Exercise Music – Girl Talk
Quick – what do the following artists have in common:
UGK
Spencer Davis Group
Roy Orbison
The Unicorns
DJ Funk
Cupid
Pete Townshend
Unk
Twister Sister
Lil Mama
Ludacris
Temple of the Dog
Birdman
Lil Wayne
Aaliyah
T.I.
Sinead O’Connor
Shawnna
Jay Z
music
Give up? They all appear on “Play Your Part, pt 1,” the first song on Girl Talk’s legendary album Feed the Animals. How the heck do they fit all those guest appearing on a 4:46 song?
Let’s clarify two things. First, Girl Talk is not a they. The act consists of one person, Gregg Gillis.
wikipedia.org
Pittsburgh music
Gillis was a biomedical engineer in Pittsburgh who moonlighted as a DJ at nights, playing music he created. Which gets me to the second clarification – all those artists don’t appear on his songs. They are the songs. Here’s a fan video for Play your Part, pt 1 –
Music
video
100% of all this and every song on his three albums were sampled from other songs. Mash-ups were pretty popular a couple years ago, where a DJ would take two songs and mix them together. Girl Talk goes beyond the mash-up by taking everything – beat, bass lines, melodies, vocals – from other songs. So you’ll get a song like this one featuring Tag Team’s “Whoomp! (There it is)” rap line, Big Country’s “In a Big Country” in the background, and Kraftwerk’s “Numbers” providing additional percussion –
Girl Talk
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I first heard Girl Talk at 2009’s Lollapalooza in Chicago. The show was legendary – I’ve never seen a crowd of 20,000 dancing like that in the middle of a Saturday afternoon in broad daylight. At the start of every show, he takes the stage fully clothed with his laptop in plastic wrap. By the end of the show he’s usually just in his underwear, covered in sweat. In between, people from the crowd are welcome to join him on stage and dance around him. By the end of the Lolla show, he was in crowd surfing in a rubber raft.
I know the temptation is to think that he just pre-mixes everything, goes out on stage, and just hits a button on his laptop. He doesn’t. Instead, he mixes and remixes his songs – often creating new songs – on the fly. It’s utterly mindboggling.
Since that first concert, that album has fueled a few hundred workouts. Same with his Night Ripper and All Day (his latest). It’s not like a group of songs put together for an exercise playlist of songs – each SONG is a playlist. Other DJs have done similar, but some of the combinations are pure genius. At first, you won’t understand what’s going on – “Was that really Jay Z rapping over Radiohead?” You’ll listen to it and start picking out bits of songs that you know. But while you’re doing that, it’s IMPOSSIBLE to not hear this and start moving.
This is one of my favorites featuring Heart, Public Enemy, Yael Naim, Cheap Trick, and Eminem.
Classic rock
the best exercise music
The best part is that all of his albums are available for free on his site – www.illegal-art.net. Since the music consists of other artists’ work, it’d be nearly impossible to secure the rights to the songs and would cost a fortune in royalties. So you can’t be your usual cheapskate self and use price as an excuse. Go out and download his stuff. Better yet, find him in concert.
exercise music
concerts
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4 comments on “Exercise Music – Girl Talk”
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WOWSA who knew. Thanks for exposing me to this.
This 1 flew right over my head as to what they all have in common 🙂
Being the true me, I only recognized a total of four names on the list. Yay me.
I saw him live once and I have never danced so intensely or freely since. The whole crowd was totally tuned into his crazy genius — it was incendiary.