Grooveshark

Because Grooveshark likes to ask those kinds of hard hitting questions that demand an appropriate level of seriousness, we asked Girl Talk(aka Gregg Gillis) his thoughts on the film Son of The Mask, what he will do with $500 worth of Taco Bell, and just how he feels about people leaving his shows to “fornicate” in his dressing room bathroom. In all seriousness, Gillis is an extremely intelligent and engaging person who proved extremely knowledgeable on the state of the music industry, the legality of his compositions, and what he thinks it means to be a music fan today. The former biomedical engineer’s music has created an hysteria that has reverberated throughout clubs and stereos all across the country.

The hysteria is a result of Gregg Gillis (aka Girl Talk)’ brilliantly crafted compositions that forge an unlikely medium between indie rock, rap, and uber-popular radio hits. The product of meticulous effort, his last album Night Ripper benefited from a glowing review in Pitchfork magazine that catapulted Girl Talk to the label of “indie-darling”. The success of the album allowed Gillis to quit his day job and tour full time as Girl Talk.

Fear not Jamie Kennedy fans, we also covered Son of the Mask.

Grooveshark: So, this is kind of a random way to start an interview, but we were reading an interview today where someone asked you your favorite album, book and movie and you answered Son of the Mask for all of them. And I think it bears noting that we are pretty sure we saw Alan Cumming from Son of the Mask at the show in Miami.

Girl Talk: Really? How sure are you?

Grooveshark: About 90% sure. We were discreetly whispering about it all night.

Girl Talk: Dude, that’s insane. He was apparently supposed to be at one of my shows in Vancouver. I’m not actually sure if he made it to the show, but there was an afterparty I went to and he was chilling there and I just kept thinking “Oh my god, the fucking dude from Son of The Mask is here!”

Grooveshark: You know that sucks when people refer to you as “that guy from Son of the Mask”

Girl Talk: I would totally get an autographed copy of my Son of the Mask DVD.

Grooveshark: So you’re the one guy that owns it. Your background is in noise music, how has that affected how you create songs as Girl Talk?

Girl Talk: Not too much. I would say, I think overall kind of the influence of the noise and the nature of the music can influence electronic music. I think I got into electronic stuff through noise and think that whole sound. I was really influenced by Sonic Youth and guys like that. So I think that even though I don’t make anything that sounds anything like those guys, I think stylistically I just try and use quick edits and make stuff as choppy as possible but still cohesive. I think that’s still the thing I’m trying to accomplish the most.

Grooveshark: I heard you met Thurston Moore.

Girl Talk: Yeah, at a festival this summer.

Grooveshark: That’s cool, how was he?

Girl Talk: I was pretty intimidated. I’m a big Sonic Youth nerd. I’ve been a fan for a while. Yeah, he was just chill. He actually played at the same exact time that I played. I played at the same time as Yoko Ono and he was playing guitar with her, so we ended like at the same time and we walked off our different stages to the backstage at the same time and there was no one around, so we just chatted for a minute. Thurston Moore is cool as hell.

Grooveshark: Yeah, I have no idea what I would say to him.

Girl Talk: I was just straight nerdin’ it out. I’m a big fan.

Grooveshark: The next question is, we read where you said you wanted to be our generation’s Kurt Cobain. Why?

Girl Talk: (laughs) Because I want to kill myself next year.

Grooveshark: You could always get Courtney Love to kill you next year.

Girl Talk: It’d be really sweet to have Courtney Love kill me next year. (laughs)

Grooveshark: You mentioned before how you didn’t want people to think of you solely as a DJ and wanted to incorporate more of a performance aspect to your shows. How has that evolved over the last few years?

Girl Talk: You know, I think I’ve gone backwards a little bit because I think when I started I really needed to perform. Just because it wasn’t necessarily a social party and people weren’t dancing at the shows so I was pretty much playing with a lot of other people on the bill and having people in the crowd who don’t give a damn about me watching the show. So then it was all about putting on a performance and making kind of an elaborate show out of it. But I think the show has turned into such a party that I’ve kind of just evolved. Most of the time I haven’t really thought about it. I’ve just done the best to adapt to where the show is at now and it is such a dancing kind of party style that I really don’t perform nearly as much as I used to, which is a cool thing. I feel like the focus is on the music for the first time ever where people really just enjoy hearing it and try to grind up on some girl or something.

Grooveshark: Or like Ben Owen getting laid in the dressing room bathroom?

Girl Talk: Exactly. Ben getting laid in the bathroom is the essential Girl Talk experience.

Grooveshark: My favorite part of Miami was actually sitting in the dressing room during the encore throwing bottles of water at each other and I’ve always sort of wondered, what goes through your head during an encore when everyone’s been so receptive to your set?

Girl Talk: I mean, it’s hard enough for me to put together a whole set. I put out an album every two years, so that’s pretty much my working pace. But I’ve just been working on so much music. An encore used to be kind of like “Oh God, what am I going to do now? I have nothing left.” But now I work on so much new stuff that I’m really excited just to try out something new. A lot of stuff I play, I just enjoy hearing and I get into it, but I have heard it a million times. So yeah, encores, I really appreciate that. It’s crazy to even hear that enthusiasm from people who don’t want to get the hell out of there and try to go have sex in the bathroom somewhere. Yeah, it gives me confidence to try out new material and everything . There’s kind of no rules at that point.

Grooveshark: Since you’ve been able to quit your job, how do you make a living solely on music?

Girl Talk: It’s really just off of the shows. I play a minimum of two shows a week these days and a lot of colleges pay well and. So mostly from touring. With the internet and everything and music being downloaded for free, everyone finds out about it so much that it’s really the easiest time to become a relatively well known musician. Playing parties and making a living off of it.

Grooveshark: So do you think piracy has had a pretty positive effect on independent artists?

Girl Talk: I think it’s great. It’s funny, because you always read about the industry falling apart and you hear about this stuff on MTV News and Rolling Stone and all these mainstream outlets that have ties now with major record labels and I think major labels are falling apart a little bit. But at the same time, I heard Merge Records had their biggest year in 2007 for sales and I know people like me and a lot of my friends, like Dan Deacon and Grand Buffet and all these people that I’ve been playing music with forever are all doing fairly well based on the fact that the internet is spreading the word so thoroughly. So I think right now is probably the easiest time to make a living off of being a musician, kind of on an independent level.

Grooveshark: So, do you think most of your fans heard of you via piracy?

Girl Talk: Definitely. A lot of shows, I’ll have CDs set up and people wont even realize that there’s a physical product out. They think it’s just some CDR or they get it from their friend. Maybe not necessarily through file sharing networks or through mp3s, but definitely through the internet, through blogs and websites and things like that. I love reading music magazines and feel like a lot of the magazines are just icing on the cake. It’s just the exclamation point on that band’s popularity.

Grooveshark: I don’t know, it seems like Pitchfork can make or break an artist at this point.

Girl Talk: Absolutely. I would love to meet that staff. I really feel like a good review on Pitchfork is more valuable than being on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Grooveshark: Oh sure. I mean, Vampire Weekend got a rave review in Pitchfork and now they’re playing Letterman.

Girl Talk: Right, yeah. I went through it and Night Ripper existed for two months before Pitchfork ran a review and the biggest sales day on the website prior to the review running was 25 CD sales in one day. The day that review went, it was like 250 sales that day. That week, I had a booking agent for the first time. Had my first sold out show a month later.

Grooveshark: About that, I read somewhere that you feared a backlash from all the attention you’ve received recently. Have you seen that happen at all? Also, how do you maintain having an audience predicated on the context of “underground” and have your music explode in popularity?

Girl Talk: Surprisingly, I’ve seen less of backlash than expected. I think the Pitchfork review came out in 2006, and I kind of thought I would be able to ride it for a few months and just see it die down. I’d be happy with that. I never expected an interview from Pitchfork or anything like that. But surprisingly, it just continued to ramp up. I think the word has spread about the live shows and people get really into them and I’ve had a couple good festival shows. There’s been some negative stuff on music blogs, but that comes with any amount of success. It’s not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. As far as getting more popular and maintaining any credibility, I’ve never given a damn about being popular and the music I’ve always championed with my music is more mainstream stuff. To me, its like I feel the music I’m making is still weird, the overall context and just the arrangements of it, how it’s put together. I use a lot of mainstream stuff. It’s kind of like, well, I’ve been sampling Elton John this whole time. How can you get more mainstream than that. But I’ve had no problems with that regard.

Grooveshark: We were talking about this before, how you sample from such a diverse group of musicians. Is there any music that you vehemently don’t like?

Girl Talk: No, for me, I like certain things more than other things. I like the way certain CDs sound more than others and I have favorites and likes and dislikes, but I think as far as appreciating things, I can take a step back and realize that my perspective means nothing, and I don’t believe anyone else’s individual perspective means anything either and I think once you understand that and be a little more objective about it, you can appreciate any sort of music for how it’s impacting other people. But when I hear something and I don’t necessarily like it on the surface, rather than dismissing it or talking shit about it, I try to take a step back and be like, why do certain people love this and how can I get into it? I’m willing to sample anything and I like and dislike certain things, but I can respect it for what it is.

Grooveshark: Why do you think it’s so easy for kids that come to your shows that abhor mainstream pop to come and dance and enjoy, I don’t know, Three Six Mafia?

Girl Talk: I think my audience has changed a good bit. It used to be more of an electronic music crowd into it because I was just playing a laptop and everything. I think when the Pitchfork review dropped and crowds did get a bit more eccentric and I noticed some more indie rock type dudes showing up, but I think that just kind of started to snowball and it just has rolled from there. Now it’s like, I think a lot of the people that come out like Rich Boy and TI and listen to rap music and there’s other people who don’t and there’s other people who only like the Pixies, but they like the way I recontextualized it. I prefer that people approach it different ways. For me, one of the ultimate goals I have is that I don’t ever hide the fact that I’m sampling music. I’m straight up about that but I’m hoping that the music I make has legs of it’s own and becomes it’s own entity. I’m hoping that it’s like no matter what I sample or use, the final product will be a Girl Talk song. So if I’m sampling Rich Boy and you hate Rich Boy, it doesn’t matter because it’s presented in a different context, it sounds differently and you can enjoy it. I think it’s really similar to the history of hip-hop sampling. Kanye West samples Steely Dan samples on his new album, and it’s just like how many Kanye West fans want to jam to Steely Dan? Probably not that many. But in this particular context, he made his own original song out of that influence.

Grooveshark: Did you hear the White Stripes got sued for sampling seven seconds of audio on “Jumble Jumble”?

Girl Talk: Yeah, it scares the shit out of me.

Grooveshark: Have you heard from anyone that’s angry about using their samples? Any cease and desist letters?

Girl Talk: Never. We haven’t. We’ve heard from a lot of people who have just reached out and supported it. For example, I told Thurston Moore I sampled him, and I don’t think he knew about it, but he was open to it and cool with it. So, yeah, I think part of the reason is I’m on a label called Illegal Art. We believe this music should be legal and the name is obviously a joke. There is a thing called Fair Use and you can’t sample people without asking for permission, it falls under certain criteria. I think a lot of people hear my album and realize it’s not doing any damage to any of the artists overall and it is potentially helping them. I think they also realize that we’re ready to fight if they do come knocking at the door, and we’d be happy to talk to them. I feel confident about what I’m doing. I think people are just like, “Why mess with this? It’s probably helping us out.”

Grooveshark: That goes back to file sharing. People are going to hear portions of a song and end up buying a tangible product or going to a show.

Girl Talk: Absolutely. The story I always tell is I played a Sweet 16 birthday party in LA for some rich girl and Lil Mama’s “Lip Gloss” came out and it’s the biggest song. I played a remix of that and there was a quarter of the room singing along and then I dropped the James Taylor sample from my album and all of the sudden, every kid, with hands in the air, knew the words to it. It’s just like, whether they’re looking to that or not, it’s like they have to from James Taylor to this music. They would not know that otherwise. This has to be beneficial in some way.

Grooveshark: I know you won $500 worth of gift certificates from Taco Bell. What are you going to do with all that food?

Girl Talk: I’m actually staring at the coupons right now. They sit right beside my workstation for inspiration. I haven’t used one yet, I’m saving them for my next Pittsburgh show, I want to do something special with them.

Grooveshark: What’s the process or exchange like for artists who approach you for remixes?

Girl Talk: Labels will occasionally approach me and sometimes the bands will actually come to me themselves. I’ve been holding off doing remixes because I’ve been trying to tackle the new album. I go about making live sets and my albums a particular way and I’ve been doing it for years. I’m used to writing songs in a certain way and recording them in a particular fashion. A remix for me is just a fun little side project. Even with the remix projects, if I like that song and try to incorporate it in my live set or in my album, I would probably use 30 seconds of it, and with remixes I have to make a whole song based around it? A lot of times, people come to me and ask me not to do samples on it, which is interesting, because I make all sorts of music without samples, just in my free time. It’s just a crazy notion. It’s like asking Metallica to write a song, but don’t use guitars on this particular one. Producing and remixing are really not a priority for me. People have been asking me a lot recently but I’ve been turning most of them down the past six months or so.

Grooveshark: Do you have anyone you’d really like to collaborate with?

Girl Talk: I would love to do production on any sort of mainstream hip-hop. I would love to do a Bone Thugs n Harmony song or a Gucci Mane song or even a Justin Timberlake song.

Grooveshark: Have you heard from any of your former coworkers after all this has happened since you quit your job?

Girl Talk: I haven’t, but I heard from my boss and he had a question about work that I had to answer. It’s like, I never told them about what I was doing and when I quit, I just told them I was traveling the world. I’m sure someone has to know by now. But maybe not, you know how adults are. They’re just idiots and they’re in their old world. Or maybe they have no idea about it. I just would be very surprised. Yeah, I told them I was doing some music on the side to make money, but never really explained the whole scope of the thing.

Grooveshark: I guess, for the last question, will there be a new Girl Talk CD any time soon?

Girl Talk: Yeah, I started a couple weeks ago. I’ve got exactly four minutes done as of today. I hope in April or May I should be done and as soon as we’re done, I’m going to put it up on the internet that week and then out on cd a month or so later.

Grooveshark: I heard it might be called Death Sucks.

Girl Talk: Yeah, Death Sucks is one of them. Right now, it’s either Death Sucks or Feed the Animals.

• Posted in All of The Rest