Girl Talk, The Buskirk-Chumley Theatre, 3.3.07
The things to like about Girl Talk (aka Gregg Gillis), are numerous. He’s a lab technician from Pittsburgh by day, and by night rents cars to play his immaculately created mashups to crowds of sweaty acolytes, without telling his boss. For all intents and purposes, the music is impossible not to like, for the same reasons that it was also pretty unfair to list his record in your 2006 year-end list. As my friend Mike reiterated to me last night when we watched his mind-numbing performance at Bloomington’s Buskirk-Chumley Theatre, of course everyone likes his music, because he takes the best rhythms, breaks, and vocal clips from the last 30 years of pop music (mostly chart-pop, 90s alternative/indie rock, and rap) and smashes them all together, simultaneously, mostly really well. It’s the equivalent, for me, of listening to six or seven radio stations all at once, Zaireeka-style, and occasionally ending up with something approaching transcendence. It’s classic rock radio for the MySpace generation.
The things to dislike about Girl Talk's performance persona, unfortunately, are equal in number, perhaps surpassing what I loved about Night Ripper when it came in the mail last fall (and, with the weight of a thousand ironies, was subsequently stolen from my unlocked car less than a month later). Gillis is the geeky, hyper-active pop-savant, incredibly over-stimulated and with nothing to restrain his after-work energy. He thus can’t stop with the usual DJ trope of spinning songs one after another, the occasional beat-juggle, or attempted mash-up thrown in for good measure. He adamantly refuses to be labeled a “DJ” in the traditional sense of the word, an act of self-demarcation both pragmatic and ass-saving, especially in an age when “cred-check” isn’t simply a term used when you try to buy a PS3 at Best Buy. Gillis is a Spacebar Pop Star, a guy who sits at home for months matching BPMs and syncing Fleetwood Mac’s “Gypsy” with the Quad City DJs, but who compensates for the fact that he can't brand himself a DJ (he just plays stuff from his laptop that he’s already made) with hipster spazziness--typically subsumed by hundreds of writhing clubgoers blocking him from view. When those people are removed, so is Gillis’ gimmick; the curtain falls and reveals a guy hitting the spacebar in his underwear (literally). I’ll get to Saturday's performance in a minute. For the next paragraph however, the music itself.
As mentioned hundreds of thousands of times, and buoyed by this voluminous Wikipedia entry, Girl Talk’s music is the embodiment of joycore—a frenzied, non-stop amalgam of pop moments from Gillis’ age cohort (actually, anyone from 16-35). Paula Abdul and CeCe Peniston share space with X-Ray Spex and Neutral Milk Hotel, but only the most awesome parts are included---in the process, Gillis reinvents Jock Jams for those never inclined to do anything remotely jockish. It’s the sort of irony laden non-escapism escapism that renders Gillis running onstage last night wearing a cheap sweatsuit, headband, and what looked like wrestling shoes perfectly fitting. And from a purely musical perspective, the way he makes the transformation is actually pretty brilliant. For instance, as we all know, the Ripper song “Minute By Minute” lifts Jeff Mangum’s pre-song countdown from “Holland, 1945” (“2…1,2,3,4”) and refashions it as the entry point for an arena-anthem symbolist fresco. I watched the effect of transformation last night from the balcony of the theatre, as attendees pumped their fists repeatedly, shouting the numbers over and over as if they were waiting for Missy Elliott to kickoff to Steely Dan.
Okay, now to Saturday night’s show. I was just as initially shocked that Gillis would bring his act to the Midwest as I was to hear that Misshapes was kicking off a nationwide tour that included a stop in Indianapolis (I had to ask Maura what Misshapes was. She replied: "Doucheteria."). Perhaps it's my hickish naivete, but I assumed that these people, despite relying as much as they do on the Internet for the distribution of their iconic-ness, would think twice before setting foot outside the comfort zone of the East Coast, but I guess not. The sold out crowd Saturday night certainly proved me wrong. Second, Gillis was performing as the capper to what was essentially an BFA student’s senior thesis project—something called the “d-star fashion show”—and thus was booked to play at the Buskirk-Chumley theatre, a not-too recently renovated venue typically suited for the likes of Richard Thompson, Ralph Stanley, and lectures by David Halberstam or whatever (here’s the view from the stage). I have seen the Decemberists, Calexico, and even the Flaming Lips there (back in 1999), but I was extremely wary of Gillis being able to pull off his controlled-chaos dance-attack in a place where people typically like to sit down and drink vanilla lattes while performers play classical guitar. I took a spot in the balcony to watch, and I was proved right. Not that that makes me smart or anything.
The failure of Gillis’ show last night wasn’t strictly his fault, but happened as the result of a confluence of factors. First, the venue. A simple trip through any number of New York-centric music blogs (read: half of all music blogs) or a quick scan through YouTube would reveal that a Girl Talk show inherently requires the crowd to surround Gillis and his laptop like pilgrims around a reluctant demi-god, rendering him the most hardcore participant-host imaginable. And the planners of this show should have known (maybe they did know) that the people who run the B-C weren’t going to let some skinny spaz from Pittsburgh and hundreds of aspiring club-kids with no clubs risk ruining their immaculate building, stage, PA system, etc, once they saw them start doing their thing.
But equally responsible is Gillis’ strange melding of performance genres. As mentioned earlier, he denies being a DJ in interviews, because that entails actually doing something in a live setting. That puts his live presence in a state of limbo between the largely invisible DJ and the stage-center wankery of a rock star. In other words, Gillis wants you to know who he is, what he looks like, how he’s dressed, how he dances, etc., but you’re also supposed to be dancing like crazy yourself at the same time. It’s a weird cross-breed between performance art and 80’s night at a dance club, and it’s understandable to be confused as to what audience role to assume.
Gillis opened the show by running onstage in track gear, hitting the spacebar, and driving the crowd into an immediate frenzy. At first they were smashed (about 400 of them) into the orchestra pit (best viewed from my perspective in the balcony), which is not nearly as big as it looks without something there for scale. After about 3 minutes, about 3/4 of them had climbed onto the stage, and the show proceeded apace, until the crowd broke one of the B-C’s speakers. They politiely passed it overhead, crowd-surfing style, until it reached stage right, and then it disappeared, along with about half of Gillis’ expected energy. The bass was now almost completely gone, and it became hard to hear Gillis' music over the roar of the crowd, but that didn’t stop Gillis or the crowd of mostly high-schoolers and college undergraduates (I felt seriously old, aided by the fact that I was recovering from a flu that dangled me over death’s balcony like Suge Knight after half a bottle of Cristal) from rocking out. On top of that, Gillis’ homemade sound-system, apparently a direct-out from his laptop into the theatre’s PA, kept feeding back again and again and again, making a noise akin to how a woofer would sound when loudly clearing its throat.
But then, it all just fell apart. After about 20 minutes of an all-out dance party seemingly held together by duct-tape, RCA cables, and Red Bull, the house lights came on and the crowd was forcefully directed to leave the stage by venue security. This took a while, and finally, the girl who started the party got onto the PA and just yelled at everyone to quickly vacate the performance area or be asked to leave. The kids were collegial, and continued to dance in the orchestra pit area they’d previously occupied. When the crowd initially left the stage, I imagined him backstage, screaming, “Noooooo! My aura! Don’t take away my aura!”, but he continued the show regardless, becoming increasingly unclothed as he went. He brought his laptop, which was sitting on a speech-team lectern, to the very edge of the stage, turning it backwards so his back would be to the audience (allowing me to hazard guesses at what sort of software was on his cheap-ass Dell), and continued his show all by his lonesome. He would hit the spacebar, dance like a spaz, hold audience members’ hands, and wear clothing items they threw onstage (including a girl’s blazer, two bras, a scarf, a handbag, and a trucker hat), like a teenage Tom Jones at his sister’s slumber party. The crowd was mostly dancing, and some of the weirder ones were idolizing him with no apparent recognition of the irony with which he so thoroughly cloaks himself.
A few of the folks I was with were blushing with embarassment for Gillis, as he ripped off his undershirt Hulk Hogan-style, and continually neglected to pull up his sweatpants, which kept falling down, revealing his boxer-briefs. He’s skinnier than I am (which is saying a lot), and it was awkward to watch his sweaty back and boney butt bob up and down as he tapped away at his keyboard, like I was spying on him in his bedroom or something. The audio problems of course continued, and the thundering feedback (“braaaaaaaaap”) regularly interrupted his set. The most enjoyable accidental irony, however, came about 2/3 of the way through his set, during the guitar riff from Nazareth’s biker-rock anthem “Hair of the Dog” (the one that goes “Now you’re messin’ with a son-of-a-bitch”). As if on cue, the monitor tech, an appropriately burly, long-haired, and bearded dude, came on stage to try and rescue the horrible sound quality, to no avail.
Gillis performs best when the “absent” part of his absent presence is highlighted. His central gimmick is a populist one, becoming one with his people and letting them become the visual focus. But last night, the fact that he was all alone on stage made him more of a “present-absence,” or maybe just a "present-presence." Having to sit and watch him for an hour was not fun, but kind of sad. The kids in front kept dancing, mostly because what else were they going to do? Given the right circumstances (lack of sickness), I would have been down there too. As it happened, though, I ended up (lamely) watching from above, able to observe at a remove the emperor with his clothes removed and others' scattered around the stage.
What last night did prove to me is that the long-romanticized notion of a ‘subculture’ does not exist anymore (if it ever really did exist). Starting with the rise of punk in the mid-to-late Seventies, British academics scrambled to theorize why and how kids were rebelling through style—you know, safety pins and mohawks and stuff—coming to the conclusion that bricolage was a fashionable way to tell “mainstream” society to fuck off. A fine gesture from the ivory tower to recognize the disaffected youth, sure, but what they failed to realize back then is exponentially truer now—there is no monolithic “mainstream,” and the channels that proper culture uses to disseminate its commercially-sanctioned messages are the same channels that these rebellious youths use to do the same thing. Zines (most of which sucked) have become blogs (ahem), and the majority of the “indie rock” variety of same are selling ad space and hyping the next big thing before that thing’s demos are mastered. MySpace and the increasingly annoying South by Southwest festival expedite the ability of the “average” music fan to feel like he/she is part of the industry, coalescing to commodify music fandom to a heretofore unheard of degree. Last night's show, by a guy who sells his music through a label called Illegal Art, demonstrated in stark terms the fact that any difference between the "underground" and "mainstream" is one only created through the discourse of the attendees.
What was impressive, though, was how a dude from Pittsburgh with a laptop and loose-fitting sweatpants had more pictures taken of a horrible performance on Saturday night than exist of every Beatles show ever played. Excess and, to a slightly lesser degree, irony aren’t just becoming integral parts of music production, but also crucial parts of its enjoyment. And Gillis, more than anyone else I can think of, blurs beyond recognition the line between musician and rabid acolyte. As he clicked away Saturday night, wearing the cast-off clothes of those in attendance, he frequently reached behind his back without looking, grabbing the hands of audience members who were supposed to be surrounding him onstage, in a display of solidarity or a plea for performative assistance. I’m not sure which, but probably a little bit of both.
The things to dislike about Girl Talk's performance persona, unfortunately, are equal in number, perhaps surpassing what I loved about Night Ripper when it came in the mail last fall (and, with the weight of a thousand ironies, was subsequently stolen from my unlocked car less than a month later). Gillis is the geeky, hyper-active pop-savant, incredibly over-stimulated and with nothing to restrain his after-work energy. He thus can’t stop with the usual DJ trope of spinning songs one after another, the occasional beat-juggle, or attempted mash-up thrown in for good measure. He adamantly refuses to be labeled a “DJ” in the traditional sense of the word, an act of self-demarcation both pragmatic and ass-saving, especially in an age when “cred-check” isn’t simply a term used when you try to buy a PS3 at Best Buy. Gillis is a Spacebar Pop Star, a guy who sits at home for months matching BPMs and syncing Fleetwood Mac’s “Gypsy” with the Quad City DJs, but who compensates for the fact that he can't brand himself a DJ (he just plays stuff from his laptop that he’s already made) with hipster spazziness--typically subsumed by hundreds of writhing clubgoers blocking him from view. When those people are removed, so is Gillis’ gimmick; the curtain falls and reveals a guy hitting the spacebar in his underwear (literally). I’ll get to Saturday's performance in a minute. For the next paragraph however, the music itself.
As mentioned hundreds of thousands of times, and buoyed by this voluminous Wikipedia entry, Girl Talk’s music is the embodiment of joycore—a frenzied, non-stop amalgam of pop moments from Gillis’ age cohort (actually, anyone from 16-35). Paula Abdul and CeCe Peniston share space with X-Ray Spex and Neutral Milk Hotel, but only the most awesome parts are included---in the process, Gillis reinvents Jock Jams for those never inclined to do anything remotely jockish. It’s the sort of irony laden non-escapism escapism that renders Gillis running onstage last night wearing a cheap sweatsuit, headband, and what looked like wrestling shoes perfectly fitting. And from a purely musical perspective, the way he makes the transformation is actually pretty brilliant. For instance, as we all know, the Ripper song “Minute By Minute” lifts Jeff Mangum’s pre-song countdown from “Holland, 1945” (“2…1,2,3,4”) and refashions it as the entry point for an arena-anthem symbolist fresco. I watched the effect of transformation last night from the balcony of the theatre, as attendees pumped their fists repeatedly, shouting the numbers over and over as if they were waiting for Missy Elliott to kickoff to Steely Dan.
Okay, now to Saturday night’s show. I was just as initially shocked that Gillis would bring his act to the Midwest as I was to hear that Misshapes was kicking off a nationwide tour that included a stop in Indianapolis (I had to ask Maura what Misshapes was. She replied: "Doucheteria."). Perhaps it's my hickish naivete, but I assumed that these people, despite relying as much as they do on the Internet for the distribution of their iconic-ness, would think twice before setting foot outside the comfort zone of the East Coast, but I guess not. The sold out crowd Saturday night certainly proved me wrong. Second, Gillis was performing as the capper to what was essentially an BFA student’s senior thesis project—something called the “d-star fashion show”—and thus was booked to play at the Buskirk-Chumley theatre, a not-too recently renovated venue typically suited for the likes of Richard Thompson, Ralph Stanley, and lectures by David Halberstam or whatever (here’s the view from the stage). I have seen the Decemberists, Calexico, and even the Flaming Lips there (back in 1999), but I was extremely wary of Gillis being able to pull off his controlled-chaos dance-attack in a place where people typically like to sit down and drink vanilla lattes while performers play classical guitar. I took a spot in the balcony to watch, and I was proved right. Not that that makes me smart or anything.
The failure of Gillis’ show last night wasn’t strictly his fault, but happened as the result of a confluence of factors. First, the venue. A simple trip through any number of New York-centric music blogs (read: half of all music blogs) or a quick scan through YouTube would reveal that a Girl Talk show inherently requires the crowd to surround Gillis and his laptop like pilgrims around a reluctant demi-god, rendering him the most hardcore participant-host imaginable. And the planners of this show should have known (maybe they did know) that the people who run the B-C weren’t going to let some skinny spaz from Pittsburgh and hundreds of aspiring club-kids with no clubs risk ruining their immaculate building, stage, PA system, etc, once they saw them start doing their thing.
But equally responsible is Gillis’ strange melding of performance genres. As mentioned earlier, he denies being a DJ in interviews, because that entails actually doing something in a live setting. That puts his live presence in a state of limbo between the largely invisible DJ and the stage-center wankery of a rock star. In other words, Gillis wants you to know who he is, what he looks like, how he’s dressed, how he dances, etc., but you’re also supposed to be dancing like crazy yourself at the same time. It’s a weird cross-breed between performance art and 80’s night at a dance club, and it’s understandable to be confused as to what audience role to assume.
Gillis opened the show by running onstage in track gear, hitting the spacebar, and driving the crowd into an immediate frenzy. At first they were smashed (about 400 of them) into the orchestra pit (best viewed from my perspective in the balcony), which is not nearly as big as it looks without something there for scale. After about 3 minutes, about 3/4 of them had climbed onto the stage, and the show proceeded apace, until the crowd broke one of the B-C’s speakers. They politiely passed it overhead, crowd-surfing style, until it reached stage right, and then it disappeared, along with about half of Gillis’ expected energy. The bass was now almost completely gone, and it became hard to hear Gillis' music over the roar of the crowd, but that didn’t stop Gillis or the crowd of mostly high-schoolers and college undergraduates (I felt seriously old, aided by the fact that I was recovering from a flu that dangled me over death’s balcony like Suge Knight after half a bottle of Cristal) from rocking out. On top of that, Gillis’ homemade sound-system, apparently a direct-out from his laptop into the theatre’s PA, kept feeding back again and again and again, making a noise akin to how a woofer would sound when loudly clearing its throat.
But then, it all just fell apart. After about 20 minutes of an all-out dance party seemingly held together by duct-tape, RCA cables, and Red Bull, the house lights came on and the crowd was forcefully directed to leave the stage by venue security. This took a while, and finally, the girl who started the party got onto the PA and just yelled at everyone to quickly vacate the performance area or be asked to leave. The kids were collegial, and continued to dance in the orchestra pit area they’d previously occupied. When the crowd initially left the stage, I imagined him backstage, screaming, “Noooooo! My aura! Don’t take away my aura!”, but he continued the show regardless, becoming increasingly unclothed as he went. He brought his laptop, which was sitting on a speech-team lectern, to the very edge of the stage, turning it backwards so his back would be to the audience (allowing me to hazard guesses at what sort of software was on his cheap-ass Dell), and continued his show all by his lonesome. He would hit the spacebar, dance like a spaz, hold audience members’ hands, and wear clothing items they threw onstage (including a girl’s blazer, two bras, a scarf, a handbag, and a trucker hat), like a teenage Tom Jones at his sister’s slumber party. The crowd was mostly dancing, and some of the weirder ones were idolizing him with no apparent recognition of the irony with which he so thoroughly cloaks himself.
A few of the folks I was with were blushing with embarassment for Gillis, as he ripped off his undershirt Hulk Hogan-style, and continually neglected to pull up his sweatpants, which kept falling down, revealing his boxer-briefs. He’s skinnier than I am (which is saying a lot), and it was awkward to watch his sweaty back and boney butt bob up and down as he tapped away at his keyboard, like I was spying on him in his bedroom or something. The audio problems of course continued, and the thundering feedback (“braaaaaaaaap”) regularly interrupted his set. The most enjoyable accidental irony, however, came about 2/3 of the way through his set, during the guitar riff from Nazareth’s biker-rock anthem “Hair of the Dog” (the one that goes “Now you’re messin’ with a son-of-a-bitch”). As if on cue, the monitor tech, an appropriately burly, long-haired, and bearded dude, came on stage to try and rescue the horrible sound quality, to no avail.
Gillis performs best when the “absent” part of his absent presence is highlighted. His central gimmick is a populist one, becoming one with his people and letting them become the visual focus. But last night, the fact that he was all alone on stage made him more of a “present-absence,” or maybe just a "present-presence." Having to sit and watch him for an hour was not fun, but kind of sad. The kids in front kept dancing, mostly because what else were they going to do? Given the right circumstances (lack of sickness), I would have been down there too. As it happened, though, I ended up (lamely) watching from above, able to observe at a remove the emperor with his clothes removed and others' scattered around the stage.
What last night did prove to me is that the long-romanticized notion of a ‘subculture’ does not exist anymore (if it ever really did exist). Starting with the rise of punk in the mid-to-late Seventies, British academics scrambled to theorize why and how kids were rebelling through style—you know, safety pins and mohawks and stuff—coming to the conclusion that bricolage was a fashionable way to tell “mainstream” society to fuck off. A fine gesture from the ivory tower to recognize the disaffected youth, sure, but what they failed to realize back then is exponentially truer now—there is no monolithic “mainstream,” and the channels that proper culture uses to disseminate its commercially-sanctioned messages are the same channels that these rebellious youths use to do the same thing. Zines (most of which sucked) have become blogs (ahem), and the majority of the “indie rock” variety of same are selling ad space and hyping the next big thing before that thing’s demos are mastered. MySpace and the increasingly annoying South by Southwest festival expedite the ability of the “average” music fan to feel like he/she is part of the industry, coalescing to commodify music fandom to a heretofore unheard of degree. Last night's show, by a guy who sells his music through a label called Illegal Art, demonstrated in stark terms the fact that any difference between the "underground" and "mainstream" is one only created through the discourse of the attendees.
What was impressive, though, was how a dude from Pittsburgh with a laptop and loose-fitting sweatpants had more pictures taken of a horrible performance on Saturday night than exist of every Beatles show ever played. Excess and, to a slightly lesser degree, irony aren’t just becoming integral parts of music production, but also crucial parts of its enjoyment. And Gillis, more than anyone else I can think of, blurs beyond recognition the line between musician and rabid acolyte. As he clicked away Saturday night, wearing the cast-off clothes of those in attendance, he frequently reached behind his back without looking, grabbing the hands of audience members who were supposed to be surrounding him onstage, in a display of solidarity or a plea for performative assistance. I’m not sure which, but probably a little bit of both.
Labels: concert
posted by marathonpacks at 5:04 AM
28 Comments:
The last twenty minutes (well, okay, almost the whole thing) felt like was like a dying horse, that just needed to be shot.
I think the only thing you didn't mention that also frustrated me was the crowd-surfing. Crowd-surfing? Seriously? At what's supposed to be a dance party? Come the fuck on.
At least there's TV on the Radio this thursday...
I'd never felt so unsure as to how I was supposed to behave at a concert as I felt last night. I don't know what to think about Gillis anymore. Thanks for writing this though. It saves me the trouble of having to explain the mess.
Thanks for reminding me why I visit marathonpacks almost every day, and why I bookmarked you in the first place.
Interesting review, but I think you are missing something in your theory of Girl Talk and club subculture. Yeah, sure Gillis is ridiculous and over-the-top and everything, but you keep addressing him like he’s a performer. (I hate to call it Rockism, but I will mention it in a parenthetical). He isn’t; he’s a party facilitator. And yes, last night’s show sucked, but the crowd of young people that just kept going at it shows to me that there is a possibility left for subculture, and not the contrary, like you argue. Club culture, so far, has been successful because of the totally mundane and superficial reliance on events, namely, parties, and actions, namely, dancing. The “rock star” cult of personality hasn’t totally devoured club culture yet, since everyone is playing, stealing, and remixing everyone else’s music; the technoculture of mp3s, music, etc has allowed for a subculture to form that hasn’t (yet) been crippled under its own personality, because the personality can’t be manifested in individuals. I know I sound naïve, but I am one of those young clubkids without a club, and I think that a little anti-rockist idealism is in order.
thanks for your comment michael, but i think you're over-parsing language a bit. "party facilitator" is surely an interesting way to approach what gillis does, but denying the fact that he's putting on a performance is missing what he's doing. someone can surely perform the act of "party facilitating." it's an act, and it's pretty far from rockist to say that someone gets up in front of a crowd and puts on a show for them. that's what christina aguilera does, that's what the actors in "the producers" do, etc.
i appreciate your outlook on club cultures as free from individual personality, but i think that's where we're going to have to differ. the "rockstar cult of personality" wouldn't be the way i would describe what's taken over club culture, nor do i necessarily understand how something like that would cease something to be understood as a club culture.
you should have come to Charalambides at Landlocked. it was truly amazing. slow snow outside the window, ghosts and echoes.
I felt pretty much the same way about the Girl Talk concert I saw last year. I enjoy his songs, but they are actually quite terrible as live dance music. Since everything is pretty much pre-programmed before he gets there, there's no taking into account the vibe of the crowd, which is, of course, what real DJs do. And that stuff where the audience mobs him is so pointless. What exactly are we supposed to be looking at?
true, subcultures, true.
I think I'm missing how the last two paragraphs tie into the rest of the post--are you saying that Gillis' unwise decision to play in a theater, where his usually-very-effective act would clearly bomb, was due to him being tricked into thinking he was a professional, and thus could give a performance in the same way Richard Thompson could? Or was it that the people in the audience had been tricked into thinking he was a bigger deal than he actually was and so were ennacting a kind of imagined subculture in a way that just ended up looking embarassing? Not trying to be snotty, because I think you're saying something interesting, and I'd like to get it!
Critics seem to think of subcultures and the mainstream as things that don't exist unless they're wholly separate, but of course they've always mingled, and what you're describing seems to mark a point of intersection, not a contradiction. Things and people have their subcultural elements and their mainstream elements, but that doesn't negate the existence of either. I also think because cultural critic-types' loyalties are always with subcultures (and because they're often consciously cutting themselves off from the mainstream), they can be blind to mainstream culture when it happens. Music is probably the area of pop culture where you're least likely to find a monolithic mainstream right now, because its audience is dwarfed by that for TV and movies. Of course the mainstream and subcultures are coming closer together in the music world--their sales numbers are coming closer together too!
As someone who was up and close the whole night, let me explain a little more behind the disastrous aspects of the show:
The theater was somehow unaware of the seemingly obvious stagecrashing that was going to happen. I was there during the day when all the equipment was being set up and the fashion show was being dress rehearsed, but didn't think to tell or ask anyone about it. How could they not know?
Subsequently, despite having parties at the Buskirk-Chumley where the crowd dances on the stage, it wasn't set up for it that night. Amongst other problems, speaker cords apparently got crushed and wrecked any chance of decent sound. I don't really have anything to say for the parts of Gregg's performance before the sound got mangled, besides that it was a whole lot better than the rest of the set.
Also, don't know if you were into any of the music before Girl Talk, but I'm the DJ who played during the fashion show and before Girl Talk (who actually was performing live and mostly ad-libbed). And I posted a mix from Saturday night up on my (ahem, plug plug) blog, flufftronix.com . Take care, and thanks for coming out.
Also, anyone who's not okay with crowd surfing at the pinnacle of dance parties is probably not going to the right dance parties.
girl talk has said it in countless interviews. the mixing his does at concerts is live. he is a computer musician, just like kid 606, just like jason forrest, just like aphex twin, etc. they all play computers live, performing live renditions of their electronic music. he uses a program called audiomulch and performs those mixes live in realtime. did you see the points where he stepped away from the computer and the same loops played over and over? so it's definitely not simply a "spacebar" thing. it seems unfair of you to go off talking about that when you have no idea how he puts the music together. and when you see him live, it's him doing 100% of his mixes in real time. unlike the opening dj, who was good, but just cued up mixes from the internet that were made by other people.
girl talk says he's not a DJ because he doesn't just play other peoples' tracks un-remixed. when you see him, you go to see "girl talk music." and that is remix music. when you see him live, it's all his own remixes.
girl talk came with tons of new material, new remixes of stuff off of night ripper. if youre a fan, it seems as good as a "computer concert" can get. its a real glimpse into how he puts his stuff together.
regardless of that, when you go see girl talk live, it's a computer music show. he does his best to interact and be one with his audience. i think it's amazing that he is even in the same league as more traditiona "rock" style performers. where people say the girl talk show was their "favorite" of the year and so on, rave reviews from everywhere. i dont think theres any laptop performer in that arena right now.
i dont think that show was the best. it wasnt all on girl talk though. 1) the PA sucked. kept clipping. wasn't loud. real volume would have helped a ton. 2) they wouldnt give him a microphone, he kept asking and they wouldnt do it. it's hard enough that it's just a guy with a laptop and then they deny him of a mic.
what you didn't mention, or maybe didn't know, is that his publicist treats dude like royalty, which sort of undoes his whole persona of regular stiff by day, rock star by night.
i think it's more than a little funny that Jem is the Girl Talk archetype.
Not trying to be snotty, because I think you're saying something interesting, and I'd like to get it!
To Mike (Eppy):
Sorry! What I'm meaning is what you're saying, actually--I placed the "blame" (and perhaps I was a bit too shrill at points, as others have noted) equally on the venue and Gillis' own music, which for better or worse refuses to fit in either the DJ or rockstar category. In a tighty-whitey venue like last night, it's just a recipe for disaster. It's just that, literally, the emperor had no clothes (man i should have used that in the piece).
Why I'm using Hebdige's conception of subculture is b/c it's still, for whatever reason, the main one relied upon when the term is used, even unconsciously. And it's the one that uses a monolithic "mainstream" as the straw man against the rebellious youth. And my thing now is that youth aren't rebelling against anything except one another, and, as you say, the concept of a "mainstream" now is just weird-sounding.
@Anonymous:
I watched from both the stage and the sound booth in back, it was definitely Gregg who was clipping. Sound guy wouldn't turn up the PA louder for fear of it blowing the amps or speakers; Gregg kept turning it up in response and so the sound guy wouldn't cut him any slack, repeat repeat etc. etc. And they wouldn't give him another mic because (and I'm not clear which) the mic he was using either got stolen or destroyed. Not knowing who or if it would be paid for, they didn't want to risk another one. Granted not how I would run things in either situation, but the whole debacle just kind of illustrated the lack of proper communication going on.
I don't want to get into an argument over what's DJing and what's not DJing, but there are a lot of people who do stuff just like what Gregg does and call themselves DJs. (And if I were to play live a mix of just my own mashups in Ableton, I wouldn't call it not-DJing). Schemantics mess.
All that's really important is if you can get the kids sweaty. And at that if you can do that despite major setbacks, more power to you. I respect what Gregg does a lot; mostly based on that.
yay. not only did girl talk suck. but so does the current state of music and its general direction. Did you just sit up in that balcony like waldorf and statler heckling fozzie all night? Perhaps if the plebians had read their theory, like Hebdige, they'd seen all this coming. "Not surpisingly, the resulting mix was somewhat unstable: all these elements constantly threatened to seperate and return to their original sources." [25]
-JM (not wussy-looking)
oh, snap. he just took ur
own theory and schoold u.chk out my facebook pics of chks makin out at girl talk. hot!
d-*
"MySpace and the increasingly annoying South by Southwest festival expedite the ability of the “average” music fan to feel like he/she is part of the industry, coalescing to commodify music fandom to a heretofore unheard of (and frankly, distressing) degree."
Coalescing to commodify?? Distressing?? Are you kidding me? So the sound system sucked, jeez, we get it! Oh no, the kids with their iPods are crashing your little indie rock party.
oh i forgot to mention...everyone who comments is invited to my little indie rock party next weekend. don't bring your iPods.
girltalk's publicist does not treat him like royality. in reality his publicist is a personal friend of his. completely outside of music biz bullshit
and i think the original writer of this was spending a bit too much time thinking of clever stuff to say in his blog rather than drinking a beer, dancing with someone, and having fun. if you sit back and worry about your blog all night, youre not gonna enjoy girltalk
Please see Exhibit A re : Girl Talk's publicist. Does it really matter if they're friends?
I don't agree entirely with the Marathonpacks view, since it sounds like the onus should be on whomever organized this event and not the artist, but there's more than meets the eye when it comes to Girl Talk - especially the rules about what you may or may not interview him about.
name one dj who does an hour of his/her own remixes, all cut up and re-arranged, all done in real time. no one elses mixes. no song played un-remixed.
did you ever think that girltalk needs a publicist because every magazine, college paper, blog, high school paper in the world is trying to interview him? and he's supposed to keep track of all of this himself?
and did you ever think that girltalk maybe doesnt want to talk about legal stuff because he could eventually end up in jail because of his comments?
and did you ever think that this guy has to work on music, get remixes done for people, go to a job everyday, occasionally hang out with his real friends/family, do interviews every day, fly every weekend to do shows so he wants to maybe make sure that the interviews are legit, rather than sucking up the little bit of free time he actually has?
and did you think that maybe since he can draw between 400-1000 people in every major city in the USA that is he needs a booking agent and is worth the money because people pay to see him? why is this not as legit as any other band or dj?
also, sorry for posting so much, but that article you linked to is bullshit. you have to talk to girltalks publicist to get an official interview with him. if you want to shoot him a line about anything, he has an email and a myspace. i've myspaced messaged him and he wrote back, very quickly too. i wasnt even expecting a reply, knowing how busy he must be.
if you dont believe me, hit him up myspace.com/girltalkmusic
I was kinda surprised to see that he has a legitimate (if indie-centric) booking agent. Hope he gives him a good talking-to if the gig was advanced so badly. One of the reasons you get a booking agent is so you don't have to worry about shit like not having a microphone or fighting with the soundguy over levels.
Thanks for the response, MP.
Wow, this was incredibly long and incredibly serious - for what purpose?
Is this your thesis paper?
WHY?
Just seems silly is all. A show can suck (especially if it's a laptop DJ we're talking about) but does it really need to conclude with an incredibly baroque discussion of what makes a subculture?
Huh?
wow, you are thinking way too hard. after some serious anxiety i realized to make the best of every moment of my life and this is strictly what it is about. the other conflicts can go to hell. let them.
you, sir, are a buzzkill. let fun shit be fun. yeah its gimmicky but its pure goodtimes. no need for it to be psychoanalyzed.
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