Putting on ‘Feed the Animals’ isn’t quite listening to an album, as much as it is participating in something that’s part puzzle and part aural art project.

One of the CDs every serious music fan should hear this year isn’t really an album, nor is it really comprised of songs. There are as many reasons to hate it as there are to absolutely love it, but that contradiction is at the center of what makes it valuable — both as a piece of entertainment and as a topic for debate on what music can be.

Girl Talk, the sound-scrambling DJ project of Gregg Gillis, takes blending to a whole new level by grabbing hundreds of samples to construct an album-length piece; yet in interviews, insists that he shuns the ‘mash-up’ label, and isn’t a big fan of that style of music. He’s become infamous for his bizarre live shows, at which he tends to yell into a microphone while fiddling with his laptop in varying stages of undress; yet his recorded works’ quickly swinging moods and varying beats per minute verge on undanceable by strict club standards. Then of course there’s the ongoing debate, which any DJ working with samples gets sucked into, over the legal and ethical dilemma of selling music composed almost entirely out of other artists’ recordings.

Let’s set aside all those discussions for now. Whether he’s a thief or not (as I believe); an annoyingly spastic performer or not (as I have yet to find out for myself); those points could be argued all day. Now his fourth and possibly best release, Feed the Animals, has surfaced via a donate-to-download site on Illegal Art — another topic that deserves its own discussion. Here, I’d like to focus entirely on the product itself and what makes it worthwhile.

This is tricky, because most of the standards by which you’d evaluate any other album don’t really apply in this case. Feed the Animals is an hour-long collection of sounds, but that’s about where the similarities end. When we talk about songs on an album someone sat down to write, each piece conveys an idea, creates a mood, or tells a story. On really good albums, all those individual songs add up to a cohesive whole built around a central theme.

Sure, a Girl Talk CD may be broken into tracks, but each one doesn’t necessarily revolve around its own concept; if they’re meant to, with titles like, “Give Me a Beat” and “Hands in the Air”, they’re certainly not trying very hard. When discussing his music, no one would say, “I love that song about _____”. Nor would they be able to explain what Feed the Animals is about versus his last album, Night Ripper. In fact, if you let your iTunes player go unattended, you can barely tell when it transitions from one release to the next.

What Gillis creates instead aren’t albums or songs; they’re essentially collections of musical moments. While it would be tough to find someone who could say “I loved ‘Smash Your Head’ off the last album” with conviction, anyone who heard that album would almost certainly say, “I loved the part where Biggie mixes with ‘Tiny Dancer’”. But that track, like the rest, contains several other samples and parts unrelated to that particularly good moment, so saying that there’s such a thing as a good Girl Talk song is both inaccurate and largely irrelevant.

What he does deliver is an extremely well-constructed musical collage that stimulates several parts of our musical minds at once. There are moments of nostalgia at hearing an old favorite, and surprise at combinations no one else would have thought to make — all meticulously crafted to keep heads nodding throughout the rapid-fire tempo and genre switch-ups. But the most enjoyment may come from simply decoding what exactly you’re hearing before he moves on to the next sample, like playing an audio version of Where’s Waldo? in which spotting the sequin-clad glam rocker or awful 80’s bouffant through the hip-hop bravado feels like winning a game of Name That Tune: Hipster Edition. Putting Feed the Animals on your headphones or car stereo isn’t quite listening to an album, as much as it is participating in something that’s part puzzle and part aural art project.

This is where Girl Talk accomplishes something special in several respects. He shows that meaningful music — music that excites and amuses but also challenges and provokes — can be created entirely from borrowed sounds and the emotions they evoke. Because of the range of samples, he also creates a work that everyone experiences differently, depending on their relationship with his sources. Pitchfork called the Radiohead/Jay-Z moment off Feed the Animals a “miss”, whereas my Thom Yorke-obsessed friend flips her lid during that track. Similarly, around the midpoint of Night Ripper when MIA finds herself suddenly backed by the deep guitar chords of Hum’s “Stars”, I couldn’t believe my ears at hearing one of my favorite 90’s bands popping up in a DJ mix, whereas others probably glossed over those 15 seconds unimpressed. Listening to Girl Talk is interactive in a way other albums aren’t, in how fully your experience is subject to your personal music history.

At the same time, his work is entirely of this moment. Proper enjoyment of Girl Talk depends on both the listener’s familiarity with his sources and openness to combining them. An indie rocker close-minded to rap lyrics would have a hard time digesting this, as would a hip-hop purist. Fortunately, fewer and fewer true music fans fall into either of those camps, so most of his savvy 20-something listeners can see the forest for the trees. But play Feed the Animals for someone a generation above ours, and they’ll likely pass it off as an ADD nightmare, because they haven’t come of age in the era of mash culture we have — I know firsthand, I’ve tried and been told to turn that shit off promptly. Or play it for a high schooler just now growing into their musical tastes, and they’ll lack the references to enjoy the same moments of recognition key to appreciating what’s being done. Girl Talk excels as a chronicle of our particular time in the broader music timeline, which is to say, Gillis’ time.

These are the reasons Girl Talk’s music has value, even if you’re of the mind that these albums are dull, unappealing, disposable, forgettable, overly twitchy or artificial, all of which are valid opinions. As a piece of audio art, they’re really a document of the moment, and a demonstration of the interaction between disparate styles. Some artsy sound engineer could probably construct a totally different collage, which makes the same points about pop music, and elicits the same response. But the fact that a release that’s more art project than album is this listenable, and will almost certainly show up on any credible music critic’s top 50 albums of the year list, is a much bigger accomplishment for one music nerd in Pittsburgh than most people give him credit for.

……….

A couple footnotes:

I did some due diligence to make sure there wasn’t already a review elsewhere that said exactly what I was trying to say here, and it seems I’m in the clear so far.

Tiny Mix Tapes and Culture Bully were probably the two that best covered some of these ideas, and both make good points I didn’t, so check those out too.

I did find a review at listenerd, though, which had a great idea I wish I’d come up with: a Feed The Animals review made out of samples from other reviews.