All Day and the value of iteration

[utilitymonstergirl]

hhhgregg, Panasonic Blu-ray ninety-nine dollars
32" LCD TV two-ninety-nine
LG 42" HDTV four-eighty-nine
Everything's on sale during Christmas in—

—HydroDalek, doin


Girl Talk's All Day is one of my favorite pop albums ever made, with 372 samples perfectly assembled across seventy-one minutes. I can't fully speak to the technical side of why it works, but the emotional side is clear. It's a pure collage that still conveys a unique artistic voice, the dream of every art-culture nerd. It takes the craft of joy seriously - while it's not outright absurd like Neil Cicierega's Mouth quartet, there's a clear music-nerd playfulness to it even though you could plausibly play it at a party. 

The whole project exudes a deadpan democratic spirit. All Day isn't trying to elevate pop music or save it from itself - this is the work of someone with a deep love and understanding of the form as it is. Critical darlings share space with one-hit-wonders and pop-culture punchlines, and plenty of iconic songs only appear in subtle supporting roles. Lesser mashups treat explicit rap as a punchline in itself - "aren't we so wacky for combining Biggie and Thomas The Tank Engine?" - but All Day says, "of course Juicy J's Twerk goes great with Mr. Blue Sky, why wouldn't it?" It's a party where the bouncer's only question is how fun are you to strip for parts?

After taking in All Day a few times, I checked out his previous albums and found that they're largely just "All Day but not as good." They’re still well-assembled and worth checking out, but they just don’t feel as airtight and the peaks aren’t as high.

This isn't all his fault - the nature of being a mashup artist is that the pool of material grows greatly over time, and All Day draws the most from the era I'm nostalgic for. They were also necessary practice to make something as taut as All Day. There’s very little sample reuse among his work, and while I’m sure Girl Talk and I would both love to see some of these combos revisited, I respect moving on with new variations on a theme. The Twerk/Mr. Blue Sky segment on All Day feels like an evolution of the New Soul/Shake That mix on Feed The Animals, more cleverly blended and painting a better picture of joyful, goofy eroticism. The same goes for the thunderous War Pigs/Move Bitch fusion that opens All Day, building on FTA's Roc Boys/Paranoid Android mix. Even if a certain hybrid didn't reach its full potential, it's still valuable as a marker of his taste and style in the moment.

I'm glad that Girl Talk has found work doing original production, and maybe he's content to have passed the torch to a million mashup artists. But if he still feels he has something to say in this style, I'd love to see another megamix diving into all the classics and trash of the past fourteen years.