First Song

As many of you must know Girl Talk (Gregg Gillis) released his fifth album on November 15th 2010. I have listening through it a few times now and feel like I have picked up on a few things. Many things have been said about GT since he started touring and releasing CDs in the early 2000s. Like most people I discovered GT after he released his third album Night Ripper. On first listening to GT I simply couldn't comprehend it. The song moved from one sample to another too quickly. I imagine the experience is similar to if you took a formula one car and placed it in the 19th century. It takes a long time to get used to the pace of the songs. The key is to not try to identify and follow each song. Just find the melody and get ready for a ride through the pop music landscape.

So what is there to make of GT's new album All Day? There clearly is musicianship on display. Merging all of these samples in a clean and interesting way is no easy feat. If you think otherwise I invite you to try it yourself. Download Audacity and give it a try.

But here is the interesting part: Is what GT is doing the same thing as what the artist he samples are doing? That is, is he just like any other artist? Do people like his music because of the way the samples are arranged or do they just like the samples themselves?
Is Girl Talk just like any other artist?

Yes, I think GT is just like any other artist. What do other artists do? They manipulate and arrange sounds into an original pattern. In this respect GT is the same as an Alicia Keys. After all, the samples are just sounds. What matters is the arrangement of the sounds. Importantly, on GT's previous albums there is a traceable melody that is independent of the samples' melody. This is much more apparent when mashes nearly 10 samples into a 5-10 second segment. When he does this there is barely enough time to recognize the song let alone recognize the melody of the original song. So I think it is fair to say that GT does compose a melody out of samples and that is enough to make him just like any other artist in that respect. Granted, he is being "more" artistic the more samples he uses in a given fixed time frame.

But here is the rub.

How many people like the frenzied samples more than hearing a song in a different, interesting context? I have started to think that I like GT because he changes the way I hear the originial song. Because he is not bound by copyrights or having to come up with original compositions he is free to improve a song any way he wants. Would a Ludacris song sound better with the keyboards from a Boston song laying down the beat? Emphatically yes! Therein lies the genius of GT. He takes what we like seperately and combines them into new awesome sonic surprise. If that is what I (and I suspect others) like about GT then do we really like GT as an artist? 

That is the problem with GT. I want him to be more than a very talented maker of mash-ups. I want what he does to be art.

At the moment I am listening to  Night Ripper and it is fantastic. I have very little problem calling Night Ripper a piece of art. The album is full of complete songs that have identifyable melodies created through sampling loads of songs. It just flows extremely well. By listening to Night Ripper I can see where All Day fails as a piece of art.

All Day fails as a piece of art because of the way GT uses the samples. He has shifted from changing the primary 2-3 samples every 10 seconds on Night Ripper to changing the primary samples every 40 seconds. Doing this destroys whatever flow or melody the song had going. It degrades it from art to a very good mash-up. Arguing on the same lines as above, without a melody constructed from the songs' sounds there is no reason to claim it is an original piece of art. Heres a little logical notation (without the actual algebraic notation because blogspot doesn't have the correct Greek characters for it) to describe the relationship:

1. if a song is a piece of art, then it uses sounds to create an original melody.
2. it is not the case that All Day uses sounds to create an original melody. Rather, All Day uses songs in new contexts to generate interest.
3. Therefore, All Day is not a piece of art.

or
1. if A, then B
2. ~B
3. ~A via Modus Tollens

P.S. it would probably be more correct to use predicate logic instead of propositional logic because All Day is a particular instance of Melody or Mx. This is probably way too nerdy for anyone to care but needless to say the diagram above is a significantly simplified argument.