I Let My Tape Rock Til My Tape Popped

Girl Talk “Smash Your Head” – Like even the best mash-ups and DJ mixes, Girl Talk’s Night Ripper loses some of its initial thrill power once you become familiar with its twists and juxtapositions, but like the best of them, it retains its listenability because the tracks are more than a collection of reference points — nearly all of them stand up as perfectly composed pop songs in and of themselves. “Smash Your Head” in particular comes across like a scale prototype of a future pop utopia in the way it flows from one idea to the next every few bars, yielding a surprisingly cohesive piece of music with its own character that nevertheless is in a constant state of mutation. As Eppy says, since artists like Gillis do not have to actually write the brilliant hooks of their source material themselves, they are free to focus entirely on structure, and as such can find new ideas that would be unlikely to emerge while working within the traditional songwriting paradigm. Obviously, this is fun for a person like me who is simply listening to the Girl Talk record as though it’s any other album, but I really hope that people who are actually writing their own music respond to this sort of challenge and attempt to apply its concepts to their original material. (Click here to buy it from Illegal Art.)

Also: If you were very curious about what I played in my DJ sets at the Delancey on Friday, here you go:

Set 1: The Waitresses “Christmas Wrapping” / Belle & Sebastian “We Are The Sleepyheads” / Peter Bjorn & John “Young Folks” / Velella Velella “Alex Boom Selector” / Klanguage “Never Over” / Cristina “Mamma Mia”

Set 2: Au Revoir Simone “Stars” / Of Montreal “A Sentence Of Sorts In Kongsvinger” / August Darnell “Christmas On Riverside Drive” / Amy Winehouse “Rehab” / Spank Rock “Sweet Talk” / Bollywood Freaks “Don’t Stop Til You Get To Bollywood” / Missy Elliott “Can’t Stop” / The Make Up “Pow! To The People” / The Pipettes “Pull Shapes”

Set 3: Talking Heads “Psycho Killer (White Girl Lust edit)” / In Flagranti “Genital Blue Room” / Clipse “Wamp Wamp (Pistol Pete remix)” / Spektrum “Don’t Be Shy” / Bonde do Rolê “Ma´quina de Ricota” / LCD Soundsystem “North American Scum” / Beyonce “Get Me Bodied” / CSS “Let’s Make Love and Listen To Death From Above” / The Knife “We Share Our Mothers’ Health”