The Importance of Being Earnest
Girl Talk and the rediscovery of pop music
Laptops cannot experience loneliness, but if ever they could, Girl Talk’s Dell notebook, onstage before his performance at the Mercury Lounge, was as lonely as they come. Perched on a small table on an otherwise empty stage, it’s a small wonder that a concert—and one as complex as Girl Talk’s—was about to emerge from it. But as the opening Ciara sample filled the room, and Girl Talk (nee Greg Gillis) pushed his way to the stage in a three-piece suit and orange sunglasses, the crowd was hardly prepared for the 90-minute performance accompanied by the shedding of layer after layer of sweaty clothing.
Gillis, a Pittsburgh-based DJ known best for his sample-heavy records, is not the first to shake the hips of hips not often shaken—a slew of other DJs and bands have been making music in the “dance music for indie rockers” vein. What sets Girl Talk apart is that his music, while moving more or less in those scenes, mines a much more consciously top-40 aesthetic. Indeed, Night Ripper, Girl Talk’s third full-length, is a record that is littered with music that is very much pop: Biggie raps over Elton John, the Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” sidles up to Oasis, and, in the track “Too Deep” alone, Dr. Dre, Mariah Carey, Juelz, Aerosmith, Smashing Pumpkins, Phantom Planet, and Clipse all get intimate in a 2:29 stretch that somehow avoids both schizophrenia and banality.
Gillis emphasizes the pop element of his record while acknowledging the competing hip-hop and indie rock strains. He particularly bristles at critics who argue he uses the latter to sell an album about the former. “It’s not a hip-hop record, it’s a pop record,” he said. And when it comes to indie rock, he argued that he uses “so few” indie rock samples—and most people, he believes, overstate their importance. “85 percent of the samples are Top 40,” he says.
Despite his investment in Night Ripper as a pop project, Gillis seems to recognize, if only implicitly, his relationship with—and, furthermore, his commentary on—styles of music less likely to be on the radio. Though critics often associate Gillis with the likes of DJ Shadow and RJD2, he says, “I come from a bit more of an experimental background. You can understand underground music and not be the biggest fan.” On Night Ripper, unlike his two earlier efforts, this concern seems to manifest itself as an attention to accessibility.
These days, with Gillis famous for being “the guy who mashed up Biggie and ‘Tiny Dancer,’” Girl Talk’s experimental roots can be difficult to acknowledge. Gillis seems eager, though, to make known his fairly “unpop” beginnings.
In high school, Gillis played in a noise band heavily influenced by Merzbow and the Boredoms. “Once that band ended,” he says, “I got a laptop for the first time in my life.” And so flowed the creative juices.
But true to his traditional approach to music, Gillis hasn’t given up on being in a band.
“It would be cool,” he says, “to have a band just based on recontextualizing pop music. Back then I was focused on making weird music ... My interest in that scene has faded a bit.”
Night Ripper, then, begins to look—and, ultimately, sound—like Gillis’ honest discovery of pop music. “From about 2004 to 2006,” he says,“I was getting into more pop music, just straight up dance music.”
The result is a pop record that bears the marks, however vague, of an experimental sensibility—a record infused with all the giddy delight of a one-time noise rocker finally finding his dancing shoes.
The lonely laptop, avatar of a music democratizing its own production, is not at all alone. “Music,” Gillis says with some finality, “is finally coming back to the people.”