@stereogum: @Gregg Gillis was a biomedical engineering undergrad when Napster turned the history of recorded music into a free playground. As Girl Talk, his first two albums were filled with samples of famous pop and rap songs, but Gillis intentionally destroyed them, transforming the original tracks into disjointed, abrasive blurs. ‘Night Ripper,’ which turns 20 years old this weekend, is disjointed, but it’s not abrasive. On the album that made him indie-famous, Gillis took the catchiest parts from instantly familiar tunes, arranging the collage in ways that made you want to hear the original tracks. While his earlier records were artistic defacements, ‘Night Ripper’ celebrated the hundreds of songs that Gillis crushed together. For decades, musicians had been repurposing old recordings into new songs — Grandmaster Flash, Negativland, “Pump Up The Volume” — but Girl Talk’s LP arrived a few years into the exciting new mutation of this tradition that was the bootleg, or the mash-up. ‘Night Ripper’ is a work of great affection. You can tell Gillis loved the crushed velvet synths of Fleetwood Mac’s “Little Lies” intro, for instance, even when he ripped that intro out of its context and put the 69 Boyz bellowing dance instructions over it. Unlike some of his contemporaries (Richard X, Hollertronix, Danger Mouse) Girl Talk didn’t shape his samples into a unified aesthetic. His aesthetic was everything, all at once. There was no sense of cooler-than-thou curation, either. While the artists he sampled included then-ascendant cool-kid favorites like M.I.A. and LCD Soundsystem, Gillis heaved their tracks into the same wood chipper as Dem Franchize Boyz and Weezer and Hall & Oates. Nothing got any more canonical weight than anything else. Gillis knew ‘Night Ripper’ was a copyright violation party and released it, on MP3s and CD, via the anonymously run label Illegal Art. They planned a fair use legal defense, but nobody sued. Somehow, the album is now on streaming services. Girl Talk will release a new EP on Illegal Art later this year — the label just announced its relaunch after going on hiatus in 2012. 
[📝: Tom Breihan, 📷: Illegal Art, Tom Purves] #GirlTalk #mashup #2000s

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Saturday 09 May 2026 15:43:08 GMT