Gregg says aside from the masses of people there, the venue and tour had particular favor in his eyes as well. “I went to the event as a kid in 1995 and it was kind of a big day in my life. I was turned on to a lot of new bands and it was something that I know I’ll never forget. So, when I was invited to play Lollapalooza last year, it meant a lot to me.” Let’s not forget our little boat ride. “To top even the invitation, I had a spot at about five o’clock in the afternoon (and I had shown up a little bit late unfortunately) and I wasn’t sure how it was going to go down. I came out on stage and it was just packed. It was one of the biggest crowds I have ever played in front of and people were going nuts.” It was one of those inane, random, spur-ofthe-moment decisions from earlier in the day that would turn this particular performance into a ride to remember. One of the guys who helps me book shows bought a raft… we had been talking about ideas for things to do with it and at the last minute we decided to just blow the thing up at the very
end of the show and see what happened. I played the set and everything went perfectly, people were really fired up. “At the very end, I got in the raft, launched it into the audience and people just kind of took off with it. They crowd surfed me throughout this crowd of thousands upon thousands of people. The software I use for my music is somewhat loop-based, so I can leave my computer and the same thing will play on loop over and over. So, as I was riding through the crowd, I heard the end of my last album that fatefully enough ends with a Journey song. I made it through the entire audience, this mass of bodies and made it back to the soundboard and was able to fade my set out and end it perfectly. It was definitely a peak moment as far as the last few years go. It was great, because the raft thing was just so arbitrary that it could have just as easily not happened at all. But, it turned into the knockout punch. Looking at the video in retrospect its hard to believe it even went down.” Gregg is a master of the mash-up, some-
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thing that is easy to understand upon listening but difficult to explain on paper. Suffice it to say that it is an even more evolved form of sampling, the art of looping a particular audio clip of music over and over again and writing another song over it. This is most commonly seen in techno or usually hip-hop. Think P-Diddy’s use of the music from Sting’s “Every Breath You Take” for a very mainstream and grossly under simplified example. Now, to get into the realm of Girl Talk and the mash-up, we take things a step further. Use the music of popular songs spanning nearly any genre and timeline you can imagine as the backing music track. These are strung together into an eclectic medley of songs that keep the listener rapt to see what the next song will be. So, for example Girl Talk’s latest album Feed The Animals is a full-length album of ten tracks designed to be listened to consecutively, preferably with no pauses. Embedded within these ten tracks are literally dozens of song clips. Now the coup de grace, and the best ex-
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ample of the talent and technical ability required for this unique musical style, the foreground track. In Girl Talk’s case this is made up generally of hip hop or rap tracks, with the selections once again as eclectic as the music. Combine all of this and you’ve got the mash-up. It took over 200 words to describe here, but 15 seconds of listening at Girl Talk’s artist profile on campusactivitiesmagazine.com’s artist database will tell you all you need to know. But, an artist’s view of his or her own work can always lend perspective. “To me it is a big audio collage. I grew up listening to a lot of hip-hop where people used samples as an instrument all the time. Then I got into music from a more experimental direction, listening to people that would just piece together pre-recorded medium to make something new out of it. “I basically take pop music from the last 60 to 75 years, chop it up, collage it together, speed it up, slow it down and really manipulate a lot of familiar elements to stir it all up. I then try to present it as something that would then be (ideally) transformative.”
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When you listen to Girl Talk, you get a sense of an incredible musical pool from which you are only hearing interspersed drops. When bearing in mind also that this is the work of a single person, one starts to understand the virtual human music library it must take to create these masterpieces. “I’m just a person that’s always categorized myself as a music nerd. I have always been into music; when I was younger I was very into the underground scene, more obscure and experimental things. When I started this project, I knew I wanted to base it around pop music. I am always listening to things on the radio and I like the idea of people making songs that are intended for everyone to like.” Along with that, Gregg has slowly immersed himself into the history of pop music, learning and listening to more and more as time went on. “Everything I sample from I am a big fan of and all forms of pop are interesting to me. Theoretically, if there is a song that a mass of people like, I am already interested in it, even if I haven’t heard it yet.” Listening to a Girl Talk album in its entirety,
you almost have to view them as you would a symphony, the orchestration, arrangement and continuity make it all like one large masterwork. It takes someone who has the gears turning 24/7, but there is also a method to the madness. “It’s a constant work process, it never stops. I am always working on little pieces that will eventually go on to be woven into a live show (which is really what my music is all about by the way). Everywhere I go whether it’s a car, store, TV whatever, there are always endless sources of pop music material to draw ideas from. Even if it is only a small piece of a song, like an interesting snare sound or a cool keyboard breakdown, it can become an element in a new song. So, it is something where I am constantly working, I go home and work on little bits every day and try to introduce new elements for the live show, which eventually influences what will be on records.” OK, so there’s pretty much no purpose in leaving a glaring hole in this whole story by glazing over or ignoring the issue of artist’s rights and copyright law. Obviously if sampling their music in a hip-hop song gets
January 2009, CAMPUS ACTIVITIES MAGAZINE, 35