My top ten tracks of 2008: #09 “What It’s All About,” Girl Talk

Sometimes a well-put-together piece of pop music wears its influences on its sleeve, other times it’s outright built from the same records wholesale. With a whopping 35 tracks sliced, trimmed, and crammed into its four-and-a-quarter-minutes length, it’s a testament to Greg Gillis’s skills as a listener as much as his abilities as a producer that “What It’s All About” holds together as well as it does. The man’s seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of the last 40 years of radio allows him to see juxtapositions and moments that would elude most people.

I’ve mentioned previously that I think of him as party music and don’t hold the Girl Talk project in the same vaunted “transformative art” position that many people do, but I’ll gladly put this on my top ten tracks list all the same.  It’s infectious, celebratory, and most of all, shamelessly pop.

For the curious, here’s a listing of every sample used, according to Wikipedia.

• 0:00 Beyoncé – “Ring the Alarm”
• 0:00 DJ Funk – “Here We Go”
• 0:00 Queen – “We Will Rock You”
• 0:05 Beastie Boys – “So What’cha Want”
• 0:18 Phil Collins – “In the Air Tonight”
• 0:20 Busta Rhymes – “Woo Hah!! Got You All in Check”
• 0:21 The Police – “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic”
• 0:40 The Cure – “Close To Me”
• 1:04 Ini Kamoze – “Here Comes The Hotstepper”
• 1:05 Wilson Pickett – “Land of a Thousand Dances”
• 1:33 Rotary Connection – “Memory Band”
• 1:35 Faith No More – “Epic”
• 1:35 Mike Jones featuring Hurricane Chris – “Drop and Gimme 50″
• 1:35 Kidz in the Hall – “Drivin’ Down The Block”
• 1:36 DJ Assault – “Ass ‘N’ Titties”
• 1:57 Junior Reid – “One Blood”
• 1:59 Boogie Down Productions – “Criminal Minded”
• 2:18 Yung Joc – “I Know You See It”
• 2:19 Paula Cole – “I Don’t Want to Wait”
• 2:19 Tones on Tail – “Go!”
• 2:24 Beanie Sigel – “Roc The Mic”
• 2:29 Argent – “Hold Your Head Up”
• 2:29 Wu-Tang Clan – “C.R.E.A.M.”
• 2:51 Terence Trent D’Arby – “Wishing Well”
• 3:12 N.W.A. – “Dopeman”
• 3:17 50 Cent – “What Up Gangsta”
• 3:17 Genesis – “Mama”
• 3:20 Bow Wow Wow – “I Want Candy”
• 3:24 Yeah Yeah Yeahs – “Gold Lion”
• 3:25 T.I. – “You Know What It Is”
• 3:30 Outkast – “Ms. Jackson”
• 3:32 Vanilla Ice – “Havin’ a Roni”
• 3:33 The Jackson 5 – “ABC”
• 3:33 Rihanna – “Umbrella”
• 3:53 Queen – “Bohemian Rhapsody”