That’s So-And-So From ’82

Girl Talk “Bodies Hit The Floor” – This is a selection from Girl Talk’s new mix album Unstoppable, which is a marathon of glitchy mash-ups of hits from the 90s and 00s. A lot of the record sounds like nothing so much as artful, deliberate channel surfing, but a majority of the tracks manage to coalesce into structured songs in their own right. I’m not sure about this, but I suspect that the sample of “Cry Me A River” in this mix may be taken from one of those Kidz Bop compilations, but it could just be Justin Timberlake pitched up a bit. It would be so much better if it were Kidz Bop, though – those things are just begging to be fucked with by clever DJs.

Laptop “Greatest Hits” – Let’s take a trip in the wayback machine, alllllllll the waaaaay baaaaack to….2000! This is taken from Laptop’s debut album Opening Credits, an underrated album of Jarvis Cocker-esque quasi-highbrow sleaze set to groovy electropop. “Greatest Hits” finds Laptop’s alter ego trying to talk himself out of a poorly conceived and badly received compliment, but only managing to make matters worse for himself.

Elsewhere: There’s a brand new remix of Low’s “I Remember” over on the Empire State Human site which is well worth checking out. It’s Low, so it’s obviously pretty downbeat, but ESH keeps it as lively as a triphop track is likely to get. The remixes of “Milkshake” and “Galang” are pretty solid too, if you haven’t heard them yet.

Also: Very good news for Saturday Night Live – Jimmy Fallon is leaving the show at the end of this season. (Thank you to Whatevs!) This works out well for everyone involved – Fallon can go make a fortune doing shitty movies, and the show loses a wildly inconsistent and unprofessional player who shamelessly cops all of Mike Meyers and Adam Sandler’s moves; writes and stars in an endless stream of subpar sketches starring his derivative characters; and makes a fool out of poor Horatio Sanz in every sketch they appear in together. Jimmy is alright once in a while, but he’s never good enough to make you forget all the crap he’s foisted on us in his years on the show.

Hopefully this is the first step towards correcting the mess that the show has become over the course of this largely unwatchable season. The next step should be to fire whoever has been booking the guests, and also whomever at the show has decreed that every episode should have at least three or four sketches in which the host plays themself. This problem was especially evident in the vile Donald Trump episode, in which all but two sketches in the whole episode were about him and his terrible reality show. (One of those two remaining sketches was totally derailed by Fallon and Sanz’s giggle fits, and the other was a poorly written political sketch about Richard Clarke which was completely unamusing, and only served to remind me of how well the Daily Show’s writers can come up with solid jokes about dry political proceedings.)

I know that it is unrealistic to ever expect SNL to be consistently funny, but the most horrible thing about this last season has been that a pretty strong cast is being wasted on such lousy material. Folks like Amy Poehler, Fred Armisen, Seth Meyers, Tina Fey, Rachel Dratch, and especially Will Forte are all very gifted performers, and they deserve better than this. If lesser talents filled out the current cast, then it wouldn’t seem like such a waste of potential.