Girl Talk’s dance party cut short
I spent this afternoon at the Be The Riottt! festival thanks to some free tickets from SonicLiving. In spite of their highfalutin’ manifesto, it seemed like a typical music festival to me. While I enjoyed having another opportunity to see the Wrens play, the most memorable performance belonged to Girl Talk (aka Gregg Gillis), a cutup artist from Pittsburgh.
He walked out onto the massive Bill Graham Civic Auditorium stage with a single laptop, and started building a catchy dance track out of snippets from top 40 songs. Once it got going, he jumped down off the stage and began pulling people from the front row of the audience back up with him. Now, I’ve seen plenty of artists drag one or two people up on stage before, but I’ve never seen someone invite effectively the entire audience up there. The stage kept growing more and more crowded. There was something really striking about it, watching a medium as exclusive as an arena stage get democratized. Here’s a brief video that I took when the stage was half full. You can see how giddy everyone is—heck, the Wrens had been excited earlier because they’d never played a venue that big.
Eventually the stage got pretty crowded, and the organizers must’ve been getting worried about The Rapture’s partially set up equipment, because they abruptly cut the sound and ushered everyone (including Girl Talk) off stage. Ironically, they cut short the moment that most reflected the ideals of their manifesto.
As a postscript, I thought the name Gregg Gillis sounded familiar, so I checked my email archive when I got home. Sure enough, he was a member of our infamous totor36 mailing list back in the day. Here’s him talking about his high school noise band of that era, the Joysticks:
Most people hate it because you hear The Spice Girls and then a Casio CZ-101 making laser noises overtop, and they think it is a waste of time. I personally like it, and I enjoy ruining other peoples’ music. I thought it was wonderful at our last show when all music cut except for Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” and Richard pounded a 25 pound microscope with a baseball bat. In our live shows, the goal is to produce an environment of electronic chaos, which is most of the time accomplished.
Mission accomplished, Gregg.