Words by: Bill Zimmerman
Photo by: Andrew Strasser
2006 may have been Girl Talk’s break out year, but in 2008 he brought his frantic laptop creations to an even bigger audience. Gregg Gillis released his fourth Girl Talk project, Feed the Animals, and finished ’08 with a successful tour – including a Chicago show in front of 4,500 – and inclusion on several year-end best lists. The Pittsburgh artist’s fourth album packs more than 300 unlicensed samples into 14 tracks, spanning various decades and genres. After marking his first complete year as a full-time entertainer – he quit his job as a biomedical engineer in 2007 – Gillis discussed the rise of Girl Talk.
A few years back you had Girl Talk shirts stating “I am not a DJ.” What’s the best way to describe your act?
I’m really interested in the fact that it’s come that there is no clear definition. That alone is like something I even pride myself on, that it kind of fits in somewhere between lots of things. A lot of the people I look up to and the reason I started doing this music were other producers, making beats out of samples. So, I’ve always in a very vague sense just considered myself a producer.
Tell me about living a double life as an engineer and Girl Talk.
Around the summer of 2006, I put out the album Night Ripper and people kind of took to it on the Internet, and prior to that I had been working a day job doing engineering for about like two to three years at that point. And I didn’t tell them about it just because it is very specific what I do. And I was kind of working with some older guys, all really cool guys but there was really no reason to explain what I was doing, especially because it’s like I go out and I rip my shirt off and play a computer. … Eventually, it just reached the point where I had to decide between one or the other.
Girl Talk started at shows often held in basements and art galleries. Tell me about the early years.
The music is accessible now but kind of where it comes from is definitely a more experimental world and my early stuff was like that. …Even back then, I had a small cult following going on in like Pittsburgh and Cleveland, and you know that’s about it, a few people knew who I was but nothing big. It was literally like night and day between pre-Night Ripper and post-Night Ripper.
You often perform shoulder-to-shoulder with the fans. As your popularity grows do you think the shows will be less intimate?
I used to like the shows to be a free-for-all and just let people get on stage if they want, let them go, but once you reach a certain point it’s just not feasible. … This whole project was born from the more intimate shows, but as it grows bigger I think it can transcend that original idea and become something else. I think when you have 4,000 people singing and dancing together that has a lot more heart behind it than 50 people hanging out, sweating it out.
