Girl Talk - Secret Diary
(Illegal Art)
The music of exhaustion. You'll excuse a borrowing of Barth, won't you? It's quite pertinent to the discussion at hand, the role of post-modernism in music, the sly wink of Spiral Stairs as he channels Mark E. Smith, The Beatles knowing nods to Cage, hell, any revival that gets it's legs these days — this whole rock renaissance with The Strokes playing the Michaelangelo — "Cowabunga, dudes!" indeed. Modern music, of course, doesn't have the history literature and art do, predecessors of the modern novel reaching back two centuries, precursors of modern art go back the same, traces being found in David and Delacroix, but modern music, for the most part, builds on the last fifty years, and sometimes, yes, reaches back to bluegrass and folk music, etc., from the earlier half of the century, but most times not.
Barth: "Nota bene that our century's more than two-thirds done; it's dismaying to see so many of our writers following Dostoevsky or Tolstoy or Flaubert or Balzac, when the real technical question seems to me to be how to succeed not even Joyce and Kafka, but those who've succeeded Joyce and Kafka and are now in the evenings of their own careers." Exhausted, played out, no more possibilities. How does one write pop or rock without infringing on the vast history of the past fifty years? Where does one go, not after the Beatles and Rolling Stones, but after The Fall, Faust, Can, Captain Beefheart, This Heat, and even their successors? Etc.
Barth, Coover, and Barthelme, as well as many other post-modern writers, answered, "Where do we go?" by not moving ahead, but rather by returning to the history of literature and recasting the major ideas in a new light. By taking shared myths and fairy tales and twisting them using new literary techniques, they effectively created a new language by which to tell stories, and, as Rorty says, "changing languages and other social practices may produce human beings of a sort that never before existed."
The analogue of this in music is, of course, sampling (that is, in rock music, because jazz certainly has its own postmodern reflections), but not just any sampling, not just P Diddy using a Police song to make money off his dead pal, but using samples to change the shape of the original song, to cast it in a new context, the most judicious form being plunderphonics. Where, say, Beck's use of a sample is akin to Pavement ripping off "Pay Your Rates," that is, communion with a savvy audience, plunderphonics seems more like the Barth end of the postmodern scale, not so much a wink at a knowing listener, as an exploration of old ideas in contemporary terms.
Gregg Gillis' Girl Talk follows mainly down this path, the John Oswald-ian reconfiguring of pop, glitched out, cut and pasted bits of Joan Osborne and Jay-Z that fly past in a blur, Secret Diary runs the gamut from full-out songs of pilfered parts combined in a patchwork manner to Olivia Tremor Control-ish noise collages. The album's 17 magazine gloss and major label pop crap sources truly give the feeling of a happy suburban teen's room, but twisted through a postmodern prism. The playfulness of the original subject matter and the non-serious presentation belie the revolutionary nature of plunderphonics though, as our shared culture is uncannily (Freudian sense) handed back to us to examine.
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