Feed The Animals is the last album worth remembering before dubstep swept everything before it into irrelevance. Against everything after, even the sounds of Girl Talk-y descendants and their looping GIFs of anime girls, Feed The Animals is a flash of ankle, a slip of shoulder. Against the modern pursuit of music that sounds ever more pornographic, Feed The Animals is a cable-knit sweater.
Here: everyone is chasing the boundaries of sensation at all times. In your teens and early twenties this is easy. You drink cheap wine and eat expensive drugs and probably not much else and everything is heaven and hell. Once the hangover wears off, your palate expands. You need more complex thrills. Some people suddenly find themselves with a butcher’s knife in the bedroom. Some people buy a couch with a partner. Life comes at you fast. Musically speaking, you either get really into drum’n’bass or really into Steely Dan. These are both hardcore experiences.
At any rate, since ‘Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites’ redefined music in 2010, even the casualest flirting with pop has involved the crunchingest kick drums. And though the bass wobble, like our youth and grace, has slipped from favour, those of us experiencing our first wine-and-pill diets at the same time as pop music was going through this Renaissance are still downright horny for big damn noise.
Feed The Animals is more on the Steely Dan side of things. By which I mean: virtuosic.
Let’s wax nostalgic a little more. Feed The Animals was the perfect album for anybody who was 17 years old in 2008. 17 is when everyone is drinking, fucking, driving, and both anticipating and delaying the start of their careers. 17 is The First Year Of The Rest Of Your Life. For someone about to start The Rest Of Their Life, Feed The Animals was an immense promise handed down by and about the world.
There were a lot of promises made to 17 year olds in 2008 about the world. Governments were recognising Indigenous rights and de-escalating wars, popular culture was beginning to welcome feminism, and Halo 3 still had an active online community. Young people were considered radical decontextualisers, born Situationists, the children of DeBord, Derrida, and Dada, even if their only real exposure to the latter was via Lady Gaga. The emergent “remix culture” (inextricable from “hipsters”) was hailed by Youngs pre-Spotify era as the liberation and free trade of art, and condemned by Olds as the endpoint of music.
We don’t need to belabour how all that panned out.
This was Feed The Animals, philosophically. Gregg Gillis wasn’t the first person to Mash a bunch of songs Up, but for whatever reason he became the fulcrum on which a whole debate about music piracy swung. He released music on Illegal Art, a label with ties to Situationist-y band Negativland. Articles talked about this weird facet of copyright law called Fair Use, and whether Girl Talk was it. Copyright was in the spotlight anyway. The proliferation of social media and a new sharing economy meant Creative Commons got a new push as an alternative to licensing intellectual property. Hey, I know, this is Some Shit. But one of the reasons Feed The Animals felt so monumental at the time was that it was somehow everything 2008 was about at once.
Anyway, that was before the dystopia claimed Aaron Swartz.
Naturally, I found out about Feed The Animals via a tweet. This was the first time I’d ever watched a bunch of strangers livetweet about an album together and it made Twitter’s potential, in those early and untested days, very clear. Suddenly I was in a lounge with people from three continents talking about the same album. This happens damn near weekly now (or did, before the apocalypse) but at the time, hashtags and retweets weren’t even official features. Conversation on the site was kind of lumpy AND jagged. But people got it together for a record of pop and rap samples.
We’re getting closer to talking about the music now. But first: last year, Chester Bennington died. As someone who copped his music via saving $2/week in dishwashing money: that fucking sucked. The obits rightly pointed out that Linkin Park brought a generation of middle American kids to rap, priming them for a young adulthood of bumping DAMN at backyard barbecues. Across Night Ripper, Feed the Animals, and All Day combined (we’ll ignore the first two records), Girl Talk probably didn’t even have the cultural impact of a lone Linkin Park single. But for as much as Hybrid Theory was the first album I ever owned (it was extremely the first album I ever owned), there’s a thick, black, pointed line of influence going from thrashing Feed The Animals on my Sony Ericsson while riding the bus to my first girlfriend’s house to later tracking down Graduation, The Black Album, and the hundreds of other rap albums I’ve listened to since, to say nothing of the pop history (shout outs Rod Stewart, Big Country, J Geils.)
Feed The Animals was an education. It wasn’t the end of music — it was the way to discovering it.
Feed the Animals is the perfect album for anybody who was 17 years old in 2008.
Feed The Animals has all the superficial trappings of a party album, but it only really describes a party, in a way that everyone at that party might talk about it in front of you, the one not invited. Their memory of the gossamer strands of your high school crush’s hair gliding through the bathroom glow as she puked her brains out is vivid and thrilling, but it will never be your memory. Folks who got the neon v-neck kinda turnt up during VICE’s first wave of relevance claim Girl Talk shows were downright Dionysian; I can only testify to the festival setting (twice!) and it being a vibe killer both times. 70 samples a minute sounds like every good time put together on paper, but anyone who ever got their hands on so much as fingerpaint knows mushing too many colours together only gets you a kinda rectal shade of brown. Folks, I’m not gonna front like I’m a regular Backpack Kid, but I’ve got a basic grasp of rhythm. Girl Talk is goddamn impossible to dance to.
Part of the why is the way Gillis’s mashes fit into a kind of episodic structure. Where the Best of Bootie bootlegs are turbonasty in that 3am jagerbomb type of way, Feed The Animals is a 40-person potluck of music’s history. It feels weird to say this about something that’s flooded with 4/4 bangers, but Feed The Animals is more Heironymus Bosch than hypebeast. The gaps in this particular polyptych are melody-less bits of beatmatching, Gillis getting ready to move from one mood to the next. But where other mp3Js will fuck around with looping pitch-shifted vocals into a riser, for example, Gillis preserves the samples, even if it means losing the groove.
Even so, this thing is scary consistent. The latter half of 'Set It Off' into 'No Pause' is a masterclass in Gillis’s sense of economy, even though the first half languishes by deploying Jay Z over Radiohead and Fugazi as a capital-R Rock interlude between the funk of 'What It’s All About' and 'No Pause'. 'Shut The Club Down' underscores Rich Boy’s hyperconsumption anthem ‘Throw Some D’s’ with Aphex Twin’s sublimely tender ‘Girl/Boy Song’. ‘Young Turks’ was a staple, but Yung Berg’s verse in proto-consent anthem ‘Sexy Can I’ somehow never made the rounds in my suburb. I picked up ‘Ghetto Superstar’ from a compilation album a few summers before, but Gillis jamming it next to Diana Ross opened a whole new word of soul and disco. Even without the recs, 'Hands In The Air' finds something exquisite in slapping Jock Jam ‘Whoomp There It Is’ against the metallic squall of ‘In A Big Country’ and Flo Rida’s ‘Low’ on top of Velvet Underground’s ‘Sunday Morning’.
Trying to sieve Feed The Animals feels foolish. In 2010, Tom Ewing broke down "The Moment" for The Guardian, i.e. the atoms of bliss and joy and despair and rapture that are maybe what We Really Mean when we say we love “a song.” Atop the piece: a wide-eyed and tie-dyed Greg Gillis. Ewing mentions highlighting these Moments feels more true to a certain form of criticism, but quickly gets pedestrian. “...maybe the best way to celebrate great moments is simply to spotlight them musically.”
This act of musical conservation actually makes Gillis more… conservative? than the handwringers would suggest with their end-of-culture tip. If mashing up frogs and mosquitoes begets dinosaurs, isn’t Greg Gillis some kind of hero for locking T-Pain’s ‘Who The Fuck Is That?’ and Avril Lavigne’s ‘Girlfriend’ in amber together? Sifting through the wreckage of our Mad Maxian future, who knows what will remain to teach the aliens of ourselves? Here, in fact, is the blueprint. If Feed The Animals was any kind of death knell, it was for the dogma of subscribing to your subculture. Goths in love with Weezy F, punks who missed the bump and grind, ravers who crave the slow jams and old heads who wanted to find something in Auto-Tune-as-instrument — Girl Talk was giving you permission. There was a time when liking one thing diametrically opposed you to another. In the aughts, we unmade that. Feed The Animals was the record we played at its funeral. Yeah, turns out at least one of those promises from 2008 came good.