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Girl Talk, The Buskirk-Chumley Theatre, 3.3.07

Monday, March 5, 2007

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.

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