Using and Confusing Beats That You’ve Probably Heard: Girl Talk’s Gregg Gillis

Gregg Gillis (a.k.a. Girl Talk) is the man behind the ’80s party jam schizo-mashup album Night Ripper, which, if you haven’t heard, is the best party record of 2006. Unlike other mashup albums, Gillis doesn’t build his songs from cleverly matched vocals and backing tracks (like the 2001 “Stroke of Genie-us,” which matched the Strokes with Christina Aguilera), instead opting for sample-on-sample-on-sample overload. For example, the track “Bounce That” samples Three 6 Mafia, LCD Soundsystem, Stevie Wonder, Wrekx-N-Effect, Wire, and Blur. The result? Something both startlingly original and grin-inducingly familiar.

Chatting with Gillis, who was doing laundry at the time, it became evident that the man behind these cut-and-paste electro-pastiches has just as wide a musical palette as one would expect from an artist that proves that everyone could benefit from a similarly pretension-free attitude toward music.

You can catch Gillis at the Be The Riott Festival this weekend, Nov. 11 at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, where he’ll be replicating the schizophrenic sounds of Night Ripper onstage.

Daily Californian: Did you make your start as a traditional DJ, or did you always do laptop-pop mash-ups?

Gregg Gillis: I can’t say. I started out as an electronic artist, always making sample-based music. My early records were collage music, kind of in the realm of people like John Oswald … more experimental, found-sound type things.

DC: When did you start making stuff like Night Ripper, stuff more suited for the dance floor?

GG: I think it came out of my live show—I would do more of an extravagant show early on, and I would demand that people dance, have a good time, but it wasn’t necessarily dance music. So I think over the years it turned into more of a beat-oriented thing, and actually my second album was beat-oriented but not as sample heavy. It was 95 percent samples, kind of like Night Ripper, but not as obvious. It faded into that style, more of a hybrid, as a need to get people to dance.

DC: Is that how your material was written, live? Or is there a separate process?

GG: It comes from the live show. My last album came out two years ago, and Night Ripper was definitely a product of my favorite material from the live show. I was always improvising within a set structure, since it’s all from a laptop, and I’m matching different loops.

DC: In terms of the spectrum between mash-up artists, or more obscure samples, like Avalanches and DJ Shadow, where do you feel you fit? Do you consider yourself a mash-up artist?

GG: I don’t know where I fit, I write both types of music. Mash-ups can be fun when done well. But making more original music out of samples is what I’m trying to do. I want to build from familiar hooks you recognize, but recontextualizing it within a Girl Talk song.

DC: How did you get to combining ‘80s party jam stuff with commercial rock radio stuff?

GG: It wasn’t that big of a conscious decision—it’s what sounds fun. I like everything in its original form that goes on my songs. These are things that I like that I’m trying to fit together.

DC: Do you ever feel the need to pull out stuff that nobody else has heard before?

GG: That’s really not my style—but it’s cool when other people do it. A lot of times, there is a more obscure sample, but that’s just because it sounds good.

DC: What are the new things you’re excited about right now?

GG: The new Rick Ross, the new Justin Timberlake, the new Christina Aguilera. Those are the three that I’m really excited about right now.

DC: Is there a particular track that you feel is where you really got it right?

GG: Whatever’s new, that’s what’s exciting to me. But after reading reviews, the personal highlight to me, and to reviewers, is the Biggie Small’s “Juicy” verse over Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.” I spent a lot of time debating over that—it’s one that I really liked, but I thought maybe it was too corny, that people might not go for it, that it might be too much, but people seemed to really respond to it.

DC: Were you surprised by your critical success?

GG: Not necessarily. I’ve said this a lot, but after making this weird music out of pop music for like six years, especially when I did it around 2001, it seemed that I was doing something really out-of-place, especially at indie clubs—“here’s this jackass messing with pop samples.” It seems like that’s faded.

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