On the wagon:
Okay, okay, so most of the time over here we try to avoid repetition and over the top hype, buuuut when something like this new Girl Talk record comes along, well... I'll jump right up on the bandwagon, take the reigns and drive that shit right over a cliff!
Girl Talk is the production alias of Gregg Gillis, a native of Pittsburgh who started out making DSP-modeled, glitchy, avant-garde music that he'd perform live in OTT costumes, with a synchronized dance squad and other goofy things to make a 'laptop performance' more interesting. (That is something I can really appreciate, because even if the music is really cool, I don't want to watch a dude at his laptop, nodding his head to the synth farts as 'performance' - no dice!)
Okay, so anyway, Gillis released Secret Diary in 2002 on the always controversial Illegal Art, followed by Unstoppable in 2004, which focused much more on pop samples, and now we're presented with his newest album, Night Ripper. This new record takes those pop-sample elements to their apogee with, essentially, a ridiculously well programmed DJ mix-CD. Gillis takes the booty-bass mash-up, as popularized by Hollertronix, to a new level, with 164 artists mentioned in the 'thank you's in the liner notes. Some of the combinations are clearly meant to be funny, and they are. Others are simply layer after layer of party-jams. Apparently the original manufacturer of the CD decided there was serious copyright infringement at hand and refused to complete the project - the label took a partial refund and moved to a different manufacturer. If the record falls under legal scrutiny, the label has prepared a Fair Use legal defense, as it is the position of the label that current copyright laws should be changed to include artistic recontextualization and manipulation.
Order Night Ripper from Illegal Art here - put it on at your next house party and the whole place will likely fall over. Wicked.