Girl Talk: A New Live Music Frontier

I WANT TO BE THERE.

I come from a family of concert-goers. When I was a kid, my mom met my stepdad while following the Grateful Dead on tour. As a pre-teen, I made a conscious decision to attend my first "real" concert at Carver-Hawkeye Arena in Iowa City. And I have to tell you, the Backstreet Boys rocked my world that night. I was in 12-year-old heaven. There's nothing better than live music, even if it is pop and partially lip-synced.

(I saw the Backstreet Boys again last summer at Ravinia. Everyone there was female, aged 20 to 35. It was a joyous reunion of my original music community.)

But not many acts patronized Iowa City or Hilo, so it wasn't until I moved to Chicago for college that I had access to the good stuff. Mad Caddies, Pepper, The Decemberists, Reel Big Fish, Maroon 5, My Chemical Romance, Keller Williams, blues clubs -- my tastes cover the spectrum. I took a break from live shows after college; they're expensive, and a bunch of my concert buddies had moved away. My triumphant return was marked by my first Weezer show in January and a single weekend in February that featured both The Decemberists and Keller Williams. But this Friday I embark on a genuine first: I'm seeing Girl Talk.

If you're unfamiliar with Gregg Gillis, aka Girl Talk, allow me to educate you:

The first track off "All Day," the most recent Girl Talk release (November 2010).

He's probably the most famous DJ* touring today, and his specialty is mashing up music -- everything from current pop to gangsta rap to Elton John to the Jackson 5. In performance, he mixes tracks live, so no two shows are the same. He's been called a lawsuit waiting to happen -- technically he doesn't have permission to use the copyrighted music clips -- but he releases his albums for free and asks people to pay whatever they want, citing fair use. And despite criticism, he's gotten away with it for 10 years, two EPs and five full-length albums. (Check them out here.)

What makes this guy amazing is the way he rehabilitates songs we've long since forgotten. For instance, if you never thought L'il Mama and Metallica made fit bedfellows, you've never listened to "Like This" off 2008's Feed the Animals:

Oh yeah, and Mya can come too.

One of my rare regrets from undergrad is skipping the show he played at our student center in 2008. I plan to set the universe right this Friday when my friend Christina and I see him live at the Congress. I expect nothing less than a life-changing experience.

When it comes to live shows, I'm all about preparation. Enjoy with me.

And just for fun: A list of all the artists and songs sampled in Girl Talk's Feed the Animals, courtesy of sjheil on Flickr:


* He's not a fan of the term, but "artist" and "musician" don't really convey a full understanding of how he makes music.

Ke-dollar sign-ha

I desperately wish I'd been at the planning session for this music video.

"So...we need unicorns. Unicorn heads on human bodies. Yes. Alright, that's solid. What else? How about James Van Der Beek? Yeah, the guy from Dawson's Creek. No, I don't think he's done anything since then...What? He was in an episode of Ugly Betty? Uh, okay, that's great. He also does some Funny or Die videos, but those are usually riding the Dawson gravy train too, so it's a wash. Anyway, he'll be cheap, and he's still pretty good-looking. Okay, so how do we get Dawson Leery into the unicorn room? He should send Ke$ha something. What, like a diamond? A love letter? Hmmm...how about a piece of cheese? That's a winning idea right there! What kind of cheese? Well, that's a silly question. Only one type of cheese deserves this sort of centerpiece attention, and that's muenster. No, fuck you, I hate Swiss, we're using muenster. Okay cool. Unicorns, James Van Der Beek, and muenster. We're missing something. Wait, what's the song about again? Let's look at the lyrics:

Hahahahahahahahaha.Dance.

Back door cracked
We don't need a key
We get in for free
No VIP sleaze

Drink that Kool-Aid
Follow my lead
Now you're one of us
You're coming with me

It's time to kill the lights
And shut the DJ down
(This place about to)
Tonight were taking over
No one's getting out

This place about to blow (blow) (x4)
This place about to...

Um...yeah, I don't know. Can Dawson dance? No, no, he definitely cannot dance. Let's just ignore the lyrics, give Dawson and Ke$ha rainbow laser guns, and call it a day.

Oh, also Ke$ha will make out with one of the unicorns. The one with an eye patch."

I think I'm pursuing the wrong career path.

White Chocolate: A Dennis Miller-Style Rant

copyright David G-H @ flickr (http://flickr.com/photos/19998197@N00/)

Chocolate is beautifully simple. There's a reason people go crazy for the stuff; it's delicious and enjoys a culturally iconic status on par with bacon. (And when the two meet, it's magical.) But the love is not unconditional, so can we all just agree that white chocolate is a terrible, utterly failed concept?

Now I don’t want to go off on a rant here, but no one worth their weight in Godiva enjoys white chocolate. It is an affront to the institution of chocolate, a merry “F-U” to the elegant beauty of mouth-watering morsels that are so awesome, they’re an aphrodisiac. Dark chocolate can literally get you laid. White chocolate hasn’t gotten anyone lucky since the 1970’s, and that was only because everyone was exceptionally stoned and named Lucky.

White chocolate isn't even chocolate: It doesn't contain cocoa solids, which are what give other chocolates their brown color. It's mostly milk and sugar. It might as well be a breakfast cereal aimed at eight-year-olds. Is Tony the Tiger looking for a new gig?

White chocolate is the Boone's Farm of chocolates. It's eaten out of necessity, not desire: Your parents are gone for the night and you’ve got one shot at getting drunk for the first time with your dumbass junior high best friend. You consume it because it’s there. It gets the job done. And then you weep with relief later in life when your taste buds encounter the real thing.

In case you’ve ever deceived yourself into believing that it isn’t that bad, allow me to present the pièce de résistance: White chocolate can’t be used in candy bars. How fucking useless is that? Think about it: Reese’s, Snickers, Butterfinger, Milky Way, truffles would all be terrible if encased in white chocolate. It’d be like eating vomit-coated peanuts. With nougat. And I know for a fact that the only people that enjoy that are the French.

If you're still on the fence, take a gander at the sort of marketing available for white chocolate:


I dare you to ever look at white chocolate the same way again.

Death to white chocolate. But that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.

The (Twitter) Discourse

copyright DailyPic @ flickr (http://flickr.com/photos/dailypic/)

We talk in education classes about a "discourse," or the idea that a community creates its own tailored language, complete with standard conventions, jargon, even inside jokes. Every group has a discourse: academia, Chicago south side urbanites, Big Island locals, Wall Street veterans, junior high science teachers, even the Northwestern University Marching Band, to name a few. Each group speaks a lexicon that is understood by its members, often to the exclusion of outsiders. (NUMB makes a rather strong case, actually.)

One of the goals of education, specifically when teaching writing, is to introduce students to many different kinds of discourses. The hope is that we go beyond what the student already knows and literally expand their world by showing them the lenses belonging to people who are different from them. Usually this begins with the simple task of making sure everyone is on the same page with standard English -- and often that's where we sputter. A communication barrier exists between a student and a teacher that cannot speak the same language, or cannot recognize what creates the differences. That's where creative and compassionate teaching comes in.

But there is so much to teach. We want students of language to appreciate the many ways that language is used, from stuffy academic journals to newspaper articles to cryptic blogs to Facebook wall posts to grocery lists. We want them to know why and how all of this content is created and used; who's doing it and for what reasons. Literacy -- fluency in a discourse -- cannot exist without that understanding of audience, purpose and especially subject.

My latest attempt at learning a new discourse is Twitter. I was familiar with the basic premise -- 140 character max, the concept and usage of the "re-tweet," even the many opportunities for #hashtaghumor. As a n00b of the discourse, I've tread carefully -- I don't want to look silly in front of my new pals, or new connections to old pals. I've learned that pushing the "re-tweet" button, for example, does not allow you to add your own comment; to do so, you have to copy-paste, throw in an @[source of original Tweet], and so forth. These things become natural to us the more we participate in a given discourse. In no time, I'll be throwing hash tags around like nobody's business, holding inherently disjointed conversations with my fellow Tweeters (Twitterers? Twitters? Twits? I still have things to learn).

The hardest part, really, is taking the leap and attempting to join a new community. The learning curve can be intimidating, the fear of failure or embarrassment paralyzing. It's one of the reasons that it's so hard to get students unfamiliar with the academic discourse to trust that they can handle the material. If the community they come from doesn't value canonical authors, the likelihood that the student will care about James Joyce or Shakespeare is pretty much nil. They're irrelevant, even trivial, in the practical life of the student. And it's hard to learn a new discourse -- there's always the fear of not passing, of your peers and teachers seeing through your act and knowing you're a phony.

I finally understand why some of my teachers were so great, and some so disappointing.

This non-traditional, five-paragraph (plus a stinger) essay brought to you by almost 20 years of sometimes great, sometimes terrible, sometimes public, sometimes private, often dull, always under-funded schooling.

Irony, thy name is Writer's Block

Damn you, Dennis Miller.

Chicago, That Toddlin' Town

Chicago skyline, circa summer 2009

Every day I am reminded how much I love living in Chicago. I feel like I have an obligation to live other places at some point in my life, just for experiences' sake, but I'm in no rush to leave. Bethany will kill me if I don't eventually move to Manhattan; we'll see how it goes.

For now, at least, Chicago is my hometown.

It's Weezer Thursday!

The babbling just kills me.

Also, check out the hair on Rivers. So 1994. Maybe it's the geek chic thing, but I definitely prefer his current look.

Caving to the Twitterverse

Narcissism incarnate.

I was working as an intern at PC Magazine when Twitter really took hold of the media in 2007. Almost everyone around me that was hip and technologically savvy -- so, you know, pretty much everyone at Ziff Davis -- jumped on the bandwagon. I did not.

I was a naysayer, a non-believer. Everything was moving too fast for me to keep up. It was a trend, a fad, a way for narcissists to project more of themselves into the world, regardless of whether we want to read about their every thought or breakfast decision. It'd go away once people realized that it was basically useless, a haven for the self-obsessed. Does this sound familiar?

Well, I underestimated American society. And, also, I was wrong.

Twitter is a great tool, particularly for a journalist. Writers spend the time we aren't writing wondering whether anyone is reading what we're writing, and scheming new ways to catch new and more eyes, to create some reverberation in the massive expanse of the media void. It operates on the same premise as Facebook in that it's completely composed of what people put into it of themselves. And what we've put into it -- breaking news, pop culture, cupcake trucks -- is astounding. Twitter may have started as an overshare device, but it's becoming a cultural necessity.

As I embark on a concerted effort to get published more regularly as a freelance writer, my plan is to use Twitter as a professional resource, an RSS feed of links and (hopefully coherent, relevant and engaging) thoughts. I will forever be overshadowed by Kanye West, but hey, follow me @britpetersen. I could use the company.

How might one wrap a heart in clover, and for what purpose?

My love of old music started early. This song would be the unequivocal winner if I were ever held at gunpoint and forced to choose the best recording ever made. Let's hope that never happens, but it's nice to know that I'm prepared for anything.

Happy Valentine's Day! (Or, per your preference, Singles Awareness Day.)