Courtesy of Pitch Perfect PR
It wasn't until Girl Talk's 2006 release, Nightripper, that the world realized a guy on a laptop could be the life of the party.
"I played with a lot of people doing a lot of electronic music shows...on their laptops," Gregg Gillis, the man behind the Girl Talk moniker remembers. "And those shows were boring. I wanted to have a little more pop––something that was more entertaining."
It took Gillis a few years to become the one-man party he is today. The only aspect of Girl Talk's first album, Secret Diary (2002), that is completely clear is it isn't much fun to listen to.
"In those early days, the music was somewhat abrasive and you couldn't really dance to it," he explains. "At shows I would be up there yelling at people to dance [and] loosen up."
After Nightripper, though, no one needed to be told to dance at Girl Talk shows anymore.
"I think I grew more comfortable with the idea of making something a little more excessive"—he pauses, then quickly corrects himself—"accessible."
It's Gillis' first adjective though––"excessive"––that fits his music best. Girl Talk songs are loud and stacked deep with musical references.
Each album is comprised of short samples of songs from all genres and decades. Gillis cuts and splices pieces of these songs together to make something completely original and nearly unrecognizable from its source material.
In one song, vocals from Ludacris are laid over Phoenix’s track "1901" and tied together with a looping vocal that sounds suspiciously like Beyoncé if she was a member of Alvin and the Chipmunks.
The sheer number of songs Gillis samples on his albums is mind-blowing––373 in 71 minutes.
Each album is a work of mathematical precision, unsurprising given Gillis' background as a biomedical engineer, a job he quit after Girl Talk made it big. He is meticulous when crafting his songs––Gillis has been known to scour the Internet for the perfect “’90s pop or...’80s hip-hop” track to provide his albums with balance.
At his live shows, Gillis treats wild, sweaty, undulating crowds to over an hour of original material not found on any of his albums––"remixes of the remixes."
With a performance based solely on music from a laptop, Gillis could easily press "play" at the start of a show and spend the rest of the time dancing along with the fans. However, he chooses to trigger each minute musical clip manually, giving him room for improvisation during a set.
That by no means implies that Gillis remains stationary during his performances—each night, he arrives on stage wearing a brand sweatshirt and pair of sweatpants that are promptly soaked by sweat and thrown into the crowd. A few years ago, he began taping his feet like a football running back to prevent the bleeding caused by his uncontrollable dancing.
Add to that the 30 or so scantily clad fans––male and female––the road crew invites to dance on stage and each show becomes utterly unpredictable.
"I've seen some of the most extreme things I've ever seen in my life at shows,” Gillis says. “Every level of nudity, to just about every fluid—from booze to vomit to blood—on my computer."
Usually the Girl Talk songs from these shows are never released to the public, the sole property of that night's audience.
"And I kind of like it like that," Gillis says.
