Photo by J Caldwell

What Ch’you Talking About?

By Diane Miller
Music Editor

Coming to the Venue October 8th, not only will we get the chance to experience music that is truly futuristic, we will also get the chance to join one big party with music being played that almost everyone will know. Imagine for a minute being back in the 90’s and you hear that Elliott Smith were to be collaborating music with the Spice Girls. Well… it definitely could never have happened… even in our wildest dreams. In fact, who on earth would even consider listening to it? At the same time, one might be curious to hear what it sounds like. Gregg Gillis of Girl Talk was one of those curious people.

Girl Talk takes popular music and organizes it into ways that on the surface make no sense whatsoever. For example, it seems strange to mix some of the dirtiest sounding hip hop with artists such as Bruce Springsteen. Because of culture differences, most rappers would not even consider creating their music to sound the way Girl Talk makes it sound. Because of technology and the fair use doctrine underneath the United States copyright law, boundaries for how music should sound are now being pushed further back.

Girl Talk is comprised of one mastermind – Gregg Gillis. Gillis creates his work though his laptop using array loops and samples of actual pre-recorded songs. He does not do much to alter the sound of the sample, but the song as a whole is altered because of what kind of music it gets lined up with. On the surface it may seem as simple as pushing buttons to form art, but because of the rhythm and timing of each different song and also the number of samples he uses, it makes it a more complicated process. During a show he may have up to 400 samples to work with, on top of having to memorize the succession of how the song is supposed to be drawn out. This is one of the main reasons it takes Gillis over 2 years to finish an album.

Girl Talk is smart. Gillis picks and chooses the best parts of the best pop songs across decades of music and mashes them together. He caters to what people want to hear at parties and at shows – high energy, catchy music that everyone will know. What is so unique about his music is that he combines completely opposite stylistic songs into one. We have seen and heard this done before. For example, hip hop music collects samples from rock music all the time – Run DMC borrowed “My Sharona” from the Kinks in order to create “It’s Tricky”, Jay-Z “collided” with Linkin’ Park, and most recently Fugazi and the Wu Tang Clan have been matched together to create Wugazi. Girl Talk goes one giant step further by using sample after sample of sounds all across the board in pop music. He allows himself no limitations.

One might wonder why Gregg Gillis chose a name such as Girl Talk to be referred to as. He has told the press that he wanted to come up with the exact opposite of what people would expect a guy making music behind a laptop to name himself. “I came from a more experimental background and there were some very overly serious, borderline academic type electronic musicians. I wanted to pick a name that they would be embarrassed to play with.”

The success of Girl Talk is absolutely huge for a solo electronic musician. Gillis has still to this day never played at a dance club or in a DJ booth; instead he performs at large sold out venues across the country. His album Feed the Animals was rated #4 on the Top 10 Albums of 2008 for Time magazine, and Rolling Stone gave the same album 4 stars. His latest record, All Day, featuring a whopping 371 samples, has everything from T-Pain to Van Halen to the Talking Heads. It is even available for a free download on the internet. –www.illegal-art.net/allday.

So what can you expect a show put on by Girl Talk to be like? It is one big party with visuals, props, lighting, balloons, confetti, toilet paper, and a vast array of fans waving their hands in the air and screaming for more. Gregg Gillis commands the wide open stage behind his computer creating his music live on stage while also catering to the crowd with his on-stage charisma and energy that travels from wall to wall.  He gives people their moneys worth by making the entire show an experience you will never forget.

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