Listening to Girl Talk is like playing competitive chess
Is anyone else physically exhausted by the new Girl Talk album Feed The Animals? I’ve been listening to it for 72 hours and I feel like I’ve just run 72 miles, or eaten 72 ounces of steak. I find listening to it to be much like playing competitive chess; it requires the same sort of close attention, and it produces the same sort of surprising(*) and rewarding fatigue. It’s so good I need to lie down.
For the record, here’s a list of songs sampled on the album: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_the_Animals
(*) At least, I find it surprising that mental exertion can produce the same sort of exhaustion as physical exertion. I’m always shocked(**) by the human body’s equivalence between mental energy and physical energy.
(**) I admit that I shouldn’t find this equivalence that surprising, given that both mental and physical work are exactly that, i.e., work, i.e., Joules, and given that I’ve never been particularly fazed by other, less plausible equivalences, like Einstein’s equivalence between mass and energy, two quantities that don’t even have the same units, for god’s sake. But the fact remains that I am less surprised by general relativity than by the feeling of tiredness I get from thinking hard.