A ripping yarn

>> A year ago, Pittsburgh’s don of desktop dementia, Girl Talk, was metastasizing mash-ups
in dirty little nightclubs. Today, he’s partying
with Paris Hilton, posing for Playgirl and
conspiring with congressmen—while a
Montreal filmmaker catches it all

BLOWING UP: Gregg Gillis

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

“He’s from my hometown and he had an interesting story—here’s a guy who’s a biomedical engineer by day and this DJ doing a new, transformative kind of music by evening.”

What makes the story doubly interesting is who’s telling it and where. U.S. Congressman Mike Doyle (D-PA), on the horn from Washington, is talking about Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s Gregg Gillis—better known as Girl Talk, the sample sorcerer responsible for the 2006 meta-mash-up masterpiece Night Ripper. The 2006 album, a year-end top-ranker at Rolling Stone, Spin and Pitchfork (Playgirl tapped Gillis as one of their Sexiest Men of the Year), dwarfs the average bootleg track’s incongruous pop-music pairings with a Mongolian clusterfuck of lifted, looped and layered fragments, all used respectfully without permission.

2ManyDJs? Not enough music! Exhibit A: “Give and Go,” at seven seconds shy of three minutes, packs 2 Live Crew and Hall & Oates, Phil Collins and Ludacris, M/A/R/R/S, Missy Elliott and Sonic Youth, plus a dozen others, into a finely crafted chimera that’s crack for the ears.

As Vice Chairman of the Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee, Doyle spoke at the March 7 hearing entitled “The Future of Radio,” using both 25-year-old Gillis and Atlanta’s mix-tape monarch DJ Drama to illustrate the need for nuanced reasoning in that other little culture war, the one over intellectual property and digital media.

“There are 167 artists [sampled] on Night Ripper,” notes Doyle. “Now, if he’d done this by the book, he would have to call up 167 artists to get permission, and then compensate them. Needless to say, you’re not going to sell a lot of CDs at the price he’s have to charge just to break even. What you realize when you look at the copyright laws is that the technology is evolving so rapidly, and some of the things going on in music are so different than we envisioned when these laws were written, that we’re constantly playing catch-up.

“I just threw it out to my colleagues that I didn’t think people like Gregg necessarily needed to be thrown in jail or sued, and that we needed to start thinking outside the box about how we deal with new and innovative things like that.

“You know, with members of Congress, we’ve probably got a couple of guys who still use eight-tracks.”

Extreme viewpoints

Gillis and Doyle both argue for a wider spectrum of legal arrangements concerning artists who make art from the art of other artists (feel free to insert “recontextualize,” “appropriate,” “celebrate” or “steal” in that last phrase). The two met for the first time last week, for a joint interview with Newsweek.

“I did not vote for him, actually,” Gillis confesses, “but I will in the future. It’s kind of going out on a limb for a congressman to take that stance. When he supported me and DJ Drama in congress, I don’t think he realized how big a deal it was, how much of an extreme viewpoint.”

Maybe, but that’s what might have been said about Doyle’s 2002 vote against invading Iraq. Could be that the general public, and even the major labels, are coming around to Girl Talk’s way of thinking. In any case, the cease-and-desist letters have yet to arrive.

“The only small issues have been with distribution, both online and in physical stores. Some people got worried, especially once some of the bigger press hit, so we got our distribution pulled a couple of times. I’ve talked with a lot of major labels over the last year, about them wanting to work with me on projects, remixes and mash-ups of their catalogues.”

Gillis is no fool about the issues, and he and Night Ripper’s label, Illegal Art, are prepared to stand their ground if need be. If anything, Gillis is more concerned what his sampling subjects think.

“I’ve been in the same room with a lot of these artists—I played a party in New York with 50 Cent and LL Cool J, I got to open up for Kanye West. But I’ve never really sat down for a conversation with them. I’ve even shaken hands and introduced myself, but either they didn’t know who I was, or if they did, they chose not to endorse or critique the album. Unfortunately, because I really would like to hear their perspectives.”

Bye bye, biomed

Gillis is on the phone from Pittsburgh in the middle of the afternoon, a novelty because as of only three weeks ago, the “biomedical engineer by day” bit has been shelved. Public demand, not just for his ludicrously dense and delightful jams but for his equally off-the-hook live sets, is simply too great.

Just the homework is a load. Following a Shortlist Prize nomination by Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, he was tapped to remix Beck, Peter Björn & John and Grizzly Bear. Next came a Tokyo Police Club track, but that was under the remixing moniker Trey Told ’Em, with his friend Frank Musarra (joints for Simian Mobile Disco and Professor Murder to follow).

Gillis—who’s splitting a night at Club Soda with Ghislain Poirier, as part of the Jazz Fest’s midnight series—was off to Barcelona on his first free day, to show Europe just what a thing of wonder—loud, sweaty, basically retarded wonder—a Girl Talk show can be. Early on (Girl Talk’s been a go since 2002), Gillis deployed synchronized dance teams and other showboat antics to counter the inherent dullness of a dude and his laptop on stage. He also earned a rep for rockin’ his birthday suit by, like, his third track. The aim was to get the crowds hyped, but lately they’ve needed little coaxing.

“The last time I was in Montreal, I thought that was great,” says Gillis of last October’s Club Lambi gig, five minutes into which half the crowd was on stage. “I actually got down to my underwear at that show, a bit of a rarity these days. I don’t know when I’ll do it anymore, it’s hard to predict.

“I used to think, even a year ago, that I had a wide variety of shows, just because I would play with a rap group or a rock group, or play a dance club or a dirty art-space sorta deal. But these days, it’s been even more extreme, just the random show offers coming in. Last Friday, I played a sweet-sixteen party with Diplo, for this rich girl in L.A., and that was just all these high school kids ready to get crazy. That was extremely weird and amazing, a very intimate vibe—one of the more wild shows in recent history.”

Playing people’s memories

The recent history of Girl Talk, by the way, has been captured for the ages by filmmaker Brett Gaylor, of Montreal’s EyeSteelFilm (S.P.I.T., Punk le Vote, Chairman George). Gaylor’s making a documentary called The Basement Tapes—“tracing the history of sample-based music as well as the current state of copyright,” says Gillis. Interviews with legal authorities and legislators (Doyle is one) are interspersed with Girl Talk gab and road gore, and if you can’t wait for the movie, help make it—footage is free to grab, remix and return at opensourcecinema.org.

“Gregg’s a fantastic way into the issue,” says Gaylor, “because what he does is so much visual fun, and represents the emerging participatory media culture, not only in the way he makes his music but at his shows. The crowd really gets into it—they get up on stage with him and become part of the show.

“He’s almost playing people’s memories and emotions more than he’s sampling. He’s mixing the song that was playing at their high school prom and the one that was playing when they first went to third base with their girlfriend, and creates this state of euphoria that way.”

Girl Talk’s recent Coachella set, however, heralded a new challenge. “The intimacy of the club show,” notes Gaylor, “lends itself to people knowing that they come up on stage and pour beer on his head, take his clothes off, do whatever they want. But at a bigger show…”

Gaylor and co. helped ease the transition. “What we did to involve the crowd was, we had cameras wirelessly sending a signal to his VJ, so the crowd was finding itself up on the stage behind him. My cinematographer was describing how he’d got a great shot of Gregg, and he moves the camera over a little to the right, and who is there in this fantastic two-shot but Paris Hilton, dancing with Gregg a week before she goes to jail!

“He’s had quite a year, it’s been fun to tag along.”

With Ghislain Poirier at Club Soda on
Saturday, June 30, midnight, $22.50