Shut Up and Dance

The Clipped Phrases of the Cut-and-Paste King

originally published March 26, 2008

Flagpole

There's a concept called "DJ's disease." It's the condition that DJs get into wherein they can't sit back and listen to music - their brains are trained to pick it apart and mine it for possible samples - and it wears them out. Do you have this? If so, can you describe, in your own words, what it's like?

Gregg Gillis

I'm not a DJ and am disease-free.

Gregg Gillis introduced “Girl Talk,” a restless, clever, obsessive pop collage project, six years ago. The first Girl Talk LP, 2002’s comparatively primitive Secret Diary, manipulated several decades’ worth of hits through digital signal processing (DSP), adding a few new grunts, glitches and hums. That album had little rhythm, often sounded like a wounded CD, and was about as danceable as Frank Zappa’s Lumpy Gravy. More accurately, it echoed John Oswald’s headache-inducing Plunderphonics, and although it lacked Oswald’s precision and grandiosity, it bore a unique sense of humor, soaked in pop culture and sensitive to revealing juxtaposition.

That sense of humor has served Gillis well, as his more recent output (2004’s Unstoppable and 2006’s Night Ripper) has grown heavier, more propulsive and about a billion times catchier. A dizzying, attention-deficient dial-scan that welds Ying Yang Twins to The Verve, puts the Notorious B.I.G.’s vocals over a sped-up “Tiny Dancer,” and changes the subject before your foot can start tapping, Night Ripper became the ubiquitous party record of ’06, beloved by spastic club kids and jaded ironists alike. By cutting pop songs to their hooks, Girl Talk provides a fleeting, disorienting rush. By throwing lewd rap choruses on top of sappy AM gold and running R&B ballads into walls of digital distortion, he somehow makes all of his source material more approachable. If pop music is cocaine, Girl Talk is crack.

His most pronounced critics generally don’t care for pop music much. But even to those who find little of lasting value in his continuity-impaired mixes, Gillis is, technically, one of the leaders in his field.

Now that he’s thickened his beats and found his niche, Gillis is releasing more Girl Talk material than ever. His label, Illegal Art, provides an exclusive download service, offering new GT tracks upon completion. He shares the series with established labelmates such as Evolution Control Committee, who’ve been engaged in creative aural piracy for decades and may find a new audience through Girl Talk’s crossover success. Gillis tours and collaborates regularly.

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When Girl Talk hit the scene, music-making software had become so user-friendly and affordable that hundreds of “laptop musicians,” nasal G4 balladeers with no hooks and no charisma, were boring audiences to conniptions across the nation. Girl Talk’s live shows are, in part, a reaction to the diffident pathos of desktop indie pop. Along with Gillis’ brainy dance music, they provide the decadent excitement of glam rock – Gillis dances like a maniac, often removes his shirt and has been said to strip entirely, and his audience often does likewise. Even if it’s sometimes taken as a postmodern joke, Gillis is excited about what he does, more excited than most straight-up rockers. And a few of his fans have discovered that the exaggerated theatrics that they’ve been conditioned to “appreciate” with a smirk can just as easily be loved for real. The stats are unreliable, but Girl Talk has certainly gotten nerds laid.

Considering he creates new music from copyrighted material, and his work exists in an intriguing legal limbo, you might expect Gregg Gillis to have some heavy opinions on artistic appropriation, intellectual property, or something. After all, most of the remarkable innovation in the last two decades’ worth of pop music has involved sampling, and it’s increasingly demonized by a fear-driven recording industry. Negativland, Girl Talk’s forebears in cheeky recycling, spend as much time talking about their work as they do producing it. Crate-diggers are the dominant cultural force, dominating sales, culture and critical discourse. Surely Gillis has something to say about all this.

He doesn’t. And, if I may project, he would probably think you were a hopeless dork if you asked. As an interview subject, Gillis is a laconic ass-pain, a blunt, high-status joker who half-assed Flagpole’s emailed inquiries with nonchalant hipster detachment.

"Where do you think the music business is headed?" I ask. "No more mystery," is his short response. "How would you describe your sense of humor?" I ask. "Perfect," says Gillis.

Perhaps he was distracted – he was in Europe at the time, and couldn’t/ wouldn’t schedule a phoner, and email interviews are always the pits, anyway, for people who’ve never traded on their writing ability. Perhaps he considers his own work more “fun” than “interesting” - he insists that he works from a sincere love for pop, not from Negativland-ish anti-capitalist revenge fantasies. But he’s no one’s public intellectual, that’s for damned sure. And if you expect artists to serve as public intellectuals, then maybe you are kind of a dork.

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Girl Talk emerged over time, through a series of aggressive pranks. Gillis formed his vision in Pittsburgh, and participated in that hilly hamlet’s noise underground for years before he made his name. He once played in an extremist improv outfit called The Joysticks (neglected in his official bio, but memorialized on a ghetto-ass Tripod site for the long-defunct OOBS Records). According to his contemporaries, Gillis set things on fire. He antagonized his audiences and threw chairs at them. He blasted Enya tapes on stage. He was a performance artist. He hosted a slumber party where he subjected guests to the entire Olsen Twins oeuvre.

At some point, he released a damaged copy of Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy through OOBS, and the future came into focus. His interest shifted toward electronic music. “He started Girl Talk,” says one erstwhile collaborator, “which was sort of equivalent to the earlier performance stuff, except inverted. Instead of throwing stuff, we worked on choreographing dances. He didn't really know dozens of attractive women at the time.” Under his new name (for which he offers journalists a battery of bullshit explanations), he distanced himself from the rest of the gossipy, claustrophobic Pittsburgh scene. A lot of his ex-associates don’t want to go on the record about him, and cop to their bitter envy.

“The truth of the matter is that he was always a laconic ass-pain,” says one old friend, “but it felt pretty good to be on the inside of that, laughing at everyone else. As he got more successful, I got pushed to the outside.”

Flagpole

What is your motivation?/p>

Gregg Gillis

I like music.

Girl Talk, Pegasuses-XL Georgia Theatre Friday, March 28 $15

Emerson Dameron