The Wild, The Innocent, The TV Shuffle is the debut album for San Diego duo TV Girl. But it's being called a mixtape, due largely to the fact that it's assembled almost entirely from the "nebulously legal" practice of sampling. TV Girl made their name by a song, "If You Want It," that rather brazenly lifted a large Todd Rundgren sample, and that holds throughout their free-to-have mixtape.TV Girl aren't coming at samples from your standard hip-hop crate-diggers angle, but from a far more inspired, 2010s specific one. When confronted with the deluge of pop-cultural stimulus that pours from computers every second of every day, sampling becomes a necessary daily skill, a coping-mechanism that helps us make sense of all that's coming at us.
"There aren't enough television shows or songs on radio to keep me distracted," sings either Trung Ngo and Brad Petering —biographical and technical details are very thin on the ground thus far— as a symbol of just how lovelorned the narrator is mid-"Keep Me Distracted"; the idea that anyone could find a lack of television or music circa 2012 being utterly absurd.
The duo use television as a symbol of the constant noise of contemporary life: their band name a commentary on the modern day; The TV Shuffle that feeling of constant flicking between entertainments in search of something, anything. They flick through samples like a wandering channel surfer, endlessly restless and happy to mash up genres. And they even invite the "TV in the Bedroom," singing "I don't know what's real or dream" as bedroom gymnastics reflect the sex acts on the television, and every night you drift off to sleep to the soft blue light of the screen.
TV Girl, The Wild, The Innocent, The TV Shuffle
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