Catchiest Album of All Time?

Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals may be the catchiest workout/dance album of all time.  It’s almost an unfair contest, in relation to normal music, since the GT guy just steals the catchiest hooks from pop music of the last few decades and (brilliantly) splices and sutures them together so it all functions as an apotheosis of the form of the mixtape.  I liked the last album but found it comparatively resistible compared to this one, which is unceasingly fun, smart and hooky.  When I put it on, it had C&I shaking their booties on the dance living-room floor within seconds, but some of the lyrics are not so appropriate for the Pre-K set so I had to take it off.

Each track contains a dozen or more samples — some of my favorite mashups include:

Soulja Boy “Crank That” + AC/DC “Thunderstruck” + Journey “Faithfully”

Pink “U and UR Hand” + Underworld “Born Slippy” + the Cure “In Between Days” + Thin Lizzy “Jailbreak”

R. Kelly “I’m a Flirt” + Fleetwood Mac “Gypsy” + M.I.A “Boyz” + Rock Ross “Hustlin” + David Bowie “Rebel Rebel”

Tag Team “Whoomp! (There it Is)” + Big Country “In a Big Country” + the Velvet Underground “Sunday Morning” + the Cardigans “Lovefool” + Edgar Winter Band “Free Ride” + Timbaland “The Way I Are”

Yo La Tengo “Autumn Sweater” + Metallica “One” + Carpenters “Superstar” + Lil Mama “Lip Gloss”

There’s a particular wit produced by the combination/integration of some of the whitest music of all time (e.g. the Velvet Underground, the Cardigans, Yo La Tengo, the Carpenters, Journey, etc.) with recent hip-hop.  [There’s an implicit joke made about this, I think, in the Procol Harum “Whiter Shade of Pale” + Blackstreet “No Diggity” mix.]  I was listening to it on the elliptical machine yesterday morning, surrounded by sloowly exercising retirees while watching Sanford and Son without sound on the Y television, which added an extra frisson of je ne sais quoi.  (The plot had something to do with Redd Foxx bringing home a bunch of seemingly homeless men who grabbed sandwiches from the kitchen table — did not really understand what was going on but was impressed by the grittiness.)

You can get the album here on emusic.  (Email me if you’d like an “invitation” to try Emusic which gets both you and me 50 free downloads, or I guess I only get them if you stick with it for more than a month.) I think it’s also free on the Illegal Art webpage.