Girl Talk: Feeding Animals, Making Believers

By • Dec 1st, 2008 • Category: Features

A half-hour before Girl Talk’s performance at this year’s Lollapalooza, there’s a girl sitting within earshot of the stage, leaning against a small fence. As the size of the Sunday night crowd doubles – then triples – in anticipation for the laptop artist’s slot, she rests cross-legged about 50 yards from the speaker towers. For now, she’s still on the outskirts of the mob, text-messaging her friends who are elsewhere in Chicago’s Grant Park to decide whether to stay and watch an artist whom she’s only heard about or leave and claim an early spot for headliner Nine Inch Nails.

But by the time Gregg Gillis transforms himself from an unassuming former office employee into his Girl Talk persona, the girl and her little pocket of crowd-free space will be gone. The gyrating masses soon will number in the tens of thousands, reaching shoulder-to-shoulder well into the distance from the small side stage. The girl, however, won’t be among them. She’ll be dancing, certainly, but doing so onstage. The unsuspecting concert-goer will be one of about 50 fans randomly handed a wristband moments before the gig, granting them the best spots in the house.

As the 6:30 p.m. show begins – with a sample of UGK and OutKast’s Andre 3000 rapping over The Spencer Davis Group’s “Gimme Some Lovin’ ”– a girl, who literally was on the fence deciding whether to stay, now is a key component in one of the weekend’s most buzzed-about performances.

The choreographed chaos of that surprise, which was OK’d unbeknown to onsite Lollapalooza security members, is the same keep-’em-guessing formula exercised on this year’s Feed the Animals and Girl Talk’s 2006 LP, Night Ripper. Despite the music’s choppy disposition and stop-on-a-dime pace, it’s less of an anything-goes approach than it is an orchestrated riot of visual, audial, sensory theater. The more than 300 cut-and-pasted samples on his most recent LP were meticulously selected – much like the dancers and costume-clad stagehands at that August gig – during the course of two years and crafted amid an intense six-month editing session to create the give-and-take relationship that has come to define today’s Gillis.

“I love being in a small club where everyone is sweaty and I can touch every single human being. But when you’re playing in front of thousands of people, it becomes less dependant on that,” Gillis said. “At a lot of [club] shows, people are looking for you to make a connection, and I like to make that connection. But at festivals, they don’t really expect it. [Performers are] a bit more isolated. But at the same time, so many people can transcend that, and it can become a bigger party.”

Gillis would know; he’s had experience in both settings. Since his Illegal Art breakout release more than two years ago, the 26-year-old has been able to quit his job as a biomedical researcher in Pittsburgh and turn Girl Talk from a weekend side project into a worldwide phenomenon. With a reputation for shows that often end with a sweaty Gillis dressed in only his boxers and a headband to hold back his shoulder-length brown locks, he’s one of several full-body performers in the vein of acts such as The Show is the Rainbow and ex-tourmate Dan Deacon. Girl Talk shows are an interactive experience that first found the musician traveling the U.S. in small dance clubs and now is making him a part of the global festival circuit. The mash-up extraordinaire has lugged his prized computer the world over, and by doing so, he has mined Top 40 radio across continents to remix and reconstruct songs, assembling them into his original material.

But his style of music – reworking the sounds of others – isn’t without its detractors. While Gillis appears almost boastful when mentioning that he hasn’t faced any copyright lawsuits, he sounds equally serious when quipping that this generation’s “Rock ‘N’ Roll Starter Kit” should include footnotes on the “fair use” clause from the U.S. Copyright Office. It’s a clause that Gillis and his ironically named label must pay close attention to when deconstructing clips for Girl Talk. The clause states that, among other things, audio is subject to re-use based on the length sampled compared with the length of the parent material, as well as whether the repositioned work will have a negative financial affect on the original.

“Through sampling, you can manipulate [songs] in any way – just like you can manipulate any sound of music with a guitar,” Gillis said of his ability to remix and fuse notes together. “You can take a guitar and do anything you want with it. You can take a Beatles song and make it into a rap song or make it into a country song. You can do what you want with it. With technology, you can manipulate it to be nothing like the original.”

Somewhere between a DJ who builds electronic music from scratch and a human jukebox who soundtracks parties by playing songs in their entireties, Gillis aligns himself with the likes of DJ Shadow – who holds the Guinness World Record for creating the first album entirely constructed from pre-recorded material. It’s this embrace of technology that saw Gillis release Feed the Animals in June using the “Radiohead model,” allowing users to download the album and name their own price.

“It is very technology-driven, but there are some old-school assets to it,” Gillis said of feeling a tad hypocritical if he did not utilize the most tech-savvy way of releasing the LP. “Specifically, putting out an album in general that is a whole album – a 50-minute piece of music that you have to listen to in one setting – is very anti- the current trend in technology where it’s all about the singles. I put together an album that has people talking about this ADD culture, and people say my music is reflective of society’s short attention spans. But at the same time, it’s forcing people to listen to a big piece of music in a way that maybe they haven’t done in a long time.”

He’s right in that neither Night Ripper nor Feed the Animals is meant for single servings, in spite of naming the individual tracks. With albums that play like an “Eye Spy” for music geeks, the short blips reveal a whopping dose of mainstream tunes with nary an obscure sample, despite culling multiple genres from several decades. It’s why even the back row of the Lollapalooza audience danced just as hard as the girl onstage and why people who attended the festival for Kanye West and Lupe Fiasco danced alongside people who came for Blues Traveler and Wilco. It’s as though Gillis is fully aware that his music is a networking tool by which he can meet every person in a room.

And just like a good businessman who knows that if he talks to people about themselves long enough, they’ll in return never forget him, Gillis uses his music as conversation. But he can’t sit down with each member of the audience; instead, he makes them feel comfortable through a steady dose of songs that they already know and love. It’s why he’ll sample Radiohead, Jay-Z, Nirvana, and Twisted Sister instead of many of the hipster acts that he so often shares concert bills with.

“Like with any band, you have to put up your limits and say, ‘This is the type of music we’re going to play,’ ” said Gillis, who remembers a time in high school when he saw Otomo Yoshihide and the Spice Girls in the same week. “A lot of the time, people give me CDs that I’m probably not ever going to sample. I love seeing acts like Battles or Jamie Lidell, but that doesn’t really work with the type of music I want to make.”

That music comes at a time when the industry is in flux, something that isn’t lost during the downloading process of Feed the Animals. After users enter their proposed price for the 14-song album, they are given choices to explain why they offered to pay the given amount. The options range from sarcastic ones, such as, “I don’t really like Girl Talk,” to cynical reasons, such as, “I am a part of the press, radio, or music industry.” Yet a few of the options – “I don’t believe in paying for music” and “I don’t value music made form sampling” – show Gillis’ awareness that his is an uphill quest for respect and that some might view his trade as less than legitimate.

It’s a viewpoint that began in the late 1990s with Napster, which recently was bought by Best Buy for more than $121 million in hopes of saving what once was an Internet powerhouse. That digital music debate has carried on through iTunes, Oink, Rhapsody and the recently launched MySpace Music. Both legal and illegal Web sites have played public roles in the ever-shrinking world of hard copies, and Gillis finds Girl Talk smack dab in the thick of that evolution.

“People are getting used to the CD dying and digital music becoming normal. People are a lot more used to there being a dialogue between the artist and the consumer other than just giving them a product,” Gillis said of the changing ways music is sold and distributed. “Hearing music has lots of value – emotionally, socially. You just don’t have to pay for it. The actual song doesn’t actually hold value anymore. Previously, if you’d hear a song on the radio and wanted to hear it again, you’d have to go out and pay for it. If you used that sample, it was valuable because you had to use your own money to get it. But now, in 2008, when you can hear anything for free, actually hearing the music doesn’t really hold monetary value.”

On albums, maybe. Live, however, the tickets still cost money, and people at festivals such as Lollapalooza are turning over a pretty penny to see Girl Talk sets. It’s why Gillis puts as much effort into micromanaging his LPs as he does turning his concerts into extravagant and free-flowing affairs. The Lollapalooza stop was just one in a series of fluctuating and increasingly hectic tour dates, which have seen him visit just Chicago on at least three occasions in 18 months, each time expounding on his previous routine. This summer’s festival featured gigantic “G” and “T” balloons and Gillis surfing the crowd in a raft. It came almost a year to the day after a spectacular Windy City stint at The Pitchfork Music Festival, which was a half-year on the heels of a sparkler-waving, costume party at the city’s Empty Bottle club on New Year’s Eve. It’s as though Gillis understands that he’ll never be as young as he is at this moment, and he wants to make damn sure he acts like it – while also being aware of the responsibilities that come with being an entertainer.

“I get very self-conscious about playing live. People think I just get up there and press play. But I mix it all live, and it can be tough. When Night Ripper came out, it took a few months to catch on. By the time everyone heard it, I had been working on new stuff. But with Feed the Animals, everyone heard it the day I finished it. So at the shows the next weekend, that’s the newest material I had,” Gillis said on how his albums translate to live performances. “It’s like how people are selling music through ‘Rock Band’ and ‘Guitar Hero.’ That music is being used there, and people are interacting and pretty much remixing those songs themselves by playing along. They are interacting to music the same way I’m interacting to music. So when I play live – in a weird way – it’s just an extension of what these people are doing at home on their own.”

For Gillis, it’s clear that serving as that extension between other artists’ music and his own fans requires a familiar first impression – whether that’s on an LP at home, or with them dancing on stage in front of tens of thousands of strangers.

Soundcheck Magazine, December 2008

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