Farnsworth launched Gillis’s musical career, which has always been a full-time side project of sorts. It was Illegal Art that discovered him and began releasing Girl Talk albums in 2000, when he was still a student at Case Western Reserve. The CDs consist of material composed for live shows that he put together piece-by-piece on his laptop. “It’s popular because it’s musically egalitarian,” says Cronin. “There’s no snobbiness in his mash-ups. Some of the songs sound better together than they do on their own.”
In a perfect world, this would be the mash-up artist’s goal. Portions of Night Ripper do follow traditional A-B mash-up form, as the Freelance Hellraiser did with their 2001 Christina Aguilera–Strokes infusion “A Stroke of Genie-us.” “Friday Night” pits the Waitresses’ insistent “I Know What Boys Like” against a more perverse line from Chris Brown’s “Run It” — “I know what girls want.” But the result sounds nothing like its source materials. “That’s the whole point,” Gillis says. “You manipulate the material into your own new song.”
His first two Girl Talk albums — Secret Diary and Unstoppable — were less overt in their borrowings. Both have a noisy, experimental quality that evolved from his high-school interest in noise music; both use slices of barely distinguishable song fragments. Night Ripper is bolder in its appropriations and more accessible. “His music has gotten so much tighter over the years,” says Jarrod Weeks, otherwise known as Lord Grunge of the Pittsburgh-based rap duo Grand Buffet, and Gillis’s long-time friend and musical collaborator. “Night Ripper is still raw, but it flows more, and it’s less glitchy and clicky.”
New software technology is making mash-ups both easier to do and more prevalent. And artists like Gillis are using the new tools to create more sophisticated collages. The contemporary Holy Grail of mash-ups is Danger Mouse’s ingenious and illegal pairing of Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles' “White Album” to create The Grey Album, yet as an idea, the mash-up has existed in various forms since Frank Zappa repositioned guitar solos in the 1970s. John Oswald broadly and ambiguously termed his own musical amalgamations “plunderphonics”; De La Soul found samples in uncommon places, like the Turtles’ “You Showed Me,” for their chart-topping single “Me, Myself and I.”
Performance mishaps have forced Gillis to make frequent use of Dell’s laptop-replacement plan. His live appearances have included semi-nudity, table dancing, and various liquids poured on or around his laptop. (He says his most recent shows have been comparatively tame.) The likelihood of an experimental outburst is proportional to his level of comfort with the audience. “If I play for a really stiff crowd, it makes me uncomfortable. I’ll run around and push people and go crazy.”
But his real problems may lie outside of clubland: will Night Ripper’s popularity create legal ramifications as the disc reaches more people in the music business? Although he devotes significant liner-note space to thanking all of the artists he sampled, he did not obtain permission to use any of the samples on the disc, and he doesn’t want to discuss the matter — “I’m not going to sweat that right now.”
That mash-up artists are bootleggers is a given. It’s part of the genre’s appeal. And for now, that’s something that Gillis is comfortable with.
GIRL TALK + DAN DEACON + THE TEXAS GOVERN0R | Middle East upstairs, 472 Mass Ave | January 20 | 617.864.EAST
