Waxy.org is the sandbox of Last month, I dissected Girl Talk's Feed the Animals using the list of samples lovingly collected by hundreds of Wikipedia users. But that was totally unofficial, a crowdsourced attempt to find musical needles in a giant mashup haystack.
Well, the official CDs were shipped out last week to everyone who donated more than $10. Inside, as promised, was the official sample list — a one-page insert with every single sample on the album. Steve Heil was the first to scan it and contact me.
Unfortunately, a huge block of printed small-caps text isn't very useful for my kind of fun, so I tried throwing into several OCR engines on WeOCR to turn the image into text. Tesseract gave the best results, but it was still a mess that needed quite a bit of cleanup.
Anyway, here it is. The complete list of all 322 samples in Girl Talk's Feed the Animals, available as a CSV, Excel, or Google Spreadsheets document.
So how did the fans do, compared to the official list? Out of 322 samples, Wikipedia users found 242 of them (about 75%), leaving 80 songs unidentified. Here's a list of the samples they didn't find, at the point my snapshot was taken last month. (Several more were identified since then, or after this entry was posted.) Also available as a CSV, Excel, or Google Spreadsheet.
There were also 22 songs listed on the Wikipedia sample list that weren't on the official list. Some of these are simple mistakes caused by similar-sounding clips, but several are samples that appeared in two different songs, like Len's "Steal My Sunshine" which sampled "More, More, More" by The Andrea True Connection. (It's also possible Gregg Gillis himself forgot he sampled songs that Wikipedia users found, like the unknown DJ Funk snippet he talks about in the Wired article.)
Also, I added a new field to my original spreadsheet, showing whether the sample listed appeared on the official list. We might never be able to match the unidentified samples with their songs without Gregg's help, since the samples could be as short as a single beat.
If you want to help, feel free to send in your changes or updates and I'll amend my spreadsheets. Thanks!
4:02 AM
Donnie Iris, and the Jaggerz -- Girl Talk slips in some of his Pittsburgh roots!
6:33 AM
Shouldn't you be paying some Turks to type it up for you? Oh, and thanks for reminding me this exists--I downloaded it for $0, planning to pay if I liked it, then saw something shiny…
10:32 AM
Well done!
10:42 AM
Nice job once again, Andy!!
I am going to print out the 'undiscovered' list and keep it handy for when I rock out to FTA in the near future. I just _know_ I remember noting at least one or two songs to myself when I heard them while listening since its release. One that stands out is 'Wishing Well' by Terence Trent D'arby.
Hmmm...I know that Gregg is somewhat of a nerd himself...I wonder if we could get this to him at some point and ask for his help on the ones he can definitely remember? :)
10:49 AM
Maybe we can get this guy to help out:
http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_releases/beatles_unknown_hard_days_night_chord_mystery_solved_using_fourier_transform?
9:28 PM
I just got my CD in the mail today after months of waiting. Plus, I'm going to see him at a show on the 5th...
Don't know how some of those songs went undiscovered- Ass'n'titties and hotstepper were both pretty prominent and well known songs
12:03 PM
great job! i definitely think this could be useful for wikipedia as well but i've just noticed you've put (c) on the image. why dont you license the image CC and upload it on wikipedia linking it to your flicker as reference? thx
5:53 PM
i would LOVE to know what the songs are in the order they are played. i know many of them are concurrent of course. alphabetical, while interesting, doesn't help me answer any of my "what song comes after that one song?!" questions. can anyone help? thanks!!!!!!
5:28 PM
1:40 into 'Hands in the Air' is 'Sunday Morning' from The Velvet Underground & Nico
GIRL TALK!
5:42 PM
The Wikipedia entry is the definitive track-by-track list of samples, which seems to have incorporated all the changes from the official sample list.
4:53 PM
I didn't even know that was there. I just looked behind the front cover and look at what I found!
6:56 PM
could you tell me how to get the Girl Talk Feed the Animals cd...I is it only available b;y downloading? Please advise.
thanks
6:11 AM
Good interview with Girl Talk...er, Gregg...in local paper today if anyone is interested:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08325/929213-42.stm
9:11 PM
im a huge girl talk fan, as im guessing you guys are. If you want to show gregg this stuff, he might already have seen it, but if you want to show him this newest stuff and ask him for help Id bet he'd do it. Just go to his myspace and message him, ive done it a few times and he always responds.
8:03 PM
Girl Talk listed "Johnny the Fox" as one of the samples, but it should correctly listed as "Johnny the Fox Meets Jimmy the Weed."
9:38 AM
Playing under the Jackson Five's "ABC" isn't "Bohemian Rhapsody". I'm almost certain it's My Chemical Romance's "The Black Parade" on "What It's All About".
10:08 AM
Very unlikely, since My Chemical Romance isn't on the official sample list.
1:22 PM
My son warned me to plan ahead for the listen, because I wouldn't want my attention divided, so I'd need to SIT and listen. I said Pfft! and dropped six bux on it.
To tell ya the truth, it made me weep. I recognize genius when I am in its presence. This is a work of such brilliance that it makes me glad to be part of the same species. I never knew you could get stoned offa music, but I am STILL HIGH.
Whew.
1:19 PM
FYI: Girl Talk is doing a private concert with Canon Powershot in NYC on 5/28/09. Tickets can only be won by entering a Spin magazine contest:
http://spin.com/gallery/submit-your-best-concert-photo-win-tickets-see-girl-talk-nyc
4:34 PM
I don't see the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows" on the list, but I definitely heard it. Unless a different artist covered the sample?