Feed the Animals is the fourth studio album by American musician Gregg Gillis, released under his stage name Girl Talk by Illegal Art on June 19, 2008. Illegal Art originally released the album as a digital download through their website using a "pay what you want" pricing system. Like much of his previous work, Gillis composed Feed the Animals almost entirely using samples of other artists' music and minor elements of his own original instrumentation.
Gillis stated that with Feed the Animals, he wanted to produce an album "you can sit down, relax, and listen to over and over again, finding out new things", in contrast with the fast-paced, frenetic nature of his live performances. Feed the Animals builds on the mashup format of previous Girl Talk albums, with Gillis using over 300 samples of music by other artists to compose the album's fourteen tracks. He produced the album as one long piece of music, which was then subsequently broken into individual songs. Gillis felt that the album "works towards a bigger whole" and initially considered releasing the album as a single piece without track divisions, but ultimately decided against the idea, as he felt that "the end of the album would get so neglected, and if your favorite moment was a 30-second bit at the 40-minute mark, it would be really annoying to have that."
Though a historical indie landmark, Girl Talk’s brand of sampling hasn’t aged well. There’s a pretty clear line in sampling between creating something wholly unique/new out of a million recognizable pieces (The Avalanches, Justice, Boards of Canada) vs. the wholesale recontextualization of entire songs going on here. Familiar pieces are presented with a winking nod and thrown together for 30 seconds at a time, making the LP feel like a speed run of “remember this?” in the vein of Ready Player One. It would play well as a DJ mix or on the dance floor, but as a listening experience it’s just exhausting and hard to endure. Less novel artistic product and more tired relic of the aughts in my opinion.
This album was a bit of a conundrum for me… the mix was pretty darn incredible - I heard everything from ? And the Mysterions to Radiohead to The Carpenters to Nine Inch Nails to Kelly Clarkson and pretty much any other pop music you might imagine.
My initial inclination was to lower the rating because this is music built largely from samples. But it was so masterfully mixed it was constantly putting a smile on my face and was perfect accompaniment to my workout.
The title of this list is “1001 Albums to Listen to Before You Die” - not the 1001 best albums of all time or the best new original music or whatever… so thinking about the theme I’m very happy to recommend listening to this before you die. Maybe the artist isn’t using traditional instruments to create songs, but the mixing artistry and incredible expanse of material being sampled does merit a strong listen to this recommendation!
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