This post is from Out the Other's 2009 Bonnaroo Artist Previews, where I will be posting previews of all the musical acts playing the 2009 Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival. Please check out and subscribe to the full site to learn more about all of this year's performers.
Editor's note: This is a guest preview from contributor Seth Graves, a freelance writer and videographer based in Nashville. He can be reached at casiocasanova@gmail.com and you can check out more of his writing at the Nashville Cream.
From the coast of Somalia to Disney theme parks and any given college dorm room, the new millennium seems to be chock full of pirates. Whether sporting peg legs and parrots or just a cable modem, the digital age has brought out the scurvy dog in all of us, storming and sneaking aboard the vessels of corporate America, taking whatever the hell we want, whenever we want it. Less in the way of cargo and shipped goods, and more like stolen movies, music, and other tangible mediums of intellectual property. It’s a battle the entertainment business is slowly losing, and one from which the art world continues to benefit .
Just as tape recorders, turntables and samplers provided tools for the creation of dub, hip hop and dancehall music, digital audio and home computers are making DJ's and collage artists out of all the aforementioned pirates to some extent or another. And there’s no better example than a bio-medical engineer from Pittsburgh, PA named Greg Gillis [aka Girl Talk].
While artists like The Avalanches, Jason Forrest and Negativeland have been crafting their music entirely out of preexisting recordings for years, nobody has gotten nearly as much attention or acclaim for it as Girl Talk. By weaving together a sonic mess of digitally manipulated, scattered, smothered, chunked, diced and smothered samples of top 40 hits, guilty pleasures, rap radio faves and classic rock jams into a head-spinning, rump-shaking, familiar-turned-alien fusion, he’s captured the hearts of hipsters, youngsters, college kids and clubsters around the world. Unlike those artists who beat him to the punch years before, Gillis has the good fortune of co-existing with a generation that lacks the attention span which would otherwise interfere with enjoying such a spastic, genre-jumping synthesis. Sounding kind of like an iPod shuffle in a rhythmic, crystal meth-induced psychosis, Girl Talk’s body of work owes a great deal of its appeal to the focus-robbing inundation of ads, images, pop-up banners, commercial breaks, drive-by billboards, and SPAM communication of the past 10-20. Basically, for every reason TV rots your brain, a Girl Talk album will stimulate it.
But, media conditioning can’t take all the credit. For a guy who performs on nothing but a laptop, Gillis puts on one hell of a performance. Inviting the audience on stage to bump and grind alongside him, a Girl Talk show is less like a performance and more like a massive, throbbing orgy of young bodies and hot tunes with Gillis acting as the shirtless (sometimes pantless), sweat-drenched nucleus thrashing about in the middle of it all. Beer bottles, glow sticks, confetti, toilet paper, arms and hands fly about in what many immediately interpret as the harbinger of a pop culture apocalypse.
Debates continue to rage as to whether Girl Talk is the music biz anti-christ or a savior of creativity, pioneering the folk art of the future. The cost of legally licensing Girl Talk’s most recent effort Feed the Animals would cost somewhere around $4 million -- for which Gillis hasn't laid down a cent, so far dodging any legal repercussion. But hey, the kids don’t want copyright lessons, they wanna dance. And if this year's performance matches anywhere the energy of his last Bonnaroo gig, you'll be hard pressed to drum up any sympathy for those faceless corporate victims on this dancefloor.
"Here's the Thing"
"Shut the Club Down"
Girl Talk plays the That Tent on Friday night/Saturday morning, June 13 from 2-3:30 a.m. Check out the full Bonnaroo schedule on the official Bonnaroo website.
