday—literally—is just as powerful (or watered down, depending on where you stand) as fond memories of childhood. Weird but true. No telling where that's gonna lead us.

Like the rest of our late 20th-century American disposable lifestyle, this whole "pop culture" thing is going to die, or at least radically transform in a crystal-totem Mayan calendar kinda way. To use a buzzword, it simply isn't sustainable. Finite usefulness is sewn into its DNA. Crazy Greg Gillis, he loves his pop music so much he has to kill it. And there he is, doing the danse macabre over its deathbed in his boxer shorts.

(Another aside: You know who addresses this issue, on levels simultaneously direct and oblique? MGMT. Death and transition and idol smashing are what "Time to Pretend" is all about, perhaps accidentally. That's a whole 'nother blog post.)

i love you. keep thinking things through.

2008-12-23T02:39:00.000-05:00

i love you. keep thinking things through.

Let's dig deeper into Gillis' 2012 expiration date...

2008-12-23T00:36:00.000-05:00

Let's dig deeper into Gillis' 2012 expiration date. Not to get all crystal-totem on you, but many interpret the "end of the world" that coincides with that date not as a snuffing out of the candle but a transition to another state of being. The end of the world we know and the beginning of one we can't yet conceive.

If Gillis is indeed a "cultural vasectomy" it might be because his work heralds another form of music construction we're only beginning to understand. Some sort of test-tube culture as a viable artistic option. Sounds awful at first but it doesn't have to be. True that many have done the mashup/sampladelic/collage thing before--and better--but it's the celebratory homogenizing force with which Gillis approaches it that makes him a phenomenon, not to mention the voraciousness with which it's received. For better or worse, Girl Talk is a logical end to our present moment. Someone has to do it, someone has to dance to it, and someone else has to recognize it for what it really is before we can all move on.

So really what we're talking about is an altogether new, post-art art form. Can we say "post-art" yet? What is art, anyway, when a urinal hanging on a wall or a diamond-encrusted human skull is a revolutionary statement? The entire concept of art is evolving in unforeseen ways (see "Dramatic Chipmunk," the video game Passage, Burning Man) with the result of making the unforeseen suddenly visible, of increasing possibility. This is what's scary/exciting and is an altogether different subject than Girl Talk. But it should be said that la danse macabre is very sexy, and not just in a morbid or nihilistic way. It's the theme song to the unknown. There is indeed hope in it.

Nostalgia has always existed. Pop has always cannibalized/democratized itself. The internet makes it all so damnably easy to do and consume and the danger is getting lazy. Writing/criticizing/discussing helps move things forward but sort of exists in a vacuum. Originality—even if it sucks—and creation—even if it's hack—only add to the momentum driving us towards something better. All this verbalizing and self-reflection and thinking about thinking that the internet engenders might be good for us in the end.

(Aside: What ever happened to Jason Forrest? Dude did the ADD-mashup thing far more musically than Gillis and never got props.)

Comments on RIFF MARKET: THEORETICALLY UNPUBLISHED PIECE ABOUT GIRL TALK, F...

I'm so glad to have stumbled on a review of Girl T...

how much does gillis' position affect the context ...

several issues with this article, but just one to ...

If you consider his first two albums in relation t...

last paragraph reminds me of a quote from knifehan...

great piece, but i'm a little unsure on something ...

I actually didn't read the entirety of your piece ...

this is brilliant. best piece i've read in years....

i also think this is the best piece of music criti...

Gillis is like PT Barnum: 90% of his success is ma...

I've got to say, if Girl Talk inspired anything, i...

Dammit, I woke up thinking about this further....

i love you. keep thinking things through.

Let's dig deeper into Gillis' 2012 expiration date...

Dammit, I woke up thinking about this further.
...