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Girl Talk Is Inspired, Jarring Samples
Generation attention deficit disorder has a new pied piper
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When the Beastie Boys exploded on the scene in the mid-80s, their dynamic sound was due in no small part to their ingenious use of sampling. They bounced from Steely Dan to Led Zeppelin to Curtis Mayfield with such abandon that a lot of up-and-comers realized they no longer needed to play a musical instrument at all to make a record. It wouldn’t take long for the likes of James Brown and others to put a stop to royalty-free samples and force hip-hop back to the drawing board, or at least come up with some money for usage.
Flash forward to today: Greg Gillis from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a veritable sampling machine who records and performs under the name “Girl Talk,” has taken unauthorized sampling to audacious new levels. His “songs” are so multi-layered and riddled with well-known samples from several genres that they can induce dizziness. Girl Talk is framed as hip-hop, but in many ways it is really more like sound collage experimentation. Incredibly compelling moments can give way to vexing, jarring segues that can undermine the flow. But when he hits his stride it is irresistible and very entertaining.
Girl Talk basically pulled a Radiohead with the release of his current album, Feed the Animals (Illegal Art Records) and gave people the option to name their own price. This sort of decision might be the reason the sampling police haven’t come along to crush him like a bug. In any case, you can’t deny his amazing ear. With his rapid-fire samples and beats, Girl Talk has become the new poster boy for the attention-deficit-disorder generation.