I don’t enjoy Girl Talk’s music all that much — I find it overwhelming, like watching someone flip channels on a TV. But I think he’s really important, and anyone who cares about music, technology, originality and ownership should be paying close attention. Adam Bossy raised an intriguing idea in his answer — describing an unlikely pairing of Black Sabbath and Ludacris, he observes: “It sounds as though each song was originally written with the other in mind.” At his best, Girl Talk finds connections between seemingly distant genres and styles, and shows that maybe the commonalities run deeper than the differences. This is a big idea, and an exciting one.
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While Girl Talk tracks have way too much information in them for my tastes, I could easily imagine having a rich musical life just unpacking their possibilities. Pop-oriented hip-hop over thrash metal! Gangsta rap over buttery piano ballads! Mixing prog and teeny bopper pop and classic rock! Teasing out the ideas suggested in these pairings could launch a thousand bands. In my own life as a musician, mashups have been the richest source of inspiration imaginable. Girl Talk lights the way with his fearless transgression of all boundaries of taste and style and copyright; it’s up to older and mellower musicians like me to pick up all the loose and tangled threads and knit them into something a little more coherent and structured.
My biggest problem with girl talk is that he only uses the most sexist racist homophobic crude ignorent rappers and uses them as shock value when mixed with tender spirital White people music. But I think that it’s because he’s using pop music and that’s the way pop music and the record companies like black men portrayed
Just discovering your blog and glad I did; we have a lot of interests common in music, science, and elsewhere. Surprised not to see more comments to your insightful posts. Gotta agree here on Girl Talk; his scattergun approach to mashup lacks those elegant moments when a mashup becomes -one- song, instead of the many it samples. But hey, he’s built his rep more on the frenzy of his live shows, and truth be told I wish I could whip up a crowd like he can.