"All Day," the latest mash-up from Gregg Gillis, more commonly known as Girl Talk, is a great album for pong and pre-gaming, that is. Especially pre-gaming. With 12 tracks that play like one big power hour on crystal meth, it could make a devastating drinking game.
Having said that, I can't really see it having any real value in a different venue.
It's not that I hate mash-ups I don't. I think sampling in music is interesting, innovative and in many ways original in its own right. Mash-ups as a genre present many questions about the nature of sampling and pastiche in music. With mash-ups, sampling isn't simply a means of enhancing or providing a foundation for a song it is the song. Nevertheless, many mash-up artists are able to create songs with a seamless originality and freshness, offering new interpretations of old tracks.
From track to track or should I say sample to sample "All Day" is undeniably "cool" (for lack of a better word, though, coolness is perhaps the most apt characteristic by which to judge a mash-up). Despite this, the album is too frenetic, too claustrophobic and so incessantly jam-packed with pop hits from the last 50 years that listeners will be hard pressed to find any real, original musical interpretation. At times, it feels like little more than an expansion pack of his previous albums under the Girl Talk moniker.
I suppose that my gripes over what is meant to be nothing more than a party album are a bit extreme.
Yet, just minutes into the album (it's hard to identify these songs individually, as they purposefully run together), I couldn't help but ponder what it says about our society that this type of music has so much consumer appeal myself included, I admit.
Does a backdrop of Simon and Garfunkel's "Cecilia" really make the Lil Jon banger "Get Low" any more tolerable to those who consider themselves above the crassness of the latter? Are songs like "Paper Planes," "Empire State of Mind" and "Blitzkrieg Bop" really not catchy enough do they need to be reduced to hooks only to be followed, however seamlessly, by another poppy hook in Gillis' encyclopedic palette?
Seriously, how impulsive are we?
If I haven't driven the point home enough, I don't consider mash-ups to be a completely degraded genre of digital music only kind of. Take, for example, Myndset's "Silvia to Ibiza," Diplo's "My Love" or Brenton Duvall's "Against a Mad World" all mash-ups that are spectacular enough to ring through any basement during a dance-party or laid back pong scene and at the same time be enjoyed in solitude as interesting and novel takes on previous works.
"All Day," on the other hand, is somewhat like that YouTube video "United States of Pop 2009," a mash-up of the biggest hits from 2009. Yes, it sounded cool during your New Year's Eve grind, but it probably was not what you remembered the next day (if you remembered anything).
Despite its smorgasbord of pop-hits from Eric Clapton to Rihanna and Gillis' masterful transitions, "All Day," at the end of the day, amounts to an empty "Name that Tune" exercise that offers potential greatness, but ultimately falls short.
