GIRL TALK Is a Scorpio
Extended Meditation/Rant by Jim Hayes
(March 2013)
Commodities can be related as values and hence as commodities only by comparison with some other commodity as the universal equivalent. But only the social act can make a particular commodity the universal equivalent- money. Engels
"I will not act civilized in this fucking city."
-Missing Foundation
Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it!
I was too tired to argue and I slept all day. The name of the last Girl Talk album is ‘All Day' with a skeleton on the cover-it's brilliant really. I've been writing an essay about Girl Talk for a fucking year now. Girl Talk is from Pittsburgh. I used to live in Pittsburgh. I hate fucking Pittsburgh. I hate fucking Eides, the fucking yellow bridges the clarinet factory that is the Warhol museum and fucking Oakland with the beige phallic medieval Teutonic Cathedral of Fucking Learning, with a Roy Rogers restaurant in the basement, orange plastic seats. Near the "original" frat boy dump and of course the Electric Banana around the corner from Warhol's high school, boarded up and abandoned, compulsively carsick. That's one of my points, for the first time in history Pittsburgh has produced a band (that's still one more than CT), music worth listening to, worth talking about-now someone is sure to say what about Don Caballero? And I'll say, though I like them personally and I do enjoy their music-they're not as post-industrial and theoretically important as Girl Talk, I mean, they're merely a jazz group. I digress and digress forever. Furthermore, technically-the only PGH band were the Plastic Bottles. They lived in Oakland, they WERE Pittsburgh-their incessant graffiti campaign and use of pre-recorded tapes reveal a hidden agenda. Remember: Poisoning were from Perryopolis , No Scabs were from Oakmont and Ninety Nine Cents were from California (PA) NOT Pittsburgh).
What does Girl Talk sound like it? He sounds like Dash Snow jacking off on newspapers blowing down Bleeker Street. Some people think that electricity comes from other planets. Girl Talk is the Dash Snow Halloween mask turned inside out to reveal the manufacturer's coupon.
It's dance music. It's disco music. Remember the eighties when all the industrial bands went disco? Leather Nun, Hunting Lodge, SPK, PTV, Controlled Bleeding- I think NON was the only one that didn't sound offensive after a few years. Well Girl Talk is an example of yet another band that started "industrial" and went the route of head bobbing and feet tapping. The only difference is that they did it right. Laptop noise is boring says the sticker and since I get all of my information and opinions from bumper stickers, I chose to agree.
But if I was listening to Emmett Miller and I was an eight figure niggah by the name of jigger, would you want me? Why do you record my phone calls, are you planning a bootleg LP? Who makes the first recordings in a pre-recorded universe filled with splendor and other festive occasions?
When ROYAL TRUX sing, gimme my coat little sister and I'll bring the car around, it's not about dope, it's about samples. Royal Trux were mainlining pop culture in moonlight memory motels off the interstate.
What do you do after you've heard Girl Talk? I've been playing All Day all day. It reconciles the post-situ gesture with the contemporary ballroom, with the thick glasses and the mutton chops, with the fucking drugs. Who loves the sun? It's musical plagiarism, but it is necessary as progress implies it. Detournement. The fact that it clicks, that's it it's entirely mouse driven lap dancing: can I get a ‘fuck you'? Can Girl Talk get a response, can he look at REASON? It's laptop driven and reminds me of the Futurist Concerto with the ship's horns. I just heard the Doors and the Ramones and a rapper I didn't recognize. Down South girls do it fucking dicey, real freak in the bed. Girl Talk is fucking the music industry with a kink so dark that it creates music while regaling in the perverse reversal of what is sacred-what is banjo mutton chop authentic musical hipsterism. Girl Talk is the fucking Beatles in the same way that Throbbing Gristle was- the theory, the endless abstraction, musical ideology as a false consciousness and knows it. "Ugly girls be quiet." Girl Talk knows what he's doing. He's obviously under surveillance by the cultural carnivores, the lawyers, the jealous fans, the bands that sent him comp samples who felt they were stiffed when he didn't use them and later got bitter and drunk in some sort of avant garde orgy of self-indulgent vomit. Picking out the cultural symbols is as much fun as listening to it (waiting for the sun: Girl Talk petitions the world to party with prayer). Was Zowie Fenderblast prophesying Girl Talk when he sang: "I'm full of beer & hung like a steer?"
Girl Talk works with mere music which he accepts without examination as the product of music and does not investigate further for a more remote source independent of music. Engels letter to Franz Mehring, July 14, 1893.
The first recording by the Velvet Underground was called "Loop" and it was on a flexi-disc, a flimsy outmoded form of transference. A flexi-disc is somehow so quaint, and the music is a repetitious, screechy bass line that just repeats and feeds back over and over forever. It's the mirror sound of the entire last fifty years of recorded music reduced to its barest form: the infinite repeat. Like a Michael Heizer land art boulder weighing 340 tons being trucked to its destination, drinking in L.A. Yeah but Dash Snow man, when Girl Talk takes a sound, it's like Dash Snow cumming on the NY Post founded by Alexander Hamilton. Copyright enriches the publisher, not the writer, not the rock star.
You know someone who is dependent on pain killers and pop music. More people than ever are becoming dependent on pop music and Opioids. That's because there's no short count. Sunshine Daydream. The myth of Dash Snow, the rich kid taking drugs and making collages is the very last Halloween mask. Dash Snow jacked off on a copy of the New York Post. Is typing Moby Dick in capital letters Art? Ugly girls be quiet, my posse's on Broadway. On Kawara. Roman Opalka, Tehching Hseih. All three of these cosmonauts typed out the codes of space by HAND.
I'm not glad that Thomas Kinkade is dead, I'm just sad that I had to see his paintings. If I painted like that, I'd die drunk too-HEY! wait a gosh-darned minute. Thomas Kinkade's estate slaps a restraining order on his girlfriend. By looking at his Jesus paintings I bet he was a real freak in the bed.
I jacked off on top of a copy of Moby Dick all in comic strip letters. All capitals sounds like you're shouting. I prefer to be soft spoken and polite. They named a street Seamen Circle. Sailors! Circle Jerk, a golden shower of hits, the germs go incognito. Do you want a sanitary mask? John Lennon's lost weekend in Los Angeles provided him a Kotex on his head. Do you know who I am he asked the waitress, she said he was an asshole with a Kotex on his head. I found a penis Polaroid on the street. I showed it in bars and was thrown out. I was listening to Girl Talk. Just like bitches at Black Masses. Girl Talk invokes, he waves his wand. Move, move bitch get out of the way is his incantation dismissing Wicca and proclaiming the age of Horus.
The use of eighties' pop music as talismanic touchstones is particularly disturbing to those who were actually alive in the early eighties. It's hard to describe the vacuous-ness of the music that was being pushed there and then. I must not think bad thoughts. Then I get to hear contemporary pop music that I don't know but vaguely assume recognize Rihanna, he takes the eighties classic rock progression of the piano solo and links it up with rap down for the count later in the same song, he switches to a song riff that was popular in the eighties-as if you changed the classic rock station to the pop station this is what you'd hear then if you went down the dial to the college station and in Pittsburgh it was WRCT at Carnegie Mellon University. The people that bought the song by Madness "Our House" now own Thomas Kinkade paintings and THEY KNOW IT.
Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it. The triumph of the collage. Photography replaced painting as representation and representation has replaced itself with attendance at the County of Fair Use. The map of the county fair is not as well recognized as the actual territory. This is a closed driver on a professional course. Everything is a recognized collage. All that remains is just an actual article stitched into another correspondence, a sea of dancing footnotes. Dash Snow picking up bits of trash and photographing the headlines in an orgasm that sounds like a scratched record processed through a Girl Talk mouse click. The cut-up splicing of word lines, the breakthrough in grey rooms, radio stations I question their blueness. Music is fifty years behind writing behind painting. The critical apparatus behind painting is a scaffolding that creaks with every new catalog, with each future essay. All I do is party. Party-line. Burroughs wrote that fans took astral journeys with Led Zeppelin- I do not deny that the psychic waves of music can certainly stretch. Girl Talk becomes Black Randy becomes Dash Snow. Zowie Fenderblast said it was perfectly logical to want to meet your soundtracks. If s/he was an Illinois lawyer and occultist, s/he'd be Babe-raham Lincoln.
The only people that like Pittsburgh are the people that are FROM there. It's like Cincinnati without the talent. Or Spartanburg South Carolina when it's raining (I was born in Jersey City). Girl Talk represents the postindustrial triumph of the collage, when Dash Snow won. Using samples exclusively is like jacking off on the media, the talent it takes to cum on a copy of the NY Post is slight in comparison to what Girl Talk does with a mouse click. All of us can jack off and all of us have mouse clicks, but who click mice like this? You too will meet the secret copyright police. Musician union dues: do not remove under penalty of law. I was on cloud nine for a minute. With every mouse click, Girl Talk screws up the gears of the machine, who is the third that walks beside him?
Girl Talk floats in coded space. Every time you hear a sample of an artist at that instant the artists' entire career is beamed into your skull. Everything that is encoded in that splinter gets under the nail and infects the blood with THEIR ENTIRE MOVIE. Every intersection leads to electric graffiti proclaiming that in the future everyone will be naked and famous for 15 minutes.
When Zowie Fenderblast sings "I'm full of beer and I don't want to hear your honky tonk songs," it links up to Burroughs writing in the Yage Letters about how awful the sounds of country music played by vacant servicemen on Panamanian jukeboxes - your cheating heart -how much Burroughs hated it. The road to rocket 69 goes through the desert. Sweet Home Alabama is the road to North Vietnam. Black Randy said that 1984 really happened in the 30's.
Girl Talk is the Charley Patton of post-industrial blues. His mouse clicks underneath his bio-medical reserve reveal bondage in the pattern of bourgeois slavery. His revolt against the big boss man, his call and response is to click away at the forced soundtrack and turn it back upon itself. Stealing software from work to make music is just like cat gutting strings for a guitar. Breyer P-Orridge said it in 1980: industrial will be a category just like blues. Artists dying to be part of the 372, 373, or 400 samples he uses so it's said- I've heard all the numbers and then there's a list with tour dates at the bottom. Why is there a copy written fence around the cemetery? People are dying to get in. How many free records does Girl Talk get in one day? How many emailed loops and samples: I don't usually do this but I just want to pass this little loop onto you.
Hey, here's my new glow in the dark vinyl 12 inch, I got the idea from that cabbage patch rock band from Lodi. Did I know Vic Chestnut? No. I once stood next to a rock star when he spoke to Vic Chestnut on the phone. Why must you record my phone calls? The other guy on this album, Sparklehorse, he killed himself too. He was from Knoxville. The painter knew a skinhead cabby with three balls who smoked Lucky Strikes from there, she was from there. Pittsburgh man. The punk scene lived on Chesterfield Avenue. There was a guy named Chester that collected Chesterfield cigarette ads and smoked Chesterfields who lived on Chesterfield. Your love of your copyright is your weakness, the beauty of death. The entire art world is just a bunch of rich kids taking drugs.
I bought an ex library book of black and white advertisements. "The ads appearing in this Scrapbook are of course void. They are reproduced not for the purpose of selling any merchandise, but for their historical interest. They afford an interesting comparison of the advertising methods of today and those in use earlier in the century." But the advertising still sells this decaying society of empty rituals its own formula for destruction: be yourself. By repetition, you can compare but where do you go from there? But part of the New Aesthetic is focusing precisely on these moments. The poetry of a screen saver, the recordings of Girl Talk indicate his willingness to be the bride in the long awaited union with his Holy Guardian Angel, which of course is the history of recorded music itself. He wishes to be fucked by music industry. And when Girl Talk cums it is the color of green. He wipes his fingers on Texaco's New Aesthetic roadmap because for the first time a musician can now choose to use absolutely every single grain of recorded sand. There are no more secrets. Girl Talk has access to everything ever recorded. Imagine composers and creators of the past who could only go so far with so much material. The more Girl Talk tries to hurt music, the more it backfires. Videos of techno bands (people) on you tube with names like: Feed Me and Dead Mou5. Dead Mou5 wears a big pink mouse costume that's actually sort of funny. It's interesting because all this techno music is just drug music-flashing lights and some type of uber-ecstasy called "molly."
Loud music and lights- it's the same carnival act from the sixties seventies and eighties. It just proves that no matter what America is up to historically emotionally or politically, its young citizens want to take psychedelic chemicals and stand in crowds dancing to light shows. The soundtrack sounds different but it's all the same endless pop culture loop.
As soon as I thought the whole thing became a bit much, he did a two or three minute passage that was really beautiful, the collection of rap music is like when Whitman crossed Brooklyn Ferry. It's like I don't think Jello would want anyone to steal HIS mail. I can just see Jello in postal court, now sir did you once sing about stealing people's mail? That's right-the people's mail, people's court people magazine people who were shorter that lived by the water.
Is this so different than when Captain Beefheart hummed melodies to his guitar player? He heard music in his head and he couldn't shape it- Girl Talk hears music but doesn't play an instrument per se- totally entirely created by alteration from existing sources- fucking weird- don't fear the reaper-the door was opened and the wind appeared.
The turn of the century. It's over baby, we blew it, the 19th century and its bastard child the 20th century is gone- the crowded gas mask future is here. Of course the music is Electric. Of course it comes from other planets. I'm not sure if Girl Talk is a faggot junkie, but his fans certainly are.
Hey (Scorpio woman):-i just got off the phone with Zowie. He's another Scorpio. My gf (Scorpio) asks are u drinking? I'm like yeah maybe. She was dialing me when i was dialing her. The new book is coming to me like table tapping. It's like there's a satellite beaming the sentences. The 120 Loop is a road you CAN get off of, it doesn't have to spin round and round. Junk addiction as a metaphor for physical space. Junk as a metaphor for the new art movement and new improved incredibly important art movement is called "New Aesthetic" and it's about how technology influences visual art, how the change in cyberspace has physical dimensions. Since all space is now a grid the grid can be millions of file cabinets storing an entire nations GROOVES: DNA-Latter Day Saint list-family matters, medical records all your calls and all your texts, yellow matter custard colored phonebooks of hate featuring People addicted to their personalities like an addict needs opium. Notice that the initials of the new hip art movement are the same as the 12 step group Narcotics Anonymous the same as my high school North Allegheny- it's a new song. It's a new loop. A new repetition. Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. To loop it. A digital zero or one. A digital recording of a skipping record. A new loop.
One of the loops of my life is driving on the highways sung about on this record in an endless ride in an endless circle. The slum Georgia city of Decatur is mentioned. The first song is about driving on Interstate 285. The circle, the loop that surrounds Atlanta. The perimeter. The upper loop it's called. Some folks call it the "watermelon 500" but I only know those people in passing.
Girl Talk subtext is that the mirror he knows himself by is linked to other mirrors, to other soundtracks, to other missionary positions.
The Lizard King speaks from behind a Michael Heizer rock in the desert Cantos. He's on a Girl Talk song- the "Waiting for the Sun" riff, waiting for the sunrise of the collage. The Doors have an old bootleg called Critique. It was live April 27, 1969 on a Channel 13 PBS show. The next day they were interviewed by Richard Goldstein. Jim said: "I can envision one person with a lot of machines-tapes, electronic setups-singing and speaking and using a lot of machines."
Not long after the Lizard King said to Jerry Hopkins of the tabloid Strolling Ruin: "Obviously there'll be a new synthesis... like Indian music, African music, Eastern music, electronic music... some brilliant kid will come along and be popular. I can see a lone artist with a lot of tapes and electronics, like an extension of the Moog synthesizer, a keyboard with the complexity and richness of a whole orchestra. There's somebody out there, working in a basement, just inventing a whole new musical form. We'll hear about it in a few years."
The historicism of Girl Talk reminds you that Alexander Berkman went to jail on the north side of Pittsburgh for shooting (wounding) the Frick of Frick Park Market in case of authentic gangsta rap. If art, all art; reflects the purpose of Byzantine icons and their INTENT of transporting the viewer NOT in front of the Saint, or the Christ-but to TRANSPORT us to that time.
Like it was such a big deal when Belle & Sebastian sang about Seymour Stein, nowadays, they'd mount him like a stuffed pig al a Damien Hirst and neither an eye ball be raised. It's the new aesthetic man-wanna buy some pencils? The Painter of Light, Thomas Kinkade-that new aesthetic joker whose cheesy scenes appear in every shopping mall every mantel piece-with his love hate affair with his racist clientele. Thomas Kinkade & Dash Snow in the land of the dead- he suffered a relapse, alcoholism, had been drinking all day and wasn't breathing. The 911 call is new aesthetic-is a head made out of toothpicks art, especially if it's about Billy Crystal, it's a Girl Talk world, the triumph of the collage- if Dash Snow wasn't an eight figure niggah by the name of jigger would anyone would have wanted him?
Also see our 2011 Girl Talk article