Let Girl Talk into your life

Here’s a good story about a new album I’ve just discovered that’s perfect for my inaugural entry on the blog.

Good DJs, especially those that manage to weld together different genres, keep me awake at night with jealousy because I haven’t got my lazy ass round to learning how to do it myself yet, but mostly it’s admiration. So, I’m not exaggerating when I say that I was as giddy as a schoolgirl when I came across Girl Talk, a guy from the States.

According to Rolling Stone he’s got over 300 unlicensed tracks on his new mix, Feed The Animals. Here’s a random list of some of them:

Metallica’s One, The Police, Kid Sister, Fergie’s Glamorous, Jay Z, Busta Rhymes, Deee-Lite, Nirvana, Salt n Pepa, Hot Chip, The Cardigans, Dexy’s, Spencer Davis Group, Eminem, Ace Of Base, Roy Orbinson, Temple of the Dog.

So he’s pretty much pulling shit together from all over the place, and it’s all done in excellent fashion. It takes a real ear for music to pull that off. GO AND BUY IT NOW – Night Ripper and Feed The Animals are the two most amazing mash-ups I’ve ever heard. He never misses a trick.

He’s taking the Radiohead model of ‘pay what you like’ so I chipped in $16 which includes European postage when the CD’s available, but you can pay less for it if you just want the download (so you could be listening to it right NOW!). But please don’t stiff him – you’ll feel bad and won’t be able to sleep. It’s at www.illegalart.net. Only bummer is that you don’ get a tracklisting – well, you do, because he’s named all the tracks like it was a normal album, but you don’t get told what sample’s when. To be fair, that’d be a hell of a feat for over 300 tracks in 53m21s.

The first album Night Ripper is on Amazon and is well worth a few quid too, though you can definitely spot this as the lesser of the two. That has a list of artists who appear in the sleeve, but again not actual specifics. And here’s a thought – next time you find yourself having to amuse a bunch of friends at short notice, stick the album on for an impromptu pop quiz and see who can name the most samples. I reckon I could do about 100 of them, with probably another 100 falling in to the “oh god I know that, what the hell’s the name of that song” category.

So there it is, my first ever tip on Cover My Tracks. And like I say, it seems an appropriate way to start off. Girl Talk is all about a complete and utter lack of musical snobbery – if it’s good, it’s in. And that’s pretty much what I want to have as the ethos of this blog. Go Girl (Talk)!

PS If you like Girl Talk’s stuff you might also like the Arhur King mixes, especially Pop Shit, where he mixes a load of good (and some cheesy) hip hop stuff with the tracks they sampled – thus follows lots of 80s sample fun. He’s French and a cool guy. Seek him out here (which also contains a tracklisting for Pop Shit).