Girl Talk Rips up Vassar | Mash-up DJ to spin hits at 100 Nights

Jackson Reeves Assistant Arts Editor

Most Vassar students have gotten down at a dance party to the tunes of Ludacris and Ciara—certainly not without an extra dash of irony when grinding to Ciara’s “Goodies.” Imagine a disc jockey who would mash together “Goodies” with “Pimpin’ All Over the World”, and maybe throw in a bit of “Wonderwall” by Oasis for balance.

Mash-up DJ Girl Talk became famous by creating just that sort of fun—he sampled the above songs to create his mix “Once Again.” Vassar students can bathe in his revelry this Friday, Feb. 15 at 12 a.m. when he will turn the proverbial records for the senior class’s big 100 Nights blowout in the Villard Room.

“We had TV on the Radio, and we had Flostradomus play the ViCE party, and we had Ben Lee play serenading; everyone is more excited about Girl Talk,” said Sophomore Class President Nate Silver. “The difference between something like Girl Talk and something like TV on the Radio is that Girl Talk is supplying a party just as much as a concert.”

Gregg Gillis, also known as Girl Talk, began combining random parts of songs from a broadly defined pop canon—including Baha Men, Cyndi Lauper, Jay-Z and Korn—to create his own mixes with little more than a computer and some simple software (GarageBand simple) while he studied biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University. His first underground album, 2002’s Secret Diary, drew enough attention that he continued his extracurricular endeavor and adopted the jarring name Girl Talk for his stripping-prone and sweat-soaked DJ persona.

The label Illegal Art has released three albums of Girl Talk’s pseudo-legally sampled mixes. 2006’s Night Ripper is the most recent. In fall of that same year, his popularity on college campuses grew as he jockeyed parties on the college circuit and his music spread from the hipster’s boombox to the Mug-goer’s iPod.

“Anybody who’s listened to more than one mash-up knows that there’s some really bad mash-ups,” said Deena McNeil ’09, who studied tonal harmony, music composition and rhythm as a freshman. “[Girl Talk] has a really good ear.”

Silver continued, citing a personal favorite, “Smash Your Head”, the combination of Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” and Biggie’s “Juicy”. “Those are epic artists and epic songs that seem to exist in totally separate worlds that he brought together in a really cool way,”Silver said.

Assistant Professor of English Hua Hsu, who specializes in music criticism, disagreed. “A computer program could have done what he did,” Hsu said. “It doesn’t take a good ear to spot Wreckx-N-Effect with The Neptunes.”

After two decades of proto-mash-up DJs sampling songs and linearly stringing them together in clubs, mash-up finally came into its own as a popular genre in 2001 with releases by 2 Many DJs and Freelance Hellraiser. Their music solidified mash-up’s convention of “mashing” the lyrics or non-instrumental part of one song over the music or instrumental part of another via computer technology.

The genre’s genealogy, however, begins in the 15th century with quodlibets, clarified Chair of the Music Department Kathryn Libin. Latin for “whatever pleases,” quodlibets feature recognizable bars of music from two or three popular songs strung together into originally composed songs. Composers such as Mozart and Bach played with the quodlibet. Some even mashed two songs on top of one another.

“The thing about the quodlibet is that composers were manipulating notes on a page, and the mash-up artists are manipulating sounds that have been recorded—not exactly cutting and pasting, but the electronic equivalent of it,” Libin said.

Lawsuits plague the mash-up genre since the sampled artists do not recieve royalties, yet sampling continues. Girl Talk samples about 20 songs per mix.

“After 10 minutes, I grew exhausted listening to it because I was trying to figure out how he put it together,” Hsu said. “I don’t know what he likes listening to based on the mix.”

“For a lot of composers, this has been a kind of game, and the more diverse materials, the more complex and interesting the game,” Libin concluded. “Very often someone...can take a tune that is perfectly banal and uninteresting and completely transcend it in his variations.”