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Girl Talk anyone?


Batman

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I'm pretty sure anyone who likes Girl Talk would have already heard of him by now, but I bet even the people who haven't heard of him here/wouldn't like him would still find him interesting. Basically what he did with his two most famous albums, "Feed The Animals" and "The Night Ripper," he just takes like 300 or so samples of well known pop songs and mutates them and alters them to create entirely new songs to form a 45 minute long mix of good dance music. I like to think of it as a pop chef's salad. It's fun to listen to and pick out the songs you recognize (there are so many and they are so altered that it can be a real challenge sometimes), but after the fun of that is gone, it's still really great dance music. His songs don't really sound like complete songs aren't really meant to be listened to on their own (they are pretty randomly divided among the mix), but here are a few highlights:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ggSQCZuC-4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK3O_qZVqXk&feature=related

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Yes FoolOntheHill, perfect party music. He just makes great mixes that everyone sort of recognizes and can dance to.

You can downlod his newest album (his best) right here on his label's website

http://74.124.198.47/illegal-art.net/__girl__talk___feed__the__anima.ls___/

He did the Radiohead name your price thing

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It's interesting that you bring up Negativland...You can tell that they (and the KLF) are a huge influence on Girl Talk just by lisetning to him, although they both represent completely opposite things. Negativland was very anti-commercial, but Girl Talk really embraces commercial pop. Girl Talk seems to love the society that Negativland mocked, even though musically, Girl Talk took a lot of cues from them.

Anyways, glad you liked it. Do you like the KLF at all? I've got some of their house stuff but I've been trying to obtain their sample-based music ever since hearing "Whitney Joins the JAMS"

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Nope, back in the day 'pop' would have been ballads and traveling minstrels and stuff.

Technically it is something that's 'popular' but it also follows a different set of musical rules

...to try and clarify

someone can write a 'pop' song but it could fail to gain an audience and not be 'popular'

Someone could write a jazz song or a folk song or a symphony that is (magically) extremely popular

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See symphonies follow certain aesthetic rules that can change, and have quite a bit from the baroque to the classical to the romantic.... well not exactly 'rules' but guidelines.

Then folk tunes are all about monophony and story telling

jazz has certain chords and scales and lots of performance stylings, be it with soloing or big band interplay.

But jazz like symphonies has had many eras, each one with a little variation.

Whereas pop has no rules, and that is what makes it 'pop' it can borrow techniques from symphonics, folk, or jazz, but it is distinguished by it's total lack of rules.

Then in recent years there have been lots of cross-polination, like Neutral Milk Hotel would be a pop-folk album, folk because it uses basic two (occaisionally three) chord voicings, and the lyrics more or less tell a story

But then it's pop because the story structures are hardly 'normal' and there are moments where Mangum experimented with polyphony and hardrock.

Then there are moments in history where symphonic composers borrowed from pop and jazz

Benjamin Briten's 'Simple Symphony' used pop minimalism with sing along melodies and it was... a simple symphony

(fun fact, Give Up by the Postal Service uses a buttload of samples from Simple Symphony)

Then there's George Gershwin who came straight out of tin-pan alley and wrote loads of symphonic works with a heavy jazz influence.

Then there's pop artists who borrow from jazz, most notably Radiohead, especially on Amnesiac which is almost straight jazz, but the electronica would lend to an argument against the album being 100%.

It's really hard to sort things, and when you get out into these reaches you wander into BS territory, but the general concensus among music professor types is that everything is basically pop, symphonic, folk, or jazz. There are of course variations of timbre and arrangement within each (such as electronica in the pop umbrella) but the chord structures and harmonies are pretty much the same.

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It depends on where you were at on the globe, western Europe, especially Germany, were very limited to the ruling class, or the church, Bach was a worker for (pretty sure on this) the protestant church, Mozart was funded by royalty and the very wealthy, and Beethoven was the first from that area to start to be able to fend for himself, and managed to grab some public attention (especially the 9th Symphony)

Then France was all impressionism, that while beautiful, was not terribly popular with the middle/lower class

Scandinavia and the Netherlands actually had a rich body of nationalistic symphonies that were popular with everyone.

The only area that I can think of that had 'high art symphonies' that were popular with the working class was Russia, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and a handful of others were Russian folk heroes, and the symphonies were widely attended.

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