*interview coming soon because gregg showed up late leaving no time for me to interview him. also submit any grammatical errors or anything else you might notice if you'd like to me. thank you.
Okay dear friends. Girl Talk. If you havent heard this man yet, where have to been living? Seriously, touring & flying to almost superstar status without any sort of commercial marketing. Girl Talk, or Gregg Gillis if you want to get technical is a brilliant mind. An ex-biomedical engineer from Pittsburg PA, Gregg got his start making glitchy abominations of pop & rap music. You probably didnt hear this record. He was playing mostly art galleries & other art/music collectives throughout various cities. Hidden throughout Providence & other cities in the country & wonderful gems disguised as loft apartments & warehouses are where some of the hottest & sweatiest dance parties can be found. But that's not what we're talking about, Girl Talk has climbed his way through the ranks & managed to land larger shows in larger venues. I'll be the first to admit, I never got to see any of his earlier, smaller shows & that my friends, is a damn shame. It's not a shame that Gregg is getting popular, it's quite amazing & great for him. Though, without this undergroud (for lack of a better word) art/music scene Gregg would've never gotten his start & these places are going quite unrecognized & even destroyed in many areas. Not quite destroyed, but renovated & turned into loft apartments & condos, overpriced ones at that. But again, I digress.
Gregg's second CD "Unstoppable" is where you really start to notice just how capable he is of mixing music together. Unlike "Night Ripper" & "Feed the Animals" "Unstoppable" is not one long track to be played in order, it's just a fun ride through a whole ton of great music. Still glitchy, but using that to his advantage to create unbelievable beats using lyricists vocals, plenty of drums & a good amount of bass, all the while keeping it glitchy & fun.
"Night Ripper" I guess is where you could say Girl Talk really came into his own. I can still remember the night I heard it & how wonderful it was. Being quite the musical snob, I am generally very picky about what I'm listening to. Girl Talk didnt give me time to be picky. He was going everywhere. Boston, Ludachris, Biggy, Neutral Milk Hotel, Elton John & that's just naming a few. It was an entirely amazing mix of everything under the sun & to top it all off, it was fun as hell to dance to. I went to my first Girl Talk show shortly thereafter, it was at the now defunct Living Room which is a mostly punk venue from my experience, definitely not the smallest I've been to in Providence. The show was great, somehow I managed to walk into the backstage area & end up drinking Jack Daniels with Gregg & Dan Deacon. When he went on, so many fans rushed the stage the power went out. After that was all settled it was just a great dance party for the rest of the night, most of which I spent on stage dancing & generally having a blast.
"Feed the Animals" is the Fourth & most recent record made by Girl Talk. Just like Night Ripper it's to be played as one long dope as ever track. Seriously, if you can't dance to this music just get out. How do you explain it? I mean, we got the Unicorns, Lil Wayne, Twisted Sister, Faith No More, Wu Tang Clan, & an incredible mash of "Roc Boys" by Jay-Z with "Paranoid Android" by Radiohead as the underlying beat. Mind you, that's only half of the first half of the record. Not to mention this is FREE. You can pay whatever you want for it, just like Radiohead did earlier this year. If you pay a certain amount you get the actual CD as well as high quality mp3s, though in all honesty if you're using .flac files to play your music, either you have an epic system or you just love wasting your harddrive space.
That being said, lets go back to what I said about no commercial success. Outside of a recent "I'm a PC" advertisement for Microsoft, Girl Talk isnt getting played on any radio stations or music television channels. But, how can this be? Why, 95.5 WBRU are the ones holding this concert at Lupos, how does that make sense? To be completely honest, it doesn't. I'm not trying to disrespect BRU, it is one of the better local stations in Rhode Island, however, they dont play the music I enjoy. Though, they're holding a concert for Girl Talk even though they cant really play his music on their station. It's blatent copyright infringement. Though in the same sense, it really isnt. He's making music his own by meticulously mixing each & every sample at the right moment with the right sample, the end result being that of a masterfully produced consistant flow of brilliant party jams guaranteed to make even the most elitist music snob's happy to be there & jamming out.
His technique is not a terribly new thing, the "mash-up" genre of music has been around for decades with groups such as Negativland, the Tape Beatles & the Evolution Control Committee but never before has any artist managed to let every sample flow flawlessly with each & every sample. The trick here being the drums, keeping the tempo & beat of the songs are countless drum samples strategically placed to keep the songs flowing, the end results being a downright club-banging-party-jam that anyone can enjoy.
11/29/08
I hate to sound like a prick, or an elitist, or anything terrible, but honestly tonight's show was a giant letdown. Lupos isnt a big venue, but it's certainly bigger than places like the (now defunct) Living Room or Narwhal Arms. Everyone there was basically inspired by youtube to be a fucking retard. Getting on stage was basically the worst move ever & I'm pretty sure a fight broke out. I also didnt have a chance to interview Gregg due to hassles with Lupos security. Anyway, if you were on the stage you might have been one of the four to five people who fell around me & couldnt get up. It was a legitimate blur of people, no longer a party but a combat zone as one guy stated. To top it all off, the further back on the stage you are the less you're hearing. Great job everyone at Lupos, seriously. You knew what was going to happen, why not let him play on the floor? Either way it would have been ridiculous just due to the fact that the set was less than an hour long. Thats right kids, a Girl Talk show got out before 10pm on a Saturday.
Nothing Gregg did tonight made me less of a fan of his music. What the unbelievably large crowd did made me less of a fan of his performances. I certainly appreciate his music & what he's doing for music as a whole, but lets face it, being tossed around, falling down, or getting injured in any way isnt really what the show should be. How the hell are you going to dance if you're getting crushed & pushed around all night? It would have been just a little bit better if people could have gotten their shit together & generally not act retarded, but still, there were xteen year old girls puking before Gregg even hit the stage, so obviously it was going to be a trainwreck.
A big problem I noticed was security holding down/moving Greggs table from side to side. This caused people to get pushed back creating almost a wave of people falling down. Girl Talk is a great musician & his music is fun for everybody ever, I highly suggest you listen to him, but dear god stop going to shows. In 2004 Gregg was playing in peoples apartments & lofts, now he's playing larger much nicer venues but it's harder for him to really perform I think.
If you take a second to search youtube for girl talk stuff you'll eventually come across footage of shows from the early days. The best example I can give is the video for Touch 2 Feel as it's basically all footage from before unstoppable came out. Though, I believe that Gregg is almost as ironic as a musician as his mixes are, what I mean by that is that while he can never be played on any radio station, BRU is not only holding him a concert but it's sold out & shit gets super out of control. He's bringing the underground to the mainstream & it's cool, but it's getting out of hand. I spent most of the night up on the balcony watching as a sea of people couldnt even move for themselves. It looked like they were all tied together & could only move together, think the Mighty Ducks.
12/6/08
For comparison I went back to Lupos a week later, security wasn't very much fun, the show however, was. Starting on a bad note, I went in with tensions rising, to say the very least I was upset. I would just like to say that Lupos is an awful venue with awful staff. Maybe it was just the night, because of the band that was playing, or maybe they're just all douchebags. Whatever the reason I managed to get hassled by a bouncer (including but not limited to an extended pat down & things of mine pocketed by the bouncer.), I got to listen to the lady outside in control of the smoking section talk about how she likes to kick people out & a bouncer/security guard elbowed me out of the way after the show was over so he could put a trash can down behind where I was standing, at least he said excuse me while he was doing this.
The Girl Talk show was very lax on security because I'm thinking they thought, "Hey, these acts arent going to bring any violence let's overbook the venue & not care, woo-hoo!" which, I guess is a great way to run a Girl Talk show, but it was a free for all, all night. Another major issue was sound in the venue, if you got pushed to the back of the stage you weren't hearing a god damned thing. So everyone is getting pushed & shoved & I guess trying to "dance" but it's all a blur. It was too crowded, understaffed & just not what a Girl Talk show should be. I hate to say it, but Lupos as a venue is too nice.
Final thoughts on the matter, if you're going to see Girl Talk try for either a Festival or a small venue. I hate saying it because I've said it about almost every last one of my favorite musical acts. I dont even know why I dont like larger or more posh venues, I prefer more intimate shows I guess. Maybe I'm just a snob, whatever the case I think the problem here is that Girl Talk is getting mainstream, which is great for him with no commercial help what so ever but it just means that the shows are going to get bigger & bigger. Still, it's all good for him, I just doubt I'd want to see him anywhere that fits more than 300 people.
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