Girl Talk feature in GQ
On my way home from PA this weekend, i grabbed a copy of GQ from my girlfriends’ parents house as a way to pass the time and was surprised to find an feature article on Girl Talk. I guess it’s not very surprising anymore, as he’s pretty huge now…but considering GQ isn’t a music magazine it struck me just how big he’s gotten over the past couple years.
The majority of the article didn’t add much that i didn’t already know about Mr. Gillis (ex-biomedical engineer…check…doing shows on weekends…check), but they did go into some details about his musical leanings growing up as well as his initial reason he decided to start Girl Talk. Both of which made me gain more context and understanding for the “band” that I didn’t fully give into until his recent set at Virgin Fest.
I recommend reading the entire article, but it is long…so I put some of the more interesting snippets below:
On his exploration of the pittsburgh underground music scene:
After the show a skinny guy with a long ponytail and glasses walked up and handed them a two-page photocopied manifesto. His name was Manny Theiner, and his handwritten pamphlet was titled Pittsburgh’s Guide to Underground Music, a classic mid-’90s zine, full of screeds against corporate mainstream commercial sellout music plus a catalog of everything you needed to know about the city’s alternative-music scene… it was like being handed the Rosetta stone, and for the next couple of years, Gregg stayed faithful to Manny Theiner’s xeroxed wisdom, listening to Japanese noise music on the Carnegie Mellon radio station, going to the shows Manny promoted at the Millvale Industrial Theater. He was always trying to go deeper, always looking for the next big weird thing: speed metal, math rock, drone-pop, death funk, riot grrrl, beep-core, electronic garage, whatever.
On his second band:
they started an experimental side project called the Joysticks Battle the Clip-On Expressway to Your Skull. With the new band, the point was not to make music, per se; it was to scream, destroy things, and annoy the audience as much as possible. They bought toy electronic instruments and took them apart, poking the insides with screwdrivers to make them emit horrifying feedback and odd industrial grunts. They got thrown out of their high school talent show after they showed up for rehearsal in hazmat suits, smashed a bunch of TV sets and computers, and then set off some illegal fireworks, lighting the stage on fire in the process.
On his initial reasons for starting Girl Talk:
“I was interested on a musical level, but as a performance it was boring,” he recalls. “So when I started the Girl Talk shows, I was using pop as a tool of rebellion. It was confrontational, like, I’m going to show up at this show where there’s a math-rock band, and everyone in the audience is standing there with their arms folded, maybe some chin-strokers, and I’m going to get up there and do some Madonna remixes and take off my clothes. People would be thoroughly offended. But I was trying to push people. I wanted to stir that scene up.”
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