Gregg Michael Gillis (born October 26, 1981), better known by his stage name Girl Talk, is an American disc jockey who specializes in mash-ups and digital sampling.[2][3][1] Gillis has released five LPs on the record label Illegal Art and EPs on both 333 and 12 Apostles. He was trained as an engineer.
Gillis worked as an engineer, but he quit in May 2007 to focus solely on music.[9]
He produces mash-up remixes, in which he uses often a dozen or more unauthorized samples from different songs to create a mash-up. The New York Times Magazine has called his releases "a lawsuit waiting to happen",[10] a criticism that Gillis has attributed to news media that want "to create controversy where it doesn't really exist", citing fair use as a legal backbone for his sampling practices.[11]
Gillis has given his own different explanations for the origin of his stage name, once saying that it alluded to a Jim Morrison poem[12] and once saying that it alluded to an early Merzbow side project.[13] In 2009, he attributed the name to Tad, the early 1990s SubPop band, based in Seattle.[14] Gillis has said the name sounded like a Disney music teen girl group.[15]
In a 2009 interview with FMLY, Gillis stated:
The name Girl Talk is a reference to many things, products, magazines, books. It's a pop culture phrase. The whole point of choosing the name early on was basically to just stir things up a little within the small scene I was operating from. I came from a more experimental background and there were some very overly serious, borderline academic type electronic musicians. I wanted to pick a name that they would be embarrassed to play with. You know Girl Talk sounded exactly the opposite of a man playing a laptop, so that's what I chose.[16]
Girl Talk released his fifth LP All Day on November 15, 2010 for free through the Illegal Art website.[17] A U.S. tour in support of All Day began in Gillis's hometown of Pittsburgh with two sold-out shows at the then-recently completed Stage AE concert hall.[18] Since Gillis releases his music under Creative Commons licenses, fans may legally use it in derivative works. Many create mash-up video collages using the samples' original music videos.[19] Filmmaker Jacob Krupnick chose Gillis's full-length album All Day as the soundtrack for Girl Walk//All Day, an extended music video set in New York City.[20]
In 2014, Girl Talk brought out Freeway as a special guest during a show at the Brooklyn Bowl.[21] They announced that they were releasing a collaborative EP together called Broken Ankles.[21] The project was released on April 8, 2014.[22]
In the years following the release of Broken Ankles, Girl Talk continued to tour and play festivals. He also began to do more production and collaborative work with other artists such as Wiz Khalifa, Young Nudy, T-Pain, Smoke DZA, Bas, and G Perico.[26][27]
Album pricing
After the success of his album Feed the Animals, for which listeners were asked to pay a price of their choosing, Gillis made all of his other albums similarly available via the Illegal Art website.
Awards
Night Ripper was number 34 on Pitchfork's Top 50 Albums of 2006,[28] number 22 on Rolling Stone's Best Albums of 2006,[29] and number 27 on Spin's 40 Best Albums of 2006.[30] In 2007, Gillis was the recipient of a Wired magazine Rave Award.[31]
Feed the Animals was number four on Time's Top 10 Albums of 2008.[32]Rolling Stone gave the album four stars and ranked the album #24 on their Top 50 albums of 2008.[33]Blender rated it the second-best recording/album of 2008,[34] and National Public Radio listeners rated it the 16th best album of the year.[35]
In 2008, he appeared as a test case for fair use in Brett Gaylor's RiP!: A Remix Manifesto, a call to overhaul copyright laws. His parents, in one scene, complain to him about his frequent stripping during his performances.
Discography
Girl Talk performing in 2006Girl Talk in Paris, 2007
Gillis began producing music with AudioMulch software, which he still uses, played live from a computer. During a live performance, he uses samples and loops to play a set — allowing room for variation throughout the set. His live sets are typically accompanied by video content on stage.[citation needed] He has been known to bring fans on stage to dance during performances.[52]
^Raymer, Miles (October 13, 2007). "The Thrill Isn't Gone". The Chicago Reader. Archived from the original on December 7, 2008. Retrieved August 18, 2008.
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