Thou Shalt Not Steal

Land of confusion

NOTE: This was originally written as a comment in response to this thoughtful post re: the Girl Talk phenomenon over at Riff Market. It is neither in full accord nor disagreement with what they have to say; nor is it wholly reliant on their post, but if you're going to bother to read what's below, you might as well read what Nick Sylvester and David Marx have to say, because it's one of the better pieces of music criticism you'll read all year.

Greg Gillis a.k.a. Girl Talk is like PT Barnum: 90% of his success is marketing. By positioning himself as an artist and not a DJ, he raises his product halfway out of the novelty muck and earns a level of consideration not typically accorded to DJ mixes. That other 10% is the problem. There's no argument that Gillis, if he's not doing something completely original (Plunderphonics, Dust Brothers, Jason Forrest, etc.), he's doing it in such a brash, inventive manner that college kids lose their shit when he rolls into town to rock their auditoriums. Most of this is obviously the nostalgia flavor, but I think it would be uncharitable to say that Gillis' ear for recontextualization and his aesthetic bent (repositioning rap lyrics against pop/rock backgrounds to unveil - or invent - emotional subtext) does not constitute a kind of art unto itself. This isn't to say that GT's art is qualitatively identical to the artistry of the people he's repurposing; we can argue all day about whether or not the curatorial can be considered artistic or what level of original contribution is necessary to make someone an artist rather than a DJ.

I also think it's freighting GT with more weight than he can bear to assert that his project, whether accidentally or by design, suggests that pop music is an undifferentiated mass that can be pulled apart and reassembled in whatever formation Gillis prefers and be identical content-wise. If we grant that Gillis' success is attributable in large part to the nostalgic, name-that-tune quality of his work, well, that nostalgia comes from somewhere. Listeners have built up emotional attachments to the songs Gillis is Cuisinarting; hence the ecstatic reaction of his fans to each clever beatjack. I don't think the average GT listener views what he does as much more than a sensationally well-executed parlor trick. In fact, I think that the positioning of Girl Talk as a "serious artist" (the pejorative quotation marks signal disdain for the phrase, not GT) derives mainly from Gillis himself and the critics who see him as both a Fair Use Moses leading the way into a promised land of IP recycling and the celebrant of the ultimate poptimist sacrament - mixing the high with the low and drawing out the undergirding commonalities. These views reek of self-justification, as if his records could not plausibly be considered worthwhile if everyone admitted that Gillis is an extremely gifted spaz whose success is largely attributable to his willingness to run so blatantly afoul of our present copyright regime.

It's tempting to defuse this conversation with a big "so what"; so what if Gillis thinks he's an artist, or so what if you think that he isn't. However, I think it's worthwhile to try and suss out a distinction between the taste-making and the art-making, if only because there must come a point where merely juxtaposing is no longer creating; indeed, the pro-GT counterargument would be that there is a point where juxtaposing does become creating. I appreciate what Gillis is trying to do in terms of elucidating connections between artists and genres; it's an extremely abbreviated version of what Greil Marcus tries to do when he writes a book presenting Pere Ubu, Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, and Twin Peaks as thematically interrelated. However, there's a difference between the guy who paves the road, the one who drives on it, and the one who sells the GPS. Figuring out in which one of these categories, if any, Gillis fits into is all the fun.