Girl Talk chat to Disappear Here
Words by Kristen Cochrane
“You do things at shows that don’t typically exist in a social setting. You’re in this foreign land.”
Stage diving. Confetti-filled bursting balloons. Frantic fan hysteria. Sex on stage? All formalities of a Girl Talk gig . Incidentally, the production behind Girl Talk mirrors the allegorical tale of a man robbing the rich to feed the poor, by sampling many enormously successful artists and creating sounds that could enthrall any musical palate. A man whose surrounding hype has had him devoured, adored, mauled and often abused by the media, under the alias Girl Talk (otherwise known as Gregg Gillis) chats to Disappear Here about juggling an engineering day job with weekend performances, his personal philosophy on copyright laws, as well as his self-proclamation of being a “hardcore nerd”.
You kept a cubicle job while performing shows on the weekends. Did your coworkers know about your double life? What was the beginning like?
Gregg : “They know now. I was about 22, 23 when I was working there, and they were all 35 and over. Now it would be easy to explain. I would be playing to fifteen people who hated it, I’m not being self-deprecating, but that’s what it was [laughs]. It was hard to explain, so I never wanted to try and define it to them. It was never something I expected to become a career. It was kind of like if you go to work and if you’re really into a specific nightlife, or any sort of subculture.”
What do you think of all the hysteria surrounding Girl Talk?
Gregg : “It’s very weird, [...] and I was kind of apprehensive about it. Right when it started to jump off, it was hard for me to stomach because I had been doing it for six years, and [then] certain websites review it, people are coming out to shows and you’re like ‘that’s great, but it’s also total bullshit that that’s what it takes for them to come out’. It took other people to say that it’s cool for them to get into it.
I specifically remember this first show I headlined at New York in the Mercury Lounge in 2006. It sold out and it was the only time I had ever played a headlining sold out show, with 200 people at the time. I don’t even remember the show right now, but I just read a review of it recently that was really negative, because I was kind of calling everyone losers and stuff [laughs], which I’m super embarrassed about. No one gave me a hard time, it was just hard for me to process [the attention].
It’s been growing steadily over the past three years and I just attribute that to six years experience, with people hating on you, and that builds up a certain level of confidence of being on stage. I almost feel sorry for these bands that blow up immediately and start playing these big shows, that’s got to be insane.
I was always playing shows to people who didn’t like it, so I would win over a few of them. And once I was playing to people who liked it, it was easy to win them over. So then I added people on stage for visuals, and people doing props. I’m super psyched to have the crew I have now.”
You throw insane parties that are of particular appeal to young people. What were you like in high school?
Gregg : “I was a hardcore nerd, I still am, absolutely, but back then I was super into the music. Maybe in 8th grade or so, after I heard Nirvana, [I thought] that band was weird. Even though they’re a total pop group, you just haven’t seen anything like that when you’re young. It’s just a weird alternative, and when I heard that, I just wanted to dive deeper into how weird the music can get.
By the time I was in high school, I discovered experimental music, where people were just using foot pedals and playing with a keyboard, and just performance art stuff, and that just blew my mind. It meant you could just get on stage and do anything. It was noise music. I just went to shows two or three times a week, that only fifteen people were attending, with weird noise bands and underground hiphop.
I was just kinda anti-social, you know, not hanging out, just doing this band thing, like recording on the four-track, and I started a tape label when I was in high school. I was just so involved in music, and the scene, and trying to wrap my head around every piece of music. I’ve never attended a high school party or anything. I threw shows at my parents house, and we had legitimate shows and the young band became a fixture in the Pittsburgh world.”
We hear a lot about copyrighting issues, with different positions from a lot of people. What is your personal stance on the issue?
Gregg : “I believe in copyright laws, I don’t necessarily believe in the bootlegging industry, and I think some people associate bootlegging with what I’m doing. I think it’s an isolated issue. Not because I feel morally obliged to it, but because I like buying cds. I still go to the record store and buy cds. I go to Best Buy about once a week and buy cds and stuff, probably more so than anyone else you know. It’s almost embarrassing how many cds I buy these days.
I feel that all music, all art, is derivative on something in the past, and you can’t make anything truly original, you have to have a certain basis. You see any band playing here today, and they have certain chord progressions, or notes, or lyrical themes, and it all comes from something before them, then they put their little spin on it and it becomes new.
You can hear any band and you say ‘it sounds like that mixed with that’ and I don’t think that’s a problem. They say ‘it’s ripping off something’, but everything sounds like something. If you were to wrap your head around any song you hear, you would be able to say that it’s based on something from before. That’s just the nature of music, and art, and everything has to be based on something.
I feel that with sampling, it’s easy to have a guitar, and a certain riff, and arrange the notes, write your own lyrics, speed it up, slow it down, and call it new. I feel there’s no reason with sampling, that you can’t take something that’s familiar and still recognizable and you can’t put it in another context.”
Sampling music promotes forgotten and obscure artists though, does it not?
Gregg : “I don’t see anyone buying my cd for a particular sample instead of the [original] song. I see more of the opposite. I get the emails everyday, asking what the sample is from a certain track. People are also really excited to have the wikipedia entry with all the sample listings.
The crowd is slightly younger, and a lot of people aren’t necessarily listening to James Taylor everyday, or listening to older music that I sample and that I like. I see it more as a promotional tool for [the original artists].”
Have any of these artists thanked you?
Gregg : “Yeah, I’ve never had a complaint thus far, but a handful of people have reached out, and not necessarily thanked me, but have said that they’re cool with what I’m doing. Sophie B. Hawkins, an artist from the nineties, mentioned in an interview that she’s cool with it, and that she was very excited about the way I used the sample and said it was reminiscent of the original way she wrote the song. Big Boi from Outkast came out to see a show in Atlanta when I played, and said that he had seen me before. Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth wasn’t even aware about it, and I told him that I sampled tracks, cut them up, and put them on the album, and he was fine with it. A lot of musicians right now that pay attention to this are open to a certain degree, because they’re used to putting out an album with people making remixes and songs on youtube. It’s not creating competition, it’s promoting it.”
What’s the strangest thing to have happened at a gig?
Gregg : “A lot of crazy stuff. People have had sex on stage. When I play at a club, it turns into a free-for-all. It’s crowded, and sometimes I can’t move. The stage and the audience is just one huge slope. So at a couple shows people have had sex, but not in a way where they were showing off on a table or anything, but they were caught up in the moment in the back, which I think is a lot more respectable if you’re caught up in the moment. That’s cool. I think if you’re having sex for the crowd it’s questionable, but I think if you’re doing your own thing, it’s fine.
I just think it’s a nice, extreme thing. People get nuts at shows, and jump on to other people. You do things at shows that don’t typically exist in a social setting. You’re in this foreign land. People jump on each other. You may have heard of it, it’s called crowdsurfing [laughs]. There’s all these crazy behaviours. Everyone stands in the same direction, bobbing their heads.
I don’t necessarily believe that anything goes, but you can’t think of having sex on stage, like…you’re at Subway, and people are [hypothetically] having sex in the corner. There are different social standards at a show.
I don’t want to promote that though, my mom would be upset.”
Posted Tue, August 25, 2009