7/21/08 - Feed The Animals

A while back, I wrote a bit on mashups and Girl Talk, and with the recent release of Feed The Animals, Gillis's Night Ripper follow-up, the subject seems worth revisiting. Like a pair of CCR albums that I've been listening to recently (Green River and Willy and the Poorboys), the second album seems like a continuation of the first, as though the artist in question simply took a break after writing an album's worth of songs, got up, got a up of coffee, sat back down, and knocked out another one of similar mood, style, and overall quality. It's successive albums like this (or strings of them) when bands can come to seem like superstar athletes, locking into the realm of the unconscious and sinking shot after shot or hitting homer after homer, making it look identical and uniform. What's amazing is that for an athlete this comes in the span of minutes and hours, while for a band it often comes in spans of months and years.

It can be toxic to artistic development, especially when self-consciousness creeps in and they're no longer knocking it out of the park without even thinking. God forbid it happen at the beginning of the artistic career - then you've got the sad spectacle of chasing after ghosts for an entire articstic lifetime. It seems to me that bands that stumble first or often along the way can then more easily revist the peaks later in their career. So I feel reassured to know that Girl Talk put out two terrible glitch-pop DJ mixes before detonating Night Ripper all over my face.

Quick list of bands that hit multi-album strings of similar quality & style:

The Strokes (Is This It & Room On Fire)
CCR (Green River & Willy and the Poorboys)
Randy Newman (Sail Away & Good Old Boys)
Ben Folds Five (s/t & Whatever & Ever Amen)
Pixies (Surfer Rosa & Doolittle)
Arcade Fire (Funeral & Neon Bible)
etc.



vs.

Bands that show marked & ragged development

The White Stripes (s/t to De Stijl to White Blood Cells)
Nirvana (Bleach to Nevermind)
Radiohead (Pablo Honey to The Bends)
The Hold Steady (Separation Sunday to Boys and Girls in America)
The Clash (Give 'Em Enough Rope to London Calling)
etc.



So Night Ripper is the Leap, but Feed The Animals maintains the spot on the plateau, and creates the beautiful illusion that Gillis could keep putting out 46 minute masterpieces like this until he dies or doesn't feel like doing it anymore. A perilous position to be in, for sure, because where's the escape hatch? But in the meantime it doubles the Night Ripper-quality output for everyone to enjoy.

Previously, I lauded Gillis for ignoring obscurity, which is the guiding principle for many DJs - the recontextualizing of the obscure. Listening to Feed The Animals, what's striking is the almost scientific way that Gillis isolates the hooks of the songs that he features. Every sample comes form a hit (and usually a massive, U.S. or worldwide hit), and for a song to hit like that it has to have at least one (and often several) monster, undeniable hooks. Usually that comes in the chorus, but as Gillis shows in his two monster pop albums, not as often as you might think. He shows an uncanny knack choosing the best or catchiest 10 seconds of each song he samples, and forms his weave out of those 10 second moments threaded together from beginning to end.

So, for example, he shows that most of Eminem's "Shake That Ass" pales next to the opening verse, and that the pop rush of Nirvana's "Lithium" really does come from those descending "Yeah Yeah Yeahs" - which cleverly calls out that Pixies/Nirvana loud-soft-loud move as the pop hook that it is, not the abrasive attack that it seems to position itself as. It's like the way William Goldman claims his Princess Bride is the good parts version, without the unnecessary boring parts - Feed the Animals is all good parts. That can make it somewhat exhausting, like catching a case of contact ADD. But it's the same thing that makes the album/mix/song/set such a rush in the first place.

5/12/08 - Mashups, Delights

The first time I heard a mashup was the Freelance Hellraiser "A Stroke of Genie-us" - I highly doubt this was the first one, but it certainly seemed to be the first to penetrate mass cultural consciousness.

Now I would consider this innovation one of my favorite in modern pop music; both for the sublime immediate pleasures of hearing a new song created from familiar elements, and also for its signifying of the collapse of the importance of genre.

Like so many things, credit for this should go to the Internet, and specifically the brief flowering of Napster and the spate of P2P file sharing. For the first time, cross-genre exploration was possible with no cost/repercussion. While terrible for the music industry as a whole, ironically this development has been fantastic for the collapsing of artificial genre fences. Chuck Klosterman has a hilarious account of these fences in "Fargo Rock City", as he expertly delineates the bands that were "acceptable" to the North Dakota metal fans that he hung out with. I spent a lot of high school listening to a lot of California punk bands, where the "Sellout" designation got a lot of play; what this meant musically was that every single band sounded like the Ramones with better production values. I can't even count the amount of times someone was asked what kind of music they liked in middle school and responded "everything but rap and country", as though entire genres could be written off.



So, when it comes to the mashup, of of the thrilling things that it does is to decouple the actual music from the dogma of classification (classification perpetrated in these cases by the bands themselves making choices about their styles which often fit within prescribed modes). So, in a mashup of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" with "Bootylicious", a whole set of normally segregated musical energies are gloriously combined (segregated being a loaded term, but apropos, in terms of the grunge/R&B demographic split in terms of artist and to a lesser extent audience)

To wit, "Smells Like Teen Spirit"'s musical ambitions - tension/release, alienation expressed through ear-splitting volume, attack, pained aggression married to inviting melody.

"Bootylicious"'s musical ambitions - tension/tightness (in the James Brown sense), sex, ecstatic release of the dancefloor, metronomic rise and fall of energy.

The brilliance in the mashup is located the shared part of the Venn diagram (tension/release, tightness of performance) and then grafting the aspects onto each song that they are simply not concerned with in their original incarnations. "Teen Spirit" is unconcerned with sex, or the dance floor. "Bootylicious" is not concerned with aggression or attack. The brilliance of the matchup is that it grafts these elements together, making the shared track richer for it. The combination produces a dance floor stomper with all the whiplash dynamics of the Nirvana original, amping up the drive and kick. Similarly, it gives the shiver of sex appeal to a dour, sexless grunge song; just add glamour and a song as titanic as "Teen Spirit"gets slinkier, more complex, more fun.



I probably listened to Girl Talk's "Night Ripper" album more than any other last year, and it's an album that's stayed with me in a visceral way - namely, I continue to hear hits sampled on that album every time I'm near a radio. The thing that I find most impressive about "Night Ripper" is that, unlike other sample-based artists, Greg Gillis ignores the obscure entirely. The entire mix is built solely off of hits, megahits, hits that are even now floating along in the pop-cultural cloud. Sure, I can respect the Dust Brothers and the Avalanches for their impeccable ears and deep crate-digging and locating of the most perfect obscure sample for the moment, but there's something incredibly and almost dangerously intoxicating about "Night Ripper's" compression of top 40 into one long Frankenstein dance party. Where, I ask, can I get more of this, and the answer is that rocket has lifted off - the explosion is all there is.

For more mashup goodness: www.bootieusa.com