30 Apr Let’s Talk about Girl Talk

If your iPod Shuffle had a favorite band, it would be Girl Talk.

For those unfamiliar, Girl Talk, the one-man, 10-year-old project of Pittsburghian Greg Gillis, is a meta-musical party machine, equal parts intellectual exercise and dance-floor exorcism. This is music that could only exist in the digital age, via the casual magic that allows us to carry our entire 500-album music collection in a shirt pocket. It’s the sound of everything at once, arranged to arrive at just this side of chaos by a musician who’s also a trained biomedical engineer. It embodies the energy and omniscience of the Internet along with the anxious, addled ADD the Internet engenders.

Gillis makes original music with other people’s original music, which is to say his music is made of samples. Lots of them—his new album, All Day, is built from a reported 372 samples mashed up over 71 hyperactive minutes. It’s foundation is hip-hop—the form wherein sampling has been most fully exploited and perfected—and its filigree comes from classic rock, jazz, funk, R&B, easy listening, and every other motherloving style of pop music to ever flow into Gillis’ 31-year-old earholes. Unimpeded by genre, his is a kind of post-music/meta-music shadow world where Wu-Tang and Radiohead and Prince and Beastie Boys and Lady Gaga and Iggy Pop all simultaneously, mellifluously coexist.

Best thing you can do is check it out for yourself. Gillis has made All Day available for free online. His fans have produced an epic, extended dance video and this very useful site that dissects each track on the album, sample by sample, in real time, while you listen.

Scratch that. Best BEST thing you can do is be at the FPL Stage Saturday at 9:30 PM to see Girl Talk live. On paper (or screen) the music inspires nerds like me into musicological and sociological reveries: Is it appropriation? Is it performance art? Is it music? Is it legal? (Yes, yes, yes, and no.) On stage it inspires open-minded listeners into full-blown dance explosions. The giddy thrill in recognizing that Rage Against the Machine sample mashed up against Steve Miller Band and Guccie Mane is very real, amplified by the thrill of hearing how brilliantly Gillis—center stage, shirtless, sweat-drenched, surrounded by dancing fans—synchs all three into a smart, silly, irresistible symphony.