Sampling Girl Talk

Author: Will Hunt



"Girl Talk's Gregg Gillis chats about the music behind the music. Interview conducted by Radio Arts Middlebury."

When Gregg Gillis, a.k.a. Girl Talk, walked onto the McCullough stage on Friday concert, he looked more like a dorky A.V. room kid tinkering with sound levels than the pop sensation famous for igniting dance parties the world over. Of course, the gawky, lank-haired artist did not go unrecognized by the McCullough faithful, who brought him onstage with chants of "Gregg, Gregg, Gregg!" and erupted as he emerged. As soon as he had revved up his laptop and sent the first dance beat over the P.A., there was no questioning the artist's reputation as a party-starter. Over 500 screaming students, drenched in sweat long before Gillis even appeared, crushed against the front of the stage. Above the crowd, Gillis jumped up and down, jackknifing his body to the beat before flinging himself off the stage to surf the hands of the crowd. No sooner had he returned to his laptop station than the first wave of the crowd rushed the barricades, flooding in from the sides of the stage to bump and gyrate alongside the artist.

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This raucous free-for-all of an opening set the tone for the next two hours. Gillis told the crowd he was ready to start some "Friday night college fun," and he delivered. Not that this was a surprise - Girl Talk is all about having a good time. The music that had hands clapping, pelvises thrusting and hormones raging until midnight in the sauna-like Social Space was pop music at its finest - and most ridiculous.

The night's playlist, which mostly consisted of tracks from Girl Talk's 2006 breakthrough album, Night Ripper, was a series of mashups, or musical collages of recognizable pop songs. Of the 150 sample sources on Night Ripper, you will find everything from James Taylor to grunge anthems (Nirvana) to the ring-tone rap song of the week (Young Jeezy). The Pittsburgh-based Girl Talk has become an international sensation (Middlebury was his first stop in the U.S. after a month-long tour overseas), all for exploding the now-popular concept of the mashup. In his concoctions-as-songs, it is all about timing: he loops a sample of a famous catchy track just long enough for the crowd to recognize it, scream and bust a few energized dance moves. Then, before the song gets too familiar, he cuts to the next sample. Each track is layered in a way that allows for the ridiculous and ironic "retexturizations" - Gillis' word - of which Girl Talk is a master. Nothing beats hearing Biggie Smalls rapping about his "red and black lumberjack" over Elton John's piano in "Tiny Dancer." Each of these sewed-together, mutant tracks is an ADD-friendly circus of pop culture that makes you want to dance your ass off, and laugh as you do it.

Last Friday night was no exception to the hilarity. A significant number of crowd members were on stage, making spectacles of themselves, writhing their sweaty hips, opening their mouths wantonly like zoom-in subjects in a music video. The rest of the crowd was on floor-level: some danced vigorously with that night's hook-up, others watched the stage, wondering how inappropriate it would be to slip a dollar bill in the strap of someone's high heel, while still others fought the bouncers to get onstage for their own shot in the orgy spotlight.

As much fun as this was, the dance party melee did come with a compromise: after that crowd-surf in the first few bars of the first song, Girl Talk all but disappeared in the crowd, along with any notion of a "performance.' If not for the proliferation of Red Bull cans (the night's sponsor), and the 10-dollar ticket, at moments we could have been at the Bunker dancing to WRMC DJ Bobby Pre-Teen's personal copy of Night Ripper on repeat. In the end, though, it did not matter. Girl Talk may have been swallowed-up by the crowd on stage (either playing Tetris or receiving a sexual favor, according to conflicting rumors), but channeled in the audience was all that makes his music good - excess, fun and irony.