Feed The Animals

A couple weeks ago I downloaded that Girl Talk album they were talking about on WBUR. The only other mash-up thing I have is Dangermouse’s Gray Album from a few years ago, and Girl Talk is totally different, the samples are at most 20 seconds long, often a lot less, so there’s no verse-chorus-verse structure, it’s interesting. He has an impressive virtuosity for blending the samples, the mixing is really powerful and clean, and the short lifespan of the samples he uses means you’re impressed and excited to hear this fun Rick Springfield or Cure or Big Country or Journey song woven through the mostly hiphop dance beats, and then it’s gone, and something else comes in. It’s a little tiring. My first listen through I thought hey this is really clever but also kind of annoying, I want him to stick with 4 or 5 artists, use a few strong themes to craft a coherent single. That’s how all the other mashups work. Then the album loops around on my ipod (the notes of the last song seamlessly hooks into the beginning of the first) and I listen to it again, and then again, and now I’m really getting into it and I think maybe I’m listening to music in a different way. Without the classic song structure, it’s a constant stream of input, my mind isn’t expecting an instrumental, or a surging chorus, or a slow buildup, it all just washes over me. Makes me wonder – does the way we listen to music make physiological changes in our brains? All my life I’ve consumed music in terms of the western civilization song structure, and most of that in terms of batches of songs released in album format an artist releases every two years. The digital music distribution model has obviously changed the old practice of buying all the songs at once and listening to them in the order intended by the artist, that changes your expectations and the way you experience music, music is so fundamental to our lives, does that change affect how we think about other things? And if I listened to all mashups like this Girl Talk dude makes, where you can’t really tell the tracks apart, they flow together in this rushing stream of stimuli, would your brain change in subtle ways, would you approach life a little differently, read books watch movies converse with friends differently? And the whole idea of content generation – this guy has not created any new notes, he’s taken hundreds of existing songs and formed from them this new…thing. What is new, what is original? One thing we know, he hasn’t paid any the original artists for the samples he lifted. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, in light of what he’s made, the building blocks are barely recognizable and the final product is such an unfamiliar edifice, and what’s more he’s probably not making a whole lot of money off of this. As opposed to Eminem, who damn well better be paying Dido for that song off which he built his multimillion dollar single. Where was I? I dunno I’m having problems keeping ideas in my head for more than twenty seconds.