Taking the computer to the dance floor

Gregg Gillis has gone through three laptops in the past year because crazed fans have spilled on them, broken them and toppled over them in the middle of shows.

And when Gillis’ laptop gets bumped and destroyed, his livelihood takes a hit, too. As the man behind Girl Talk, he depends on his laptop. It’s constantly in use, either mixing the tracks of preexisting artists into dance-style “mash-ups,” or controlling his notoriously wild, dance-party concerts.

Gillis takes the songs on the top of the charts and makes them sound new. His mixing has given him a following and a musical style unlike other DJs that is worth breaking a few laptops over.

“Even when they wouldn’t break, they’d just be disgusting,” he said. “I’ve had someone vomit, I’ve had the table knocked over many times and fans fall over the computer a lot.”

Gillis now wraps his laptop in Saran Wrap before concerts, he said. A few hours before his concert at Boston University on Saturday, he sat in a backroom in the George Sherman Union, casually ripping out sheets of plastic and taping them onto his laptop.

“It’s very therapeutic,” he said. “And it does the job.”

An unusual tactic, but the music is unusual, too. With Gillis’ mixes, fans can always rely on quirky music mash-ups. In his 2008 “Feed the Animals” album, Gillis features a mixture of contemporary pop-artist Fergie’s song “London Bridge” with the Police’s hit “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic.” In “Like This,” he mixes rapper Lil’ Mama with the heavy metal band Metallica.

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All sold out

Rachel Richmond, Programming Council Entertainment Manager, said the unique nature of Girl Talk’s music is what drew her to book him as the first PC concert of the year.

“It was something I’ve never quite heard before, like long-form mixes of popular songs,” Richmond, a College of Communication junior, said of the first time she listened to Girl Talk. “And it’s not just contemporary things, but classic things like classic rock. It just jumped out at me.”

The fans make sure they match Gillis in his unusualness, as well. At the Saturday concert, girls wore everything from bright-colored spandex, head adornments, elaborate makeup and sequined embellishments.

“I want to be putting on a very over-the-top, fun show, from a laptop perspective,” Gillis said. “You go, and you get in people’s faces.”

BU proved to appreciate Gillis’ concept. The 1,500 tickets available for the concert sold out in just two-and-a half hours, Richmond said. To accommodate student demand, PC opened a balcony to provide 150 more tickets, which sold out in 15 minutes.

“It was a really big gamble,” she said. “It could have gone either way. To go onto Facebook and see the Facebook Girl Talk event go from five people to 2,000, seemingly overnight, it was unexpected.”

Gillis was not always playing to sold-out shows, however.

“It was really tongue in cheek in the early days,” he said. “After “Night Ripper” [2006 Album], there were small shows that were going amazing . . . That was the moment when I was like, this is not so abstract of a concept.

“I can’t be grateful enough. Just coming from a background of playing for zero people a lot,” he said. “I can say that over and over again, and it just wouldn’t really ring a bell unless you experienced some of my early shows where someone punched me in the face or something.”

Gillis said his first show was at an all-girl school, in what he suspects to be a miscommunication.

“Every other band that night was an all-girl band, or at least fronted by a female,” he said. “I think they thought I was a girl band. Somewhere down the line, they didn’t’ realize I was a single man using a computer.”

The WTBU student-run radio show, “High Fidelity,” is hosting a Girl Talk-themed show on Thursday to celebrate Gillis’ recent visit to BU.

“High Fidelity” DJ Zach Kohn said he appreciates Girl Talk for being unique.

“The problem with today’s music is that things start to sound the same,” Kohn, College of General Studies sophomore, said. “People have a hard time branching out. The cool thing about Girl Talk is that he uses music that’s already out there and makes it sound like something new.”

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Piracy or publicity

With all the legalities surrounding the music industry and music ownership, some people may not look fondly upon Gillis’ practices. He uses clips of other artist’s songs to create his own beat. Although he attributes the other artists in his album liners, some people think the practice is stealing.

The New York Times Magazine called Girl Talk, “a lawsuit waiting to happen,” in a July 20 article, and BU assistant professor of music and composition and theory Samuel Headrick said he agrees.

The idea of musical arrangements is nothing new. Composers in the 1900s arranged scores of music with other artist’s work.

“When [Maurice] Ravel orchestrated [Modest] Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition,’ he didn’t delete Mussorgsky’s name from the score,” Headrick said in an email. “Girl Talk certainly does not own as much to the ‘originals’ as Ravel did.

“I do believe that there should be attribution of some sort, and perhaps residuals paid to the original makers of the sound samples,” Headrick, a composer, said.

Kohn said he thinks Girl Talk is giving the artists he uses in his mash-ups free publicity.

“Indie rockers, they’re not going to listen to Chamillionaire, but when they put Girl Talk on, they’re going to hear it,” he said. “My feeling on music is that it’s an art form that should be open for everyone to view and appreciate. Once you make music it’s out there, and it should be free for other people to use.”

Gillis allows his fans to purchase his 2008 album, “Feed the Animals,” in a “pay what you want” format, meaning fans can choose whatever price they deem reasonable. Other artists, such as Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, set the precedent for this practice.

“I think the Radiohead, pay what you want album legitimized it to the world,” he said. “Then Nine Inch Nails did it — it was like you can actually do this. If that Radiohead thing did not exist and I did it, people would be like, ‘Oh he’s not that serous.’

“I just wanted to get it out as quickly as possible,” he said. “I want my CD to be treated like any other artist’s album.”

Gillis said no artists he has spoken to have had a problem with his music.

“I understand there’s a controversial aspect, but I’ve never met anyone with an issue,” Gillis said. “Big Boi from Outkast came out to one of my shows in Atlanta, and it was really cool. He wasn’t phased by it in any way.

“A lot of kids come out to shows. They don’t think of controversy, they just enjoy it on a very surface level,” he said. “Especially in 2008, when every idea presented to the public is remixed and rearranged, it’s becoming very commonplace for people to have their work remixed by the public.”

“High Fidelity” DJ Garrett Brooks said he has no issue with Gillis’ methods because Gillis acknowledges all the artists in the liner notes of his albums.

“The way he uses it, he takes it so out of the original context,” Brooks, a COM sophomore, said. “I think Girl Talk does enough to change the music that I don’t have a problem with it.”

The way Gillis mixes the artists is incredible, Brooks said.

“For every song he makes, he uses 50 songs,” he said. “He turns it into something completely different than what you would expect to hear — like putting Cyndi Lauper with rap tracks. He’s just unbelievably creative in how he does it.”

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Making a beat

Brooks said he thinks Gillis is a talented artist because of the original way he creates his songs.

“I think you need to have an unbelievable knowledge of music to put together all those samples. Some of them are so obscure,” he said. “You have to be really musically intelligent to make things work with tempo and pitch.”

Headrick expressed similar beliefs.

“Another time-honored type of creativity is when the artist uses pre-existing or familiar material in a new, personal or transformative way,” he said. “Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations,’ the greatest work of art that exists, in my opinion, might fall into this category.

“By using pre-existing pop-art, iconic, song-samples, this Girl Talk CD [“Feed the Animals,” 2008] forces the listener to perceive familiar material from a fresher, revitalized, more creative point of view,” he said.  

Kohn said it takes a special kind of person to be able to mix mash-ups like Gillis.

“You need to understand music to know what’s going to sound good together,” Kohn said. “You need to have some musical background to do that. Even with that musical background, it takes a certain kind of person to bring together two different artists.

“I think what’s cool about girl talk is that there isn’t necessarily a genre for him,” he said. “He uses so much different music. The fact is ravers listen to Girl Talk and indie rockers also listen to Girl Talk. There’s definitely a flow to his albums that aren’t in most albums.”

Gillis said his style of composition is “trial and error,” and he just tries to have as much material as possible. During his live shows, Gillis said he tries out different mixes and relies heavily on improvisation to please his audiences.

“It just seems so fun to me,” he said. “It’s bratty almost. It’s like painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa.”