For the Record

Author: Emily Temple

Today's MTV mainstream is moving towards the catchy and danceable, while holding tight to - and mixing itself up with - the hip-hop and rap traditions that have been so prevalent in recent years. This kind of fare is perfect for late night dance parties and club-hopping, not to mention backdrops for perfectly scandalous music videos, but I personally am unable to stomach an entire album's worth - not to mention an entire night's worth - of Top 40 hip hop. Despite numerous Get Emily To Like Rap mix CDs, good memories of foreign spots attached to certain tracks and even a somewhat heartfelt effort on my part, I just get bored.

Gregg Gillis, aka Girl Talk, has an answer, at least for me. He creates music almost completely out of pre-existing songs by other artists, sewing samples from as many as twenty different songs into each of his tracks. This guy is a biomedical engineer by day, and you can tell: each sample is meticulously laid down to line up with the rest of the beats in a way that oftentimes sounds decidedly mathematical. Gillis even claims to use a calculator when composing his pieces.

His songs are a mishmash; he uses lots of Top 40 tracks, especially grungy hip hop and rap, plus 80s pop songs, seamlessly blended with classic alternative rock, newish indie rock and songs I don't think anyone but Gillis has ever heard of. For some it might be fun to hear radio favorites, but for someone like me, who is mindfully unexposed to such things, I wasn't totally sold on Girl Talk until I recognized a sample of Neutral Milk Hotel's "Holland, 1945" on "Minute by Minute." Like with any weekend consumption, I need to cut the rap with something a little sweeter.

Something about his composition makes even the staunch non-believer appreciative - it's like he takes the one gem of quality from each of the twenty different songs and melds them to build something spectacular. Or more to the point, he cuts off the hip-hop before I can't take it any more and replaces it with something else, Elton John, for instance. At the same time, it can get a little tiring; the novelty wears off when you're not actually dancing to it, and the pounding backbone actually makes me a little bit sick to my stomach. There's also the stigma of the mash-up; and although Gillis's brand is much more eloquently executed than most, he's still playing the dance club DJ role.

He also has to fight against the snobbery of many of his fans, or potential fans. In an interview with Pitchfork, he said, "It's funny when you're pushing it on this Pitchfork crowd and all of a sudden I'm presenting these songs that people are supposed to hate for whatever reason. The whole point of not liking something is being defensive because you're scared of not being cool." Well, I'm not sure. There are some songs that people are supposed to hate because they're, well, bad. But, and I think this is in a way what Gillis is getting at, a song being bad doesn't necessarily mean it's not fun to dance to, and therefore doesn't mean it is valueless. And bad dance songs are admittedly much more fun in context than a traditionally good song would be. It all depends. But I reject the concept that the only reason not to like something because one is scared of being uncool. Obviously that happens, but come on, "My Humps?" That's not sonic quality.

There's some question as to the legality of sampling at all. Supposedly it's acceptable if the borrowed section is completely re-contextualized, and there's something else about a certain percentage that has to be new, but Gillis doesn't seem overly worried. After all, the name of his label is Illegal Art. U.S. Representative Mike Doyle brought up Girl Talk in a congressional hearing last Wednesday during a discussion of digital copyright issues to suggest that perhaps some ownership laws are being made obsolete by the evolution of the art form, but there's always a certain amount of subversive glee in creating and supporting illegal art. Gillis, however, has said that even if he did receive a cease-and-desist letter, he would continue to make music, and just switch to giving it out for free. After all, he has a day job.