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ACL artist preview: Girl Talk
J. Caldwell
The mashed-up, sample-heavy music Gregg Gillis makes under his Girl Talk moniker sounds like the greatest house party of all time — or, more precisely, a half dozen house parties, all held on the same block on the same Saturday night, each of which keeps turning up the volume in hopes of out-drawing its rivals.
On “No Pause,” a representative track off Girl Talk’s recent album, “Feed the Animals,” Missy Elliot’s profane “Work It” rap is melded to the vintage ’80s Nu Shooz synth-pop hit “I Can’t Wait” and then gives way to Public Enemy frontman Chuck D bum rushing the show over a chunky sample of Heart’s 1970s AOR staple “Magic Man.” Cheap Trick wanting you to want them, Jam Master Jay getting loose and Jimi Hendrix kissing the sky make brief appearances before the track’s 3 minutes and 12 seconds are up.
If you show up to Girl Talk’s Austin City Limits Music Festival set this evening, you might not be sure how to react to his barrage of famous and semi-famous samples. Dance your head off? Frantically cross-reference your dog-eared copy of “The Spin Alternative Record Guide”? Or wave your iPhone’s Shazam app in the air like you just don’t care?
Talking to Gillis by phone from his home in Pittsburgh turns out to be a similarly disorienting experience — at least on a recent Thursday afternoon, when odd noises and voices kept filtering into the conversation.
“I’m sorry, the G-20 summit’s happening in Pittsburgh right now and it’s, like, I just opened my door and there’s, like, helicopters flying overhead and you can hear, like, three different protests happening,” Gillis said. “It sounds like there’s a war happening outside my home right now.”
The real topic of discussion, though, is the war going on inside Gillis’s home studio — the one between the hipster music he samples (Jay-Z, Radiohead, MIA) and the non-hipster music, heavy on the ’70s cheese, he also samples (Chicago, Seals & Croft, Styx). One doesn’t have to categorically agree with the Internet poster who asserted that Girl Talk “manages to take bland and uninspired popular music and blend it into something awesome and unique” to wonder if, really, Gillis could possibly like all of the music he builds his music out of.
“I’m a big fan of everything I sample,” he says, putting any doubts to rest. “There’s so much pop music out there I’m a fan of, it seems almost wasteful to be listening to music or sampling music that I don’t really love.
“I’ve always been a fan of pop and the idea of making music for the masses… . These days I’m more likely to be picking up a CD at Best Buy by Heart or Chicago than maybe a new release.”
Gillis has his tastes — he started out in the underground noise scene and still loves that stuff — but he sees his music as an opportunity to interrogate his own preferences and aversions. “A lot of times people like to frame their opinion as fact or fiction and that kind of bothers me a little bit,” he says. “When I hear something that I don’t necessarily like on a surface level, I try to kind of take a step back and at least appreciate that someone out there’s into it and clearly it’s doing something right. Just because it’s not my thing, I don’t think that the people who like it are stupid and I don’t think the people who are making it are stupid.
“When (I’m) hunting for pop samples, a lot of these songs have been my favorites over the years but at the same time some of them are just songs you hear over and over and over again. And it’s like, oh, that’s an interesting isolated segment. Once you kind of start working with it a bit more you might have a little bit more appreciation for some of the subtle elements once you start cutting it up.”
To the amazement of many, Gillis has never been sued for copyright infringement for doing this sort of thing. He’s not sure why this is the case, though he suspects the rise of YouTube culture, where anyone can — and seemingly does — upload audio and video remixes of copyrighted material to hundreds of thousands of viewers, has something to do with it. Today, perhaps, even the Recording Industry Association of America recognizes that there’s no going back to the way things were.
In fact, Gillis wonders if the RIAA isn’t worried that if it took him to court and lost, the floodgates to sampling would open even wider.
One upside to that scenario is that hip-hop, which has shied away from sampling over the past decade out of fear of lawsuits, would return to its crate-digging roots.
“There’s definitely been that shift, where hip-hop records just don’t sound like they did 15-20 years ago,” Gillis says.
Well, except when he remixes them.
“It’s true. I definitely think the stuff I do is definitely, for me, paying respect to a lot of the records I grew up listening to,” he says. “In a subtle way I try to make it progressive and make it new and it reminds me of a lot of the records I grew up with, from Bell Biv Devoe to the Beastie Boys. Using a three second clip of a song to be a transition or just the briefest sample and just moving on — that’s something that’s always exciting to me. It’s made a lot of albums like a journey; you hear something one time and that’s it, and you keep moving forward.”
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Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: ACL Festival 2009
Comments
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By Duder
September 30, 2009 6:25 PM | Link to this
I can make these songs ta home, so can YOU!
By Quinn Thompson
October 1, 2009 6:46 PM | Link to this
any chance of a girl talk acl after party this weekend?