record reviews:
Girl Talk
Night Ripper
(Illegal Art)
Girl Talk’s Greg Gillis was all the blog-rage when he released Night Ripper earlier this year. As mash-ups became part of the mainstream, Gillis was one of the pioneers of what seemed to be a natural new plateau for the genre: a sort of hyper-mash where instead of orderly and monogamous relationships, the source songs had wild orgies with each other. Part of the glee for listeners was simply to identify the samples; a perfect score would have been highly impressive, and required familiarity of Neutral Milk Hotel and Dinosaur Jr, Boston and Chicago, and Trina and Ciara.
But what was the shelf life? Night Ripper was a failsafe choice for a summer party, but how would it hold up in the winter? Gillis does not at all shy from the hot songs of the moment, and he’s still reportedly trying to find a way to deliver his tracks to his audiences with the shortest turnaround time possible. Here near the end of 2006, no one is really itching for “My Humps” or “Hollaback Girl” on the dance floor (and that’s another thing; Night Ripper is unmistakably a party record, but because of its ADD tendencies, it isn’t an especially good dance record—unless you’re on speed, maybe). So portions of Night Ripper have lost their party potency, but the samples are so fleeting—with the exception of a few hip-hop tracks that get a little too much airtime—that it’s easy to just move on. “My Humps” proves an exception on “Warm It Up,” as it stretches on too long and later cedes the floor to the similarly way-played-out “Milkshake.” Maybe in five years those songs will have the same appeal as, say, the Bell Biv Devoe or Salt-N-Pepa that we hear elsewhere.
Sometimes the songs pile on each other and nudge each other out of frame without too much rhyme or reason. Even then, Gillis still manages to entertain, sometimes by sheer excess. But the finest moments of Night Ripper—then and now—are when seemingly disjointed tracks are shown to be long-lost cousins. This is best demonstrated on “Smash Your Head,” which is fueled early on by the dual-headed aggression of Nirvana and Young Jeezy, then gives way to a surprisingly poignant hodgepodge of The Pharcyde, Notorious B.I.G. and Elton John.
If Girl Talk’s 15 minutes are to be extended beyond 2006, though, it will likely be the flesh-friendly, audience-inciting live shows that are most responsible. Good news for curious Girl Talk virgins: Gillis is ripping it up at the Empty Bottle in Chicago on New Year’s Eve, then has shows in a number of major cities already scheduled for the early stretch of ’07.
— Adam McKibbin
More by this writer:
Dr. Octagon - The Return of Dr. Octagon
Of Montreal - Live - June 3, 2005
Tim Fite - Gone Ain't Gone
Lotterboys - Feature Interview
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