Soup! du Jour #vingt-huit
Girl Talk - Here’s the Thing
Probably the first time and the last time that I will ever post a homework assignment (concert reviews for Musc237 with my fav professor ever - Scott Bacon!) unless I compose some serious flavor in one of music theory classes coming up in the next two terms……..hooray electives! boo engineering!
I would say that I’m pushing at least 60 or 70 concerts in my life. Included in those are a few festivals in New York and Maryland as well as a couple road trips to see bands that weren’t coming through to Philadelphia (for whatever terrible reason that might be). In fact, one of the best things about living in the Philadelphia-area is the music scene. Whether it’s Dave Matthew’s Band at the Tweeter (I’m tired of trying to remember what corporate entity happens to own the huge concert venue in East Philly ((<- Camden)), so I’m stickin’ to the Tweeter for now) or Freezepop at the North Star, there’s a little bit of music for anybody. Of course, going to lots of shows implies I’ve been to a lot of venues.
Even so, Girl Talk managed to play the Starlight Ballroom, which I had never even had the privilege of hearing of before………and for good reason. It’s sits on the fringe of all the bars and clubs near the river on Springgarden . The only reason I found it at all was because there were a bunch of hipsters hanging out in front of the place which is quite the give away if you’re at all familiar with Girl Talk. The highlight of the whole place was the over 21 “bar” area which featured a faux-perimeter of folding tables and two anything-but-bartenders passing out slightly-cold beverages through a window. Nevertheless, I can’t imagine a single better venue for this show.
Girl Talk, the moniker of Pittsburgh DJ, Gregg Gillis, is more a mashing machine than man. Once an engineer, now, the MTV-featured (<- that’s how you know you’ve made it) DJ has released four albums on the Illegal Art Label, mostly because all of his albums are 100% illegal. Just to digress back to the beginning of the last sentence for a piece, I guess the fact that he was an engineer but turned musician makes him my role model to some degree; intriguing. They’re all illegal because he creates mash-ups from out pretty much anything he can find from Rick Springfield (bonus points to anyone who knows what song Rick Springfield is famous for) to M.I.A. with an average track containing about 15 to 20 unlicensed samples. He’s not just mixing fast; he is blending sections of tracks, never the full mix, such as the piano from Chicago “Saturday in the Park” with the verse of Quad City DJ’s “The Train.” It’s not that he is against paying for these samples and has stated before that he would pay for all of his samples if it was possible. It’s just infeasible for anyone to weather the absurd amount of money he would need to license all the samples (17.5 per song * 12 songs per album * 4 albums = a lot of hondo), but why should that stop him from twisting them into something new? The fact that he is still able to produce and distribute his music is a testament to the ensuing collapse of the RIAA. Gregg is playing the Radiohead game and allows people to pay whateve amount they want for his album (including free) because anything more would strictly label him a hypocrite of the worst flavor. Nevertheless, he is a trendsetter for music everywhere. I have a lot more to say on this topic, but my master’s thesis is in systems engineering and not music industry……**sigh**. Putting that into perspective, it’s severely unfortunate that I’m so young, but I already know I’m doing not what I love. Son of a bitch.
To return to some semblance of a concert review, his live shows are absolutely ridiculous which is why an equally ridiculous venue is beyond perfect. Within 10 seconds of Gregg coming out, the crowd was already surging over the stage. I’m told that this is encouraged behavior at Girl Talk shows. This is not a totally new phenomena to me as I’ve been to multiple shows where the crowd is invited on stage for a song or rarely two…..but never the whole set. That’s bold. Give him credit because he gets the award for most people one guy has ever got dancing. The whole place was going nuts and I highly doubt even Weezer gets a reaction like Girl Talk to the intro riff from “Say it Ain’t So” dropping. The crowd just as upbeat but not even half as well informed when “Hustlin” by Rick Ross hit the floor. I reckon that implies the red head sporting SPF50 suntan lotion was the most hip-hop out of anyone there. Regardless, there wasn’t a hipster in the crowd that wasn’t rocking out and it turned out to be the best set of any DJ I’ve ever seen.
