Girl Talk: A make believe musician

Girl Talk is the single biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the American people. The first time people got the idea to mix instrumentals from pop songs with vocals from rap songs it was kind of cute. You’d listen to Eminem rapping over a Brittney Spears song for thirty seconds and think, “Hey that kind of goes together.” Now you have this hipster scum convincing people that he’s creating some revolutionary form of art, making millions of dollars and earning critical acclaim.

The first problem with mashups is that they sound terrible. Music fans around the world have heard 3-6 Mafia played over Neutral Milk Hotel and thought, “How did I never think to listen to these two groups at the same time? Oh yeah because it sounds dissonant and shitty.”

Mashups have found a niche because hipsters’ indie rock of choice can never be played in a social setting. Putting on an Arcade Fire record at a party will have everyone in the room standing around awkwardly and reminiscing over sad memories of not fitting in during high school. Mashups solve this problem by putting hipsters’ favorite songs over a danceable drum beat. No one will actually dance, but it allows socially incapable young people to engage other hipsters on conversations with “Hey, I recognize this song,” which soon leads to, “Hey I saw them in concert one time and they were awesome,” which inevitably concludes with, “Hey, wanna go smoke a bowl and talk about it?”

As with most of society’s woes, Kanye West is to blame for the influx of mashups. While rap has always relied on sampling, most producers at least tried to use relatively unknown songs and obscure them to the point they’d be fairly difficult to recognize. Kanye was too lazy to do this, so he began lifting full songs and having people rap over them untouched. It wasn’t long before hipsters realized they could do this same thing, except eliminate the original rapping. Once it was cool for Jay-Z to rap over an existing Doors song, it was only a matter of time before some bearded hipster who was too lazy and untalented to make his own songs could play a Jay-Z verse at the same time as a Doors song and call it new music.

This concept excites hipsters to the point of climax. See, as dedicated music fans they spend all day criticizing it, causing them to feel superior to the people the actually create it. When Girl Talk sells out concerts and is listed among Pitchfork’s albums of the year, it feeds their deluded belief that they can be important to music even though they never took singing lessons and didn’t make the high school jazz band. It’s only a matter of time before they run out of music to mash up and have to mix old mash ups together. “Oh my God, did you hear how he mixed the drums off track 4 from Feed the Animals with the xylophone breakdown from track 8 on Night Ripper, it was so brilliant.” God help us all.