The issue here is not whether this is done well (it certainly is) but whether or not it should have been done at all. What Girl Talk does isn't new, at least in the macro view: he's a sampler, a plunderphonics guy. His music is constructed entirely from samples of other music. This isn't original: it had been going on for a good decade before this record came out. But what GT did to differentiate himself was simple: when he chose music to sample, he didn't do what most other samplers did, i.e. find obscure samples that gain interest when placed in a new context. He just took the best parts, the stuff that everyone recognizes. While this adds up to an incredibly fun album, it also produces the inevitable question: does this mean anything? does it have any lasting value? The fact is that as fun as this is, it's fun like eating at McDonalds can sometimes be fun. It isn't bad, exactly (it is, after all, scientifically designed to be good) and you know what you're getting, but nobody would mistake it for the best you could get, or in fact anything with any lasting value at all. A huge problem with this album is there is no tonal variety: on far superior sample records like
Endtroducing or
Since I Left You or
As Heard On Radio Soulwax there is actual ebb and flow in the music, slow parts and fast parts, reflective and excitable. Here it's all coming at the same pace with no variation. Familiar rap verse over familiar rock backing--repeat. Over and over. Basically, the interest lies in the quality of the original samples, not in what GT does with them, which is pretty much nothing. It's its own thing, but it's its own thing like a six-legged dog: there's a reason there aren't very many.
MY RATING:
4.8
Girl Talk - "Once Again"
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