One of my favorite days of the semester in my media literacy class is when we start talking about remix culture. Two of the central things we do is look at Girl Talk’s album All Day and the film Girl Walk / All Day that was based on it.
To launch our discussion, we started off with the first episode of Kirby Ferguson’s documentary series Everything is a Remix
Part 1: The Song Remains the Same
We followed that up with a discussion of D.J. Danger Mouse’s remix classic The Grey Album that mashes up Jay Z.’s Black Album (with his blessing) and The Beatles’ White Album (emphatically without their publisher’s blessing).
Moving on from there, we looked at the massive mashup that is Girl Talk’s album All Day, that features more than 400 samples in the 70+ minute long album. (You can get a great look at the complexity of this remix with the moving bar graph of the samples located here.)
Finally, we closed out today by seeing a couple segments from the Kickstarter supported dance film Girl Walk / All Day. The first clip sets up the basic plot of the film (such as it is) and the second one presents one of the best musical/dance combinations of the film.
Girl Walk // All Day: Chapter 1 from Girl Walk // All Day on Vimeo.
This is Chapter 3 – It Goes Like This
I want to say that I also learn something new every time I teach this class. I’ve been showing the series Everything is a Remix now for several years, but it just really registered on me that remixing is obviously a part of Truth 4 – Nothing’s New: Everything that happens in the past will happen again.