Solid Little Rock Jams

Girl Talk- Night Ripper

Well, well, well, after a good month of rest and relaxation I'm back on the indie music beat ready to review either all your favorite prog albums by talking about dicks and pussies, or writing about how fat Orson "Lipitor Can't Save me Now" Welles is. What a whale. Anyways, if any of you have more irony then blood in your bodies, you'll realize how funny it is that right after I RAILED upon Dan on how BLATANTLY HE DISREGARDED THE BLOG, I decide to go on a month hiatus from your wonderful bleak and murky lives. Well, I had fucking finals, and shit. It was pretty terrible, but I am ALIVE AGAIN, ready to instill the fear of God in every single person who reads this blog. God is actually a black Tom Cruise look alike who votes Republican. Isn't that some scary stuff????????

Anyways, in case you haven't been around the music scene wrap-up of 2006, the album Night Ripper by Girl Talk has been thrown around a lot. I first heard of this compact disc around August, and it pretty much caused the irony pressure to increase by tenfold when I heard it. Girl Talk is a techno/glitch-rap/dance ARTIST who's actual name is Gregg Gillis (Kind of like Greg Ginn). With Night Ripper, he seemlessly blends and warps every genre of music from gangster rap to indie rock to rock and roll and back to crunk in a dazzling array (We are the cliche police) of loops, samples, mash-ups and tunes. The album is the perfect embodiment of our ADD generation; 25-40 seconds of focus on one particular mash-up that quickly mutates into another mash-up building off of either the previous one or becoming a whole new monster. Each song runs about 2-3 minutes of this genre-bending beat-splicing, with the occaisionally drummachine segue between them. The sheer amount of samples on the album is ludicrous to even begin to count; however, if there's any ironic hipster asshole in you, it'll explode out of your eyelids when you hear the multitude of ways that Girl Talk's blending of various genres explodes into ironic danceable bliss. Just when you think that you've heard some of the greatest song collaborations that could never happen, Girl Talk's next song is cut with another great mash-up, sometimes to hilarious effect.

I won't give away the names of the artists or some of the more intresting juxtapositions because half the fun of the album is listening to them happen without any prior knowledge. Some of the music can seem a bit gimmicky, especially towards the end where I was mostly unfamiliar with the samples being used and it just sort of became the denouement of an ecstasy fueled dance rave for me. This album embodies the some of the reasons why rap is so great, that is interesting, flowing beats that really create a sense of dynamics and accentuate whatever else is going on. Unlike most rap music, since the mash-ups are usually short I don't find myself getting tired of any sort of particular beat or feeling like its worn out its welcome.

Translation: Become the hero of the next hipster party you go to and play this album.

Rating: 9.1

Download: Girl Talk- Once Again