A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

AUTUMNGHETTOSUPERSTARSWEATER: I've been meaning to talk about Girl Talk's Feed the Animals album for weeks now, and Rob Walker's NYT Mag piece yesterday reminded me I need to seriously promote this album I can't stop playing. Greg Kot helps describe the music:

Just about every note heard on "Night Ripper" and now "Feed the Animals" is a provocation, a test of copyright law. Each track on both albums consists entirely of electronic snippets meticulously stitched together from hundreds of major hits, most by high-profile artists. In the process, Gillis has become a somewhat reluctant poster boy for fair-use advocates in the ongoing battle over copyright law. Girl Talk's music demands that a distinction be made between simply copying someone else's work for profit, and reconfiguring and recontextualizing it to create a new piece of art.

Girl Talk does not traffic in working with obscure or obscured fragments; instead, he positively revels in the way he can put a new spin on the overexposed. Some of his source songs are so hoary that they were clichés nearly the instant they were originally released (Tag Team's "Whoomp! (There It Is)," we're looking at you). Yet by pairing "Whoomp!" with the drums from Big Country's bombastic "In a Big Country," Gillis re-energizes both tracks. Tag Team sounds suddenly more urgent, and Big Country loses some of its clenched-teeth earnestness.... The laugh-out-loud juxtapositions, such as the Carpenters' somber "Superstar" ushering in Metallica's rivet-gun riffing in "One," are all the more enjoyable for the way Gillis makes them sound utterly natural, almost inevitable.

There's a wonderful moment near the end of the album where Lil Wayne's ubiquitous "Lollipop" slips inside John Frusciante's lyrical guitar riff from the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Under the Bridge." They are songs separated by two decades and two cultures, but in the context created by Gillis, they couldn't be more right for each other.

It's just hard to describe it; you just have to listen to the lessigtastic album yourself. Sample a piece via YouTube (annotated!), and then pay Gillis whatever you think it's worth and download the whole thing to your iPod. So worth every penny you choose to spend.