Something Special (Installment 3): Girl Talk's new album "All Day" for Free

If you've never heard of Girl Talk, that just means you're a perfectly normal person.  But once you sample his music, itself an incredible collection of musical sampling, you'll wonder how you ever cruised on a summer day or partied without him.  You'll recognize most of the tracks he mashes (fuses?  mixes?  crochets?  there's no word for what he's doing here, but it's sublime) together, but there are also plenty of samples you've never heard, most likely by artists you've never heard of.  It makes for a fun listen, and given that even The pop-culture filing cabinet that is The AV Club admits in their review that they can't name everything sampled on Girl Talk's albums, it's practically a pre-packaged trivia and drinking game of an album for music lovers and snobs (trust me, I'm both).  That's really only half the fun, however--the real fun is hearing Jay-Z lace the track over top of Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" and then three minutes later listen in slack-jawed awe as it all melts seamlessly into a medley of 80's tracks with vocals provided by the Beatles.  Those are all fictional examples, but every track of this album is so intricate that each of them probably occurs somewhere on the album.

By providing his latest album as a free download, Girl Talk continues the trend embraced by Radiohead and a handful of others of defying the traditional artist-music-user interfaces (I think it's fair to say at this point that iTunes has become a traditional practice).  It's nothing that's lighting the world on fire, but given the rise of exploratory music sites like Last.FM, Pandora, Grooveshark which allow users to listen extensively to to a band before (or let's be honest, instead of) purchasing their music, it's interesting to see that many artists are embracing the idea of cutting out the "middle man" and just delivering their art directly to its audience.  Not even Radiohead is going to topple a monolith like iTunes, let alone Girl Talk, but if you don't think companies like Apple or Best Buy are concerned about losing music buyers to these types of user-empowering internet music sources, then heed the lesson of LaLa, an indie music darling of a website which was purchased by Apple a little over a year ago...and was immediately shut down by said parent company, which never had any intention of continuing to provide its music service to the users who adored and raved about the site.

But that's all political talk, I guess.  The bottom line is, with the click of a couple buttons you can have a phenomenal album on your computer (and it will play in iTunes and on your iPod) for free and without breaking any laws.  Enjoy:
get some juicy Girl Talk HERE