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Sample the sounds of Girl Talk
In the musical landscape of Gregg Gillis, there is no filler, only killer.
Gillis, 28, is a leading light in the world of mashup — the 21st-century art of assembling musical compositions from the scattered bits and pieces of other songs. Imagine, say, the driving lyrics of Outkast layered on top of the drumbeat from Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” as the Hammond B-3 organ from “Gimme Some Lovin’” wails in the background. Or better, yet, don’t — just queue up the first track of Gillis’ acclaimed fourth album, 2008’s “Feed the Animals,” which features all three samples. And that’s just in the first 30 seconds.
You also can see it for yourself Saturday, April 10 as Girl Talk takes to the stage as the headliner of the University of Texas’ 40 Acres Festival. The show kicks off at 7 p.m. with opener White Denim and is free and open to the public. Gillis spoke with us by phone about why his music — once called “a lawsuit waiting to happen” by the New York Times — has thus far evaded legal action, the similarities between mashup and biomedical engineering, and why irony has no place on a Girl Talk album.
American-Statesman: The South by Southwest Music Conference went down here in Austin just a few weeks ago, and as I’m sure you are aware there was a panel titled “Why Hasn’t the Record Industry Sued Girl Talk?”
Yeah, that was funny. I think a lot of people who were down there heard about it in the same 24-hour span, so I got a lot of “LOL” text messages sent to me. My booking agent had a friend who went and said the panel was a little vague but kind of comical.
Did they invite you to be on it? It seems strange to have an entire panel dedicated to one artist and then not have that artist sit on it.
I actually can’t remember. I have been invited to be on specific speaking engagements in the past, a good number of them at universities and for panel discussions on copyright, but I’ve never done any of them. It may have slipped my mind, since we don’t do any of them.
Well, now’s your chance — why hasn’t the record industry sued you?
I think it’s a variety of reasons. I believe what I’m doing should qualify under fair use, because I’m using all the sampled works in a transformative way. I don’t think it impacts any of the artists I sample — it’s not like people avoid buying Yeah Yeah Yeahs records because I used four seconds of “Gold Lion” in a song … I think realistically it’s because I sample so many artists that if they did challenge me, and I won, it’d set a precedent they wouldn’t like.
Have you had threats of legal action? The legal threats from EMI that were brought on Danger Mouse’s “The Grey Album” were pretty substantial.
None at all, actually. I think the only real contact I’ve had with labels has been more or less support. No one’s gone ahead and said “This is great and we love this,” because that’s a bad look, but they know that their albums get exposure through my albums. A couple of labels have come to me about doing work for them or big remixes of their back catalogue, so from my end I haven’t had really any issues at all.
It’s always interested me that you studied biomedical engineering in school, if only because it’s not hard to imagine how the same brain that pursued that field could also see the appeal of mashup. Do you think there’s a common thread in your motivation for getting into both?
Yeah, I definitely see a connection. Especially because I don’t think I was born an engineer by nature. You kind of grow into it a little bit. The time I was studying that was the same time I was developing the Girl Talk project, and just like with engineering, when I started this music I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know how to make a beat, and there’s no set way to go and learn how to play a computer. So I went through a big process of experimenting and fooling around and trying many different ideas and being detail-oriented and I think that’s very similar to what I did in the engineering world. I’d sit in front of a computer and tweak the smallest little variables in ways that would hopefully contribute in a big way to something later on. And that’s how Girl Talk works, too.
On a practical level, it’s pretty easy to see the appeal of slapping together two segments from, say, Dee-Lite and Nirvana — it’s fun. On an artistic level, though, are you looking to get anything out of that juxtaposition?
On a broad level, I want to challenge people with the idea that no music is truly bad. It’s not black or white. Take a step back and respect the intentions of the artists, and realize that everybody is doing very valuable things and that they all kind of work together.
I take it that means ironic appreciation doesn’t play a big role in your approach to your work?
No, not at all. I try to really dismiss all irony when I’m doing my music. I try to have no guilty pleasures in life. I don’t think anything is silly or dumb when it comes to music. You have to evaluate Miley Cyrus on a different level than Sonic Youth, but they’re both pursuing different aims and they’re both doing a really good job at what they’re setting out to do. When I was in high school I wasn’t as open-minded to all forms of music, and when you’re an angsty teenager you have to hate something, so I put my foot down and hated this or that. But the older I got and the more I dove into music the more I saw issues of people blindly not being into something because it wasn’t cool, and when I took a step back it got very silly. Part of the main idea in even starting Girl Talk was to challenge that attitude. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying pop music in all its forms.
I’m interested in hearing what your listening process is like — obviously you ingest a pretty huge amount of music. What kind of listening habits do you have?
There’s two different modes for me: listening for fun and listening for samples. Occasionally I’ll be sitting around and say “Man, I haven’t been working with enough ’70s soul music lately,” so I’ll go out CD shopping or to a used CD store and start grabbing things from the R&B sections. That’s a very different mode of listening. I pop in a CD and skip through songs, which is very different than when I just listen to music, which I tend to do when I’m chilling out and eating dinner. Despite all the piecemeal listening I do, I feel like I have a solid attention span when it comes to listening to things as a whole, I kind of zone out and don’t worry about if there’s a great drum fill in there or whatever.
Do you have a lot of affection for full albums or do you prefer individual songs? I think anyone listening to a Girl Talk record would probably assume you’re a jumpy listener.
This may surprise people, but I still very much believe in the album as a whole process and an art form unto itself. I think you can kind of view my music in a couple of ways. You can view it as a case of extreme attention deficit disorder, but I feel like technically you may have to have a longer attention span. Since I work in whole albums and the song breaks are pretty arbitrary, you’re really supposed to hear 40 or 50 minutes of it in a row, and that can be pretty exhausting for some people.
I’m curious to what extent you regard mashup as an act of personal creation. On the one hand, it’s obviously pretty involved, but on the other you’re working with other peoples’ music, not your own. The drum fills, the guitar solos, the vocals — these things are not yours. Do you still have a sense of ownership over your music?
It kind of works on a case-by-case basis. Some things I feel more ownership of than others. But with my work one of the goals is for it to be transformative and for the bits and pieces of songs to become something else entirely. The samples provide the source material and inspiration, but they become something new. It’s sort of like — I feel like a lot of artists sit down and learn to play the guitar, but they didn’t invent the guitar. They didn’t invent the chords. It’s not necessarily that much different than sitting down with a sample and chopping it up and adding a beat to it. I think a lot of times people view what I do as less real, but for me a goal with the music is to make it something of my own and really take it somewhere new.
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