Overheard at this year’s Coachella Music Festival: “I was so done with mash-ups, but then I heard Girl Talk.”
The sentiment is understandable. Ever since the mash-up’s very public coming-out party in 2002, the musical subgenre that cuts a song into another of a contrasting style has been nearly played out – to the extent that MTV organized a legal mash-up album of Jay-Z and Linkin Park songs.
It’s all part of a natural coming of age for mash-ups, an underground art form existing amid a commercial society. And Girl Talk, a.k.a. Gregg Gillis, is the ideal ambassador/DJ/producer to revive the relevance and exuberance of the mash-up.
“I’m not trained on any instruments, so most of my work is guess and check, trial and error,” Gillis said recently from his native Pittsburgh.
He offered – deep breath – a look at the complexity of his craft.
“I’ll sit down, and I’ll cut up this Elton John piano and have it synced up to a beat,” Gillis said. “I really like that as an instrumental. Maybe I’ll throw in a Ciara vocal line tonight at a show. Maybe the next time I’ll try a Wu Tang vocal on it, and I’ll keep it that way for five shows. Then, no, it’s not the right thing.
“Then I try Biggie, and it’s a lockdown. It sounds great. So it’s a slow evolution. Very rarely do I hear music and think it would go well with something else. Randomly one day I was in the car with my girlfriend, and I heard Elton John’s ‘Tiny Dancer,’ and I started rapping a part over it, so I knew I wanted an MC on it. But it took a while to find out which one.”
That Gillis combines Notorious B.I.G. with Elton John is the reason he’s the hottest DJ since MSTRKRFT – and the most marketable mash-up entity since Danger Mouse’s “The Grey Album,” which combined the Beatles’ “White Album” and Jay-Z’s “The Black Album” in 2004.
Fans have responded by taking over Girl Talk shows, jumping onstage and dancing around Gillis as he concentrates on the laptop screens in front of him, never losing the beat.
“I love the pop music nerds and the people who hate rap music but can get down to the album because it’s recontextualized enough so it’s a different entity,” Gillis said.
But to understand Girl Talk’s place in this evolution of mash-up culture, it’s best to start at the beginning.
Mash-ups were introduced to the world several years ago by a Belgian duo that goes by multiple names, including 2 Many DJs and Radio Soulwax. With the help of Napster and other peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, the duo’s mixes – for example, the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” with Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It” – enjoyed global distribution, even as the form raised copyright and domain issues.
Infectious mixes that mashed up the Strokes’ “Hard to Explain” and Christina Aguilera’s “Genie in a Bottle” touched a nerve. Suddenly everybody was a mash-up producer. Countless mediocre bootlegs circulated on the Internet before “The Grey Album” roared into being.
It’s one thing to cut and paste a mash-up in the controlled atmosphere of a studio. Live, it’s a minor miracle – at least to the uninitiated. Onstage, Gillis performs with a laptop loaded with his samples and cuttings. A simple looping software allows him to position and reposition these elements, switching out a Wu Tang rhyme with a Biggie rhyme, crafting a pop symphony on the fly with only a few keystrokes.
“Nobody would pay attention to what I was doing until I mixed Wu-Tang with Jefferson Airplane and Nas with Portishead,” Danger Mouse, a.k.a. Brian Burton, told The Post in 2004. “To me, it was just another way of looking at music … Because (‘The Grey Album’) is not Jay-Z on top of the Beatles. I wanted Jay-Z with the Beatles. It was natural, what I was doing at the time musically, but it also was very tedious.”
Since getting shut down by the Beatles’ record label in 2004 for distributing “The Grey Album,” Danger Mouse has produced a multiplatinum record in the Gorillaz “Demon Days” and a gold record in Gnarls Barkley’s “St. Elsewhere,” which included the hit single “Crazy.”
And Girl Talk is picking up where Danger Mouse left off – only this time the jams are dancier. Gillis has played in noise bands since he was 15, experimenting with glitches and tweaks of instruments, sounds considered obnoxious by others. But his music has steadily grown more accessible, leading to his most recent CD, “Night Ripper,” which is delightfully populist.
“I sample very sincerely, even though some people may interpret that I’m doing it as ironic or being corny,” Gillis said. “That concerns me, the ‘I’ word. This is not about irony. A lot of it has nostalgic connections, which is a lot different than being ironic.”
Many among the hipster cognoscenti have labeled Girl Talk’s mixes ironic because of the exuberance with which he selects samples from songs such as Tag Team’s “Whoop There It Is” or Phil Collins’ “Another Day in Paradise.” But his passion for those songs, and others like them, is sincere.
Gillis has always been a hip-hop fan, and that’s evident in the groundbreaking “Night Ripper,” a 42-minute opus that samples 164 artists including hip-hoppers Clipse, 50 Cent, Arrested Development, Jay-Z, Ludacris, M.I.A., Wreckx- N-Effect, Marky Mark, Busta Rhymes, Kanye West and Missy Elliott.
Making out with the hip-hop in the sweaty mix that typically finds Gillis nearly naked are Elton John, James Taylor, James Brown, Hall and Oates, Boston, Steve Winwood, the Beatles, Phil Collins, Wings, George Michael and Al Green.
That’s bolstered by the more contemporary slate of Madonna, the Verve, Britney Spears, Neutral Milk Hotel, the Breeders, Weezer, Pavement, Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Gwen Stefani, Tears for Fears, Fall Out Boy and Nine Inch Nails.
“I’m not poking fun at soft rock or rap,” Gillis said. “But there is some humor in the music – the ‘Tiny Dancer’-Biggie connection, it’s funny while at the same time it’s cool hearing a classic Elton John track with a classic Biggie song.
“But I don’t want it to seem like I’m poking a joke at the music. … I try to put it on these basic levels where you’re into it or you’re not into it. And so even if you don’t like it aesthetically, you might like it conceptually.”
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-954-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
Girl Talk
MASH-UP|Bluebird Theatre, 3317 E. Colfax Ave.; 8 tonight|$15|ticketmaster.com, 303-830-8497
Mash-up masterpieces
Mash-ups, by their very definition, are one of the most bastardized subgenres in music. Only a few records stand out as classics. Here are three of them.
2 Many DJ’s, “As Heard on Radio Soulwax, Pt. 2” (PIAS) This is where the thin line between the underground and mainstream cultures started to crumble. We fawned over the genius of Skee-Lo rapping over the Breeders and laughed when Destiny’s Child helped out Dolly Parton. Independent women indeed.
Danger Mouse, “The Grey Album” (self-released) This is the greatest concept album in mash-up history. While that’s not saying much, this record is an artistic accomplishment, fusing rhymes and beats from Jay-Z’s “The Black Album” with distorted guitars, rhythms and backing vocals from the Beatles’ “White Album.”
Girl Talk, “Night Ripper” (Illegal Art) This is the ADD entry in the bunch, but it’s also the most fun. Gregg Gillis goes from Trina and Lil’ Wayne into PM Dawn, DJ Shadow, David Banner, Nine Inch Nails and Pharrell featuring Gwen Stefani – all in under 60 seconds.
– Ricardo Baca
