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 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. Girl Talk, a.k.a. Gregg Gillis, is the ideal ambassador/DJ/producer to revive the relevance and exuberance of the mash-up with “Night Ripper,” a 42-minute opus that samples 164 artists.
“I’m not trained on any instruments, so most of my work is guess and check, trial and error,” Gillis said 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. “… 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.
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.”
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. His music has steadily grown more accessible, leading to “Night Ripper.”
“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.
“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.”
