Girl Talk

Mon 27th Oct, 2008 in Features

At first glance, mash-up DJ Girl Talk is just a whole lot of fun. His shows are notorious for their conviviality: Girl Talk at laptop, centre-venue, often in his underwear, with a bevy of similarly clad dancers (mostly women) around him. His cavalier attitude to genre, era and copyright laws – think anything from Jurassic 5 to Kelly Clarkson to Wings – have ensured Girl Talk’s profile and performances keep getting larger.

Look again a little closer and Girl Talk becomes something else entirely. Well, his shows are still frenetic and sweaty, but it’s clear that there is reason behind the rhyme.

Girl Talk, aka Gregg Gillis, started small. He began performing as GT in 2000, and until the release of Night Ripper, his third album, Gillis had never played to more than 30 people at a time. ” Night Ripper caught on when blogs and websites took it up, and it just snowballed until mainstream media started playing it,” he says. “Before I knew it I was selling out shows.”

Gillis would play shows on the weekend and work at his day job as a biomedical engineer from Monday to Friday. In 2007 he ran out of vacation time, and halfway through the year he gave the lab away in order to do Girl Talk full-time.

Girl Talk’s genesis was in Pittsburgh’s underground scene, with gigs at house parties first off. Gillis would have his laptop in the middle of the room, with the party going on around him. This signature set-up has organically migrated with him to larger venues and sell-out shows.

“I make a point of trying to get into the crowd,” he says. “I try to make my shows a rowdy event.” Plus, says Gillis, the celebrated crowd participation “is a fantastic visual element, more then any light show.” While he works hard to ensure Girl Talk shows are “over the top”, Gillis’s primary aim is to have the most fun of all the people in the room. “But crowds are really challenging me now.”

The idea to sell Girl Talk’s fourth album, Feed the Animals, using a pay-as-you-want system came from his label Illegal Art. The revolutionary Radiohead model “acknowledges the reality of the music industry,” says Gillis. Early on, he put out his Girl Talk material through Napster, blogs and burnt CDs, and this pay-as-you-want system is arguably the next step in democratic music distribution. On a more pragmatic level, giving away CDs (or digital versions of them) has the likelihood of increasing your audience. Gillis hopes that this new tactic will expose listeners to his music who wouldn’t normally buy CDs or pay for digital downloads.

As to the economic success of the online release of Feed the Animals, Gillis says it is hard to quantify. “There’s been more hype around this album,” he says. And because this is the first time Illegal Art have sold a Girl Talk album using the Radiohead model, “there’s nothing to compare.”

Girl Talk’s liberal attitude to copyright legislation has led some commentators to describe his music as “a lawsuit waiting to happen”. According to Gillis, however, his position is not so potentially litigious; on account of fair use clauses granted by US copyright laws. Fair use allows an artist to sample music as long as the finished product is transformative enough to distinguish it from the original, and as long as it does not compete for sales directly with the source material.

“So we’re not being outlaws – there is a grey area,” he says. It is true, he points out, that if any record companies were going to sue, they would have already. “It’s a sign of the times,” Gillis says. “It’s becoming the norm for people to have a dialogue with media. Every kid has got the software to remix.” The effect, he says, is a “collage” of media, and one to which vested parties like record companies find they must become accustomed.

Right now, Girl Talk is one the road, taking his show through the United States. Come March next year, he’s be headlining Laneway Festival here on our shores. “I had a lot of time off the last time I was in Australia, so I spent a lot of time soaking in the sun.”

He also visited the previous year, but it was the most recent visit that saw audiences get into Girl Talk “full force”. “We were selling out club shows, it was crazy,” he enthuses. “The New Years show [at Lorne Falls Festival] was probably the biggest crowd I’ve played to.”

Feed The Animals is out 1 November on Illegal Art through Inertia. Girl Talk will be doing it large on the Laneway Festival tour in 2009 – make sure to wear your best underwear.

Saturday 31 January – Alexandria St off St Paul’s Terrace, Fortitude Valley

Sunday 1 February – Lonsdale St, Caledonian Lane and Little Lonsdale St, Melbourne

Friday 6 February – Perth Cultural Centre, Northbridge

Saturday 7 February – Fowler’s Live, Northern Terrace, Adelaide

Sunday 8 February – The Basement, Macquarie Park & Reiby Place, Circular Quay, Sydney