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Live review: Girl Talk at Forty Acres Fest
Even before Gregg Gillis queued up the samples, readied the laptops and had his posse shoot toilet paper into the audience, it was already abundantly clear that the operative word to describe his headlining performance at the University of Texas’ Forty Acres Fest Saturday was going to be “insane.”
The annual free and open-to-the-public shindig at the base of the UT tower has hosted some fine performers in recent years, from the Roots to Little Richard, but the crowd for Saturday’s show was on an entirely different level. Clearly UT’s Music and Entertainment Committee found the pleasure center of the collective college brain and stroked it hard, as students and onlookers were packed into the area like sardines. Before a note of music was played, two things were clear for every attendant: you were going to dance, and you were going to get sweaty.
The ever-reliable White Denim made for something of an odd opener for Girl Talk — they’re sloppier and more psychedelic than Gillis even at his most outre — but played an energetic set that at least established a nicely frenetic vibe. But the best setup for Girl Talk was in the songs played over the PA before he started performing — nothing gets a college-age audience primed like some vintage 80s cheese and a little Stevie Wonder, so spirits were high and students were singing along even before Gillis played his first sample.
After a quick introduction — Gillis steered away from banter for most of the night, letting the mashup do the talking — Girl Talk plunged into a selection of cuts drawn primarily from “Night Ripper” and “Feed the Animals,” with a healthy selection of new samples and progressions thrown into the mix to keep things fresh. It’s been almost two years since “Feed the Animals” hit the Internet, so there was plenty of new life in Gillis’ mixes, including prominent samples from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Heads Will Roll” and Phoenix’s “1901.”
Recapping a Girl Talk show is a little tricky — there’s no song breaks and no set list, per se, and running down which samples he employs would be a tedious exercise in listmaking. The ultimate barometer for a Girl Talk show is audience engagement, and by that rubric Saturday’s show was a sweeping success. It wasn’t a show for the faint of heart — if you wanted to stand in the back, cross your arms, and sway mildly, you were out of luck, as crowds jammed into each other, elbows were thrown, and the temperature on the ground was a good twenty degrees higher than in the air. As with any Girl Talk show, attendance essentially required getting very intimate with strangers. But the joyous audience was willing to go with the flow as beach balls bounced, confetti flew and students crowdsurfed. As the set wound down with an extended sample from John Lennon’s “Imagine,” the experience was self-referential, sweaty, diverse, dance-filled and very exhausting.
In other words, perfect for a college show.
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By TXn
April 12, 2010 10:51 AM | Link to this
Ahhh Kids these days… buying albums of samples, paying $35 to see MGMT, Passion Pit, etc…sad that a man that plays no instruments gets so much attention.
POINT: Anyone can make splice samples at home. Learn an instrument.
White Denim=great REAL band!