There’s an undeniable truth on Columbia College’s campus: Girl Talk, aka Greg Gillis is a hot item, which is striking to those who know what music he creates, or rather mashes up: top 40 jams with classic bands and hip-hop icons. Just ask a Columbia student about his high energy shows, which keep local college kids coming and dancing in droves. Most importantly, his latest album was a Radiohead-esque experiment in free merchandise.
Fearing copyright infringement for using hundreds of classic and modern pop, rock, and hip-hop samples, Girl Talk released Feed The Animals under a Creative Commons license on June 19, 2008, on his label, Illegal Art’s website.
No matter what how old you are, or what your preference in music is, there is an undeniable catchiness to the brazen mash-ups of artists like Radiohead’s “15 step,” meshed with Kanye West’s underground smash “Flashing Lights” in the song, “Still Here.” For those who keep up with celebrity news, Kanye West recently was snubbed by Radiohead at the Grammys.
Even so, as more teenagers become aware of the dangers of drugs, booze and rock’n’roll, their attention span begins to dwindle, often “growing,” in terms of musical taste, forcing many artists to stay relevant as new music and new media take a stranglehold of the younger generation. However, with Feed The Animals, and the 2006’s equally chaotic Night Ripper, it seems that the mash-up DJ loves to switch it up like a child suffering with ADHD. Each song would progress into a new beat or verse every fifteen to twenty seconds, satisfying our rapidly diminishing patience in a world that won’t stop moving and shaking.
Girl Talk understands the importance of funky dance music, especially with kids that love to drink and do a lot of drugs, a common staple I’ve seen at three different concerts that Girl Talk has held in Chicago in the past year. And let’s face it, what’s not to love when an artist like Girl Talk takes modern radio hits from artists such as Lil’ Wayne, Jay-Z and Mariah Carey, among dozens of other artists and throws together a few classics like Aerosmith, James Brown, Oasis into a delicious pop culture casserole.
It’s a fresh concept in the dated music landscape. Songs by individual artists might leave different impressions on all types of scenes, but Girl Talk understands what a true DJ really needs to have in order to succeed: a vast knowledge of music that brings different individuals together, despite their preferences.
Innovation is what college students strive for and that is exactly what a musical scientist like Gillis does when he dissects and disassembles the current music scene in order to render a completely different jam to dance to at parties and clubs. It doesn’t hurt that Gillis’ label offers the option to “name your price” in order to “Feed the Animals.” The CD is basically recession-proof, even for poor college students. It doesn’t take a genius to know that this concept works.
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