Girl Talk. With these two words came three radical ideas: the revival of the genre-melding style of dicing and splicing music, an artist inviting his fans to join him on stage and the venue-filling artist simply being on stage with his laptop.
However, the name Girl Talk came without an understanding of what the artist offers. In fact, Gregg Gillis, the man behind Girl Talk, said he intended for his stage name to emit a confusing perception.
“In picking the name Girl Talk, I definitely didn’t intend for it to be a nine-year project that would eventually become my career or anything like that,” Gillis said. “I kind of wanted to pick a name that sounded the opposite of a guy playing a computer – a name that was kind of flamboyant, sounded almost like a Disney girl group – almost on purpose to challenge the contemporary, almost to make them embarrassed to be on the same bill as me.”
The 28-year-old Pittsburgh-native started Girl Talk right out of college in 2000.
“I started up when I was 18, right out of college about this time of year. In high school I fiddled around with sampling and electronic music, definitely related to what I’m doing now but a lot of experimental, and over the years it’s kind of evolved into what it is now,” he said.
With the mashup style being a fairly new perspective on music, Gillis did not have a great amount of footsteps in which to follow. But luckily, with the ’60s and ’70s came pioneers like “Plunderphonics” creator John Oswald and experimental-music band Negativland. Gillis also considers the more recent electronic musician Kid 606 one of the main reasons he got involved in doing what he does.
So how does Gillis compare his music to other forms of art?
He said fellow Pittsburg brother Andy Warhol was a great influence on him, with his artistic ideas being instilled in him at a young age in art classes.
Much like the way Warhol’s pop art changed the way people view everyday items, Gillis’s creations – made by taking everyday music heard in grocery stores, shopping malls and radio stations, spanning from Top 40 to hip-hop – are changing people’s perceptions on many levels.
“It’s definitely a similar idea [to what Warhol did]- appropriating pop music, putting it in a new context and challenging what people know about what can be considered art, or what can be considered music or what can be considered original,” he said.
Girl Talk has released four albums to date through the label Illegal Art, releasing his debut Secret Diary, in 2002 and his latest, Feed the Animals, in 2008. Feed the Animals was ranked #24 in Rolling Stone’s Top 50 Albums of 2008, number four on Time magazine’s Top 10 Albums of 2008 and Blender magazine placed the album at No. 2 of the top-33 albums of 2008.
Fans of the albums who have not had the chance to attend a Girl Talk show can expect a concert possibly incomparable to anything they have ever attended.
Past shows have involved Gillis floating through the crowd on an inflatable raft, crowds toilet-papering the stage and the more typical shows have fans on stage thrashing around a sweaty, half-naked Gillis with the rest of the crowd bouncing around beach balls and swinging glow sticks. When something is this bizarre, the behind-the-scenes preparation is hardly chaos.
“On the musical end of things, it’s actually very nerdy and precise,” he said. “If we’re doing a course of an hour show, I might drop between 300 to 400 samples. I trigger all the samples in real time, but the arrangements are pre-thought out – just stuff I rehearse and practice. I change up small little pieces every show. Some elements of the show might stick around for four months straight.”
Gillis said he still gets nervous to a certain degree no matter the crowd size. Sometimes he said the number of people in attendance does not even register with him until the show is over. After that, he is surprised he actually survived.
Many artists would probably be highly distracted in Gillis’s position with the amount of people hovering around, but the chaos of his concerts hardly phases how he performs.
“It’s me clicking on boxes which will trigger a vocal sample or a loop of a piano so a lot of that material is just memorized because I do it so often, and I work on it every day of my life and I play shows every weekend,” he said. “A lot of the time, the chaos is surrounding me, and it’s kind of insanity from front to back – from people on stage and people in the audience. But the actual process of triggering samples is something that has just become so common to me.”
The fall concert on Oct. 8 will be Girl Talk’s second show in Mississippi with the first being at The Lyric in Oxford. And even though two weekends ago he attracted 8,000 people to his free concert in Brooklyn, N.Y,, he still enjoys playing smaller shows.
“It’s very nice to play a smaller club, you play Manhattan and then it’s nice to get to Mississippi and create that balance,” he said.
He also looks forward to the concert having a general admission section.
“Sometimes the non-general admission seating can make things a bit too organized to let people get really out of control dance sort of event,” he said.
Also on the bill with Girl Talk is fellow Illegal Art recording artist Deepak Mantena, better known by his recording name Junk Culture.
“The Junk Culture album was up my alley as far as his style of electronic music,” Gillis said.
They will perform together in the weeks prior to the fall concert, and Gillis is looking forward it.
“It seems like a good fit,” he said.
As for the burning question of copyright infringement issues associated with Girl Talk’s work, Gillis does not view it as a problem.
“I believe in what I’m doing; I definitely believe it should be legal,” he said. “I don’t think we should be sued, I don’t think a lot of people that have had issues should have had issues. I can never say that we are in the clear though. If someone has a issue with what I’m doing, they have their argument and we have ours.”
And for the fans who have seen Girl Talk perform on numerous occasions, you might have noticed he tends to switch from the clean-shaven, short hair look to the full beard and long locks look.
He claims he cuts his hair once every two years and shaves his beard approximately once a month, so those planning to attend the concert on Oct. 8 are left with the lingering question of how he will look. They say waiting is the hardest part so grab a calendar and start the countdown – 34 days to go.