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The Dartmouth
July 25, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

Forthcoming Girl Talk album to sample Fugazi

Mash-up music has a way of attracting attention to artists from fans who would not otherwise take an interest in their music. Skeptics find it in them to appreciate the guitar loop of Miley Cyrus' "Party in the U.S.A." the moment Nas, Jay-Z and the Notorious B.I.G. are overlaid onto it, just as Grizzly Bear fans may have been opened up to the catalog of revolutionary rappers Dead Prez thanks to The Hood Internet's "Two Weeks of Hip Hop."

Greg Gillis, alias Girl Talk, told Pitchfork this month that he is planning on releasing a 65 minute-long follow-up to his 2008 mash-up album "Feed the Animals" before the end of the year. In the interview, Gillis said he plans to include samples from such musical acts as Nicki Minaj, Rick Ross, Aphex Twin, Fugazi and Black Sabbath. If there is any band that I hope Girl Talk's new LP will expose to new pockets of fans, it's the seminal post-hardcore band Fugazi.

Active from 1987 to 2002, Fugazi was one of the bands that took the punk do-it-yourself ethic to a new level and stuck with it more than most other bands. While they have been mostly out of the limelight since they went on an indefinite hiatus in 2002, some old source material has resurfaced, giving Fugazi fans a chance to relive the glory days of one of the most fiercely principled bands in rock history.

In December 2009, for example, a 40 minute-plus montage of Fugazi stage banter, set against a backdrop of feedback on the monitor, surfaced online. The recording ranges from Fugazi co-leader Ian Mackaye's tirades against spitting, Lollapalooza and ticket scalpers to polls of the audience to see whether they want to turn the house lights off and requests to adjust the air conditioning.

Fugazi's catalog of critically acclaimed music ranges from the caustic, raw energy of the 1989 compilation release "13 Songs" to the more subtle, drawn-out, refined tracks on their last LP, "The Argument." Their songs were always, however, defined by an impressive variety of themes ranging from the political to the personal, but always intelligent.

"Why can't I walk down a street, free of suggestion?" Mackaye asks in the aptly-titled track "Suggestion" off of "13 songs."

This sentiment, like many other sentiments expressed in their music, mirrors the band's practices: it was fiercely independent and anti-corporate, nearly monkish and uninterested in the artistic pressures of corporate record labels and top-40 pop trends.

"Fck me? Why fck me, you little asshole, why? Do you know me personally?" Mackaye yelled at one belligerent audience member in the 2009 montage of stage banter. "You little MTV-generation piece of shit."

Fugazi was notorious for its members' dedication to their fans and to the accessibility of their music. They refused to play venues that were not open to all ages. They tried, whenever possible, to keep admission to their shows at $5 and kept their record prices as low as possible.

Not only did Fugazi stick to all of these principles, but they made it commercially viable, keeping low overhead wherever possible to make the low prices work. They were self-managed, and they distributed all of their own material, eventually under the auspices of Dischord Records, the record company started by Mackaye.

"My manager? I am the manager what are you talking about?" Mackaye said to one audience member in the montage recording who jokingly asked to see his manager. "We have no manager."

The band was fiercely opposed to mosh pits, violence at shows, crowd surfing and any other crowd behavior that might ruin the experience for others. They toured with envelopes of $5 bills, refunds that they would hand to uncooperative audience members as they escorted them out of the show.

"We're asking you all, as a personal favor to you all, to be nice and to not go bump people's heads and to not jump off the stage," Mackaye said during the montage. "You don't like it, you take your five bucks and get the f*ck out of here."

The marriage between mashup and Fugazi is an interesting one, but in some ways is also decidedly odd. At first glance, it seems unlikely that Gillis and Mackaye would hit it off. Girl Talk shows feature balloon drops and leaf blowers shooting rolls of toilet paper into enormous crowds of college-age kids looking to party and have a good time a very large production indeed. Fugazi always took a minimal route, with the main principle of keeping the music accessible and inexpensive. The rest they considered frills.

Nonetheless, part of what underlies Gillis' work seems to draw from Fugazi's own ethos. There is something anti-establishment about making mashups, taking little stock in the lawsuits of big record labels and opting to be a legal "margin walker."

Of course, by any standards Fugazi espoused, Gillis would be considered a sellout. Yet in some ways, he is trying to push back at the meta-narrative of mainstream music, showing everyone that these songs are not invincible. The innumerable mashups that have surfaced in the past few years are part of this growing conversation, talking back to the corporate music industry in a way that was not truly done before, or at least not to the extent that Fugazi did.