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"FacebookPinterest\n\nlook, it's not like it's a bad job, being tour manager for Girl Talk. It's a pretty good gig, most of the time. If you've tour-managed for, say, Broken Social Scene (and David Scheid has), where you've got, like, twenty people in the band and vanloads of guitar pedals and high hats and trombones to keep track of, it's a relief to manage a tour where the entire band is one guy and the sum total of his equipment is one Panasonic Toughbook laptop.\n\n Also, each night you spend most of the concert onstage next to the guy\u00A0 and his laptop, which has its pluses and minuses, the pluses being the eighty or so amped-up young people up there with you the whole time, a lot of them cute girls, all jumping up and down and sweating and taking off various articles of clothing and occasionally singing, en masse and at the top of their lungs, lyrics like Hey! We want some puss-ay! (The minuses are more or less the same thing.)\n\nBut there's one part of the job David Scheid just can't get comfortable with, and that's the five minutes each night where it falls to him to instruct the local security crew on the details of working a Girl Talk show.\n\n To understand the scenario, you've got to be able to picture Scheid. He's tall and skinny, in his late thirties, with long, stringy Axl Rose hair. He's wearing jeans and a faded Metallica T-shirt and a black baseball cap that reads ready to die, and it's not inconceivable that he sold his soul for rock 'n' roll at some point fifteen or twenty years ago, maybe at a Dokken concert. And then you've got to understand that we're in Oord, Mississippi, deep in the Deep South, and that they don't get a lot of experimental electronic/dance/whatever-Girl-Talk-is acts coming through town. These security guys are huge, with biceps like rugby balls, arms folded thickly over their white polo shirts, which have a crest that says cobra security under a picture of an angry-looking snake. They're looking up at Scheid, skeptically, as he crouches down on the edge of the stage, and you can tell they're all thinking more or less what Scheid thinks they're thinking, which is: Shouldn't we be beating the crap out of you for resisting arrest or something?\n\n \"Okay, here's how we do it,\" Scheid says, a little haltingly. \"I'll come out first, and I'll start the computer. Some intro music will play, and Gregg will come out, maybe slap some hands. He needs a couple of minutes alone up here. And then the cue is that he'll throw a handful of confetti. And when he throws it, you can just sort of step back.\"\n\n Step back? Since time began, the job of the beefy concert-security guy has been fairly straightforward: Keep the kids off the stage and away from the talent. Now this long-haired dude wants them to step back?\n\n It gets worse. \"If some kids are having trouble getting up on the stage,\" Scheid goes on, \"feel free to help them up.\" (Help them up?) \"But not too many. We want to get the stage full, but the goal is not to have a free-for-all. It's usually ten or fifteen minutes of craziness, and then it mellows out.\"\n\n As for Girl Talk himself, Scheid says, \"You really don't have to worry about him too much. It's not like it's an aggro vibe. There will be kids right on top of him, but he's fine.\"\n\n As Scheid sweated his way through his security tutorial, the performer known as Girl Talk was backstage, up a narrow spiral staircase, in the greenroom, where there was a couch and a flat-screen TV and a fridge full of beer and Red Bull. His name is Gregg Gillis, and at that moment, anyway, he didn't look like a guy who regularly sells out thousand-seat venues in small towns in the South. He's 27, with shaggy brown hair and a scruffy beard and blue eyes; a gentle-looking guy, intense and ironic, cool and nerdy at the same time. He was wearing glasses and a Nirvana tee and a flannel shirt and gray jeans and white Air Jordans, and he was folded deep into the couch, staring intently at the laptop balanced on his knees. You'd think he could maybe be a biomedical engineer\u2014which in fact he was until about a year ago. If someone told you he was a musician, you'd probably guess, looking at him, that he played bass for an emo band from Portland and wrote sensitive ballads with a lot of literary allusions.\n\n But instead, coming out of his laptop was an old Wu-Tang Clan song, Raekwon the Chef chanting And let's start it like this, son, rollin' with this one / And that one, pullin' out gats for fun. And the weird thing was that Raekwon wasn't rapping over a regular hip-hop beat but over the bass part from the Boston song \"Foreplay/Long Time\" mid with a single repeated inhalation by Ciara, the R&amp;amp;B singer, clipped out of her song \"Goodies\" and looped into a symphony of rhythmic heavy breathing. And the weirder thing was that the sound emitting from the laptop wasn't a Ciara song or a Boston song or even a Wu-Tang Clan song, but a Girl Talk song. This is what Gregg Gillis does: he samples, blends, loops, recombines, and reconstitutes the popular music of the past fifty years or so into strange and beautiful new creations. Gillis didn't invent the mash-up, but he elevated the form into something jubilant and mind-boggling and original (and arguably highly illegal), something that sounds a little like all the artists he samples and, at the same time, nothing like any of them. His last two albums, Night Ripper from 2006 and last year's Feed the Animals, were critical hits, winning rave reviews on Pitchfork, the influential alternative-music Web site, and admiring notices in mainstream music magazines. Time decreed that Feed the Animals was the fourth-best album of 2008, and Blender said it was number two, behind only Lil Wayne. You can't buy Girl Talk records at Wal-Mart or download Girl Talk songs from iTunes; radio won't play him. And yet he is one of the biggest \"alternative\" live acts in the country, selling out more than a hundred shows last year in venues that held anywhere from 800 to 4,500, his legend spreading by word of mouth and, of course, on the Internet.\n\n\n\nand now, an hour before his show began, Gillis was doing what, for him, amounts to tuning up. He had a shareware music-editing program called AudioMulch open on his computer, and he was drawing up the digital-age equivalent of a set list, lining up the samples and loops and combinations of samples and loops (some drawn from his albums, some newly created for the show) that he would trigger with a click of his Dynex mouse, live, one by one after he took the stage: Slash's guitar riff from \"Sweet Child o' Mine\" snaking in and out of Eminem's rap from \"Crack a Bottle\"; \"Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)\" married to \"It's Goin' Down\"; \"Tiny Dancer\" pirouetting around \"Juicy,\" by Biggie Smalls.\n\n As Gillis clicked and dragged and copied and pasted, David Scheid drifted upstairs and found a spot on the opposite couch, and for a while the two men reminisced about Girl Talk shows past\u2014the All Points West festival in Liberty State Park in New Jersey last year, where they fired 200 beach balls and dozens of rolls of toilet paper into the audience; the Lollapalooza show a few days earlier, when Gillis set sail from the stage on an inflatable life raft and floated over the crowd, propelled hand by outstretched hand all the way back to the sound booth.\n\n \"What are we going to do at Coachella, man?\" Scheid said.\n\n \"I want to do some crazy stuff,\" Gillis said, still deep in the couch, his legs bouncing idly. \"I was thinking we could have a helicopter do a balloon drop.\"\n\n \"Well, we're in a tent,\" Scheid said.\n\n \"We are? Absolutely?\" Gillis looked disappointed.\n\n \"From what I understand, they said you're definitely in a tent, but you're in the tent that Madonna played in.\"\n\n \"I like that that's how they refer to it. She was there, like, three years ago.\" Gillis swept the hair out of his eyes. \"It's superarbitrary.\"\n\n They were both quiet for a minute, trying to figure out if maybe there might be some way you could get a helicopter inside a Coachella tent.\n\n \"It'd be cool if I had a jetpack,\" Gillis said.\n\n And then it was showtime. Gillis traded in his glasses for contact lenses, stripped down to his bors, and put on his stage clothes, which are unlike anyone else's stage clothes: a basic white V-neck T-shirt; long, shiny basketball shorts, still sweaty from last night's show in Little Rock; and then a baby blue hoodie and dark red sweatpants, which he buys, thirty or forty at a time, from a store near his home in Pittsburgh that specializes in factory rejects. Then, a final ritual: He pulled out a box of Glad Wrap and started tearing off long sheets and wrapping them over every surface of his laptop until it was fully encased in translucent plastic, held together with strips of Scotch tape, safe from dripping sweat and spilled beer. He was ready.\n\n Downstairs, the club, a high-ceilinged former warehouse not far from the town square, was full, and the audience was feverish, chanting \"Girl! Talk! Girl! Talk!\" Scheid and Gillis made their way down the spiral staircase, and Scheid ambled out onstage and placed the mummified laptop on the long cafeteria-style table that Girl Talk uses. He plugged it in and pushed a button and Ciara started her breathing, and backstage Gillis started bouncing, his hood pulled low, looking like a featherweight bor before a fight. Somehow, in those moments, the mild-mannered former biomedical engineer disappeared, and when Gillis ran on stage a few seconds later, he had magically transformed himself into David Lee freaking Roth. He grabbed the handheld mike sitting next to his laptop, strode to the lip of the stage, and yelled, \"Mississippi, make some fucking noise!\" And then in came\n\n Raekwon, and up went the confetti, and the security guys moved aside, as instructed, and the kids streamed onto the stage from both sides, and within sixty seconds there were a hundred of them up there, maybe more, every square inch jammed with sweating, writhing southern flesh.\n\n For the next hour and a half, Girl Talk kept them happy and moving, no breaks, a continuous flow of music, Fatman Scoop into Don Henley into M.I.A. into the Jackson 5, all at 160 to 180 bpm and all at ear-splitting volume. Gillis could barely move, jammed against his table by the pulsing sea of humanity surrounding him, but he went with it, bobbing and weaving to the beat, squinting down at his laptop, clicking and scrolling, his face lit by the screen's green glow, turning occasionally to dance and shout and hop with the fans pressed up against him. By the time the show reached its climax, around 1\u00A0a.m., Gillis was standing on top of his table, high above the crowd, his long hair plastered to his sweat-soaked face, his arms in the air, one foot planted on either side of his laptop, which was issuing forth Lil Wayne's rap from \"A Milli\" over the anthemic coda to Journey's stadium-size power ballad \"Faithfully.\" He was a remix rock star, and he was feeling the love.\n\n\n\nwhen gregg gillis was in second grade, back in the late '80s, he made his first mix. His equipment at the time was lower than lo-fi: a ninety-minute Mall cassette shoved into a cheap boom box. He carried that boom box everywhere he went in the comfortable Pittsburgh suburb where he lived, and when a song caught his interest, he just hit \"record\" and held it up to whatever\u2014the TV, the car radio, his sister's CD player. The result was a mess, half a Bell Biv Devoe song followed by some Guns N' Roses with his mom talking over the top, but Gregg listened to that tape on his Walkman like it was the voice of God, flipping it every forty-five minutes, over and over and over. \"I literally wore it down,\" Gillis remembers. \"I was just drawn to it somehow. It got to the point where my parents were actually like, \u2018You should stop listening to that for a minute.' \"\n\n In third grade, his friend John discovered N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton in his brother's bedroom, and John and Gregg stole the cassette and spirited it down to the basement, where they listened to it furtively, trading the headphones back and forth. It blew Gregg's young mind\u2014it just seemed impossible that a record this vulgar and angry might actually be sold, in regular stores, to any grown-up who wanted it. Then came fourth grade and Public Enemy and Metallica, and then, in fifth grade, Nevermind. Nirvana led to Sonic Youth, which led to Gregg and his friend Matt saving up to buy tickets to Lollapalooza when it came through Pittsburgh in the summer of 1995. By the end of the all-day concert, when Sonic Youth took the stage, they had edged their way up to the front row, where Thurston Moore's guitar feedback cascaded over them in crashing waves.\n\n After the show, while their ears were still ringing, 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. For a kid from the suburbs eager to plumb the depths of the underground, it was like being handed the Rosetta stone, and for the next couple of years, Gregg stayed faithful to Manny Theiner's rod wisdom, listening to Japanese noise music on the Carnegie Mellon radio station, going to the shows Manny promoted at the Millvale Industrial Theater. (Gregg and his friends were the only ones whose parents dropped them off at the concerts.) 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.\n\n Gregg couldn't play an instrument, but that didn't stop him from forming a band with his friend Joe. They called themselves the Static Probe Pioneers. \"We had a couple of keyboards and a cheap drum machine, and we were just pressing buttons and making noise,\" Gillis says. \"We had no concept of how to play.\" At sparsely attended concerts on Gregg's roof or in Joe's backyard they performed dissonant, distorted cover versions of the Doogie Howser, M.D. theme song and Salt-N-Pepa's \"Push It\" and squirted Silly String at the audience. Gregg did freestyle raps about vitamins. That band was weird, but not weird enough for Gregg and Joe, so 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.\n\n \"We'd line up ten CD players with scratched CDs and play them all at once and then break them, and that would be the show,\" Gillis recalls proudly. \"Or we'd play the Forrest Gump soundtrack and smash a TV. A show might last twenty minutes, or it might last five seconds.\" His mother left one concert in tears.\n\n In 2000, Gregg was admitted to Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, and one of the school's requirements was that every incoming freshman have a laptop. When Gregg got his\u2014a cheap Toshiba\u2014it was a little like Miles Davis getting his first trumpet: He had found the instrument he was born to play.\n\n Gillis had seen laptop artists before, at the Millvale Industrial Theater, but they were stern Austrian or Japanese guys who sat perfectly still onstage, occasionally pushing a button or two on their keyboards. Their shows had all the energy of a graduate seminar in music theory; it was like paying money to watch someone read his e-mail. \"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 remis and take off my clothes. People would be thoroughly offended. But I was trying to push people. I wanted to stir that scene up.\"\n\n\n\nwhere the joysticks set out to alienate the audience, Girl Talk would do everything possible to entertain. Gillis wore elaborate outfits and hired dancers to perform choreographed routines at the beginning of his shows. He barely smashed anything. College had broadened his musical tastes, too. In high school, he had been too cool to go to parties\u2014he felt it would interfere with his reputation as an eccentric artist, so he would stay home instead and listen to severe avant-garde music on the radio. In college, he rediscovered the simple joys of pop music, of going out to parties and clubs and dancing with girls. Girl Talk's music began to change accordingly: He was no longer chopping up a Britney Spears song as a sarcastic commentary on the insipidness of mainstream popular culture; now he was doing it because Britney Spears was so much fun to dance to.\n\n He sent his new compositions out into the ether, first to friends and then to underground record companies. To his surprise, the owner of a mysterious and shadowy outfit named Illegal Art, which seemed to exist only as an e-mail address and a Web page, expressed interest in releasing an actual Girl Talk CD. Gillis worked on his music all through freshman year, sending files off to Illegal Art every few weeks, and by the summer his first album, Secret Diary, was complete.\n\n Throughout college, Girl Talk performed occasionally in tiny clubs in Pittsburgh and Cleveland and then, as word gradually spread, in other cities. Unstoppable, his second album, came out in 2004, just as he graduated from college, and that summer he toured the country with a few friends, a tour that he describes as \"amazing in a horrible sort of way\": five or ten or twenty people at each show, the bands barely making gas money.\n\n By the end of the summer, combined total sales of his two CDs stood at about 400. He returned to Pittsburgh, moved into his parents' basement, and got a job working in a cubicle at a medical-research company, testing cures for sleep disorders. He started work on his third album, Night Ripper, sitting down at the laptop each night as soon as he got home from the office, remixing and looping all weekend long. The music continued to evolve, his sound growing more complex, samples piling on top of samples, and yet somehow more accessible.\n\n Illegal Art put out Night Ripper in the spring of 2006, and at first it seemed like simply the next logical step in Girl Talk's gradual rise\u2014maybe now he'd get forty people out to shows instead of twenty. But then, three months after the album's release, Pitchfork bestowed on Night Ripper a sky-high 8.4 rating and its coveted \"Best New Music\" tag. Overnight, sales blew up, booking agents started calling, audiences grew. Gillis got a headlining gig at the Mercury Lounge in New York, which has a capacity of 250 hipsters, a bigger space than he'd ever played, and he sold it out. Suddenly, unexpectedly, Girl Talk was kind of famous.\n\n Gillis didn't give up his day job. In fact, he didn't tell anyone at work what was going on. He started playing shows every weekend\u2014leaving work on Friday, going straight to the airport, performing for hundreds of sweaty kids that night and the next and then flying back to Pittsburgh in time to show up at work on Monday. He didn't mean to keep his other life a secret, exactly, but by that point it just seemed too late to casually mention to his fellow lab coats that he was in fact an underground-music sensation. \"It got to the point where it was very surreal,\" Gillis says. He'd fly to London and back in a weekend to open for Beck, or to New York to play an afterparty at the MTV Video Music Awards, kicking it with Kanye and 50 Cent. \"I'm signing autographs, sweating it out, jumping around, partying with these young kids, going nuts, and then I'd get back to the cubicle on Monday, and I'd have to lie and tell them I went out to a movie with my girlfriend or something.\" By June 2007, Gillis had already used up all his vacation days for the year, and he realized that his double life had to come to an end. He turned in his lab coat and started growing his hair long.\n\n\n\ngillis assembled Feed the Animals in the spring of 2008 in the tiny, run-down third-floor studio apartment in East Pittsburgh where he had lived since moving out of his parents' basement. It was an unusually anxious time for him. The success of Night Ripper meant that people were actually paying attention now, and Gillis felt compelled to prove that Girl Talk wasn't a novelty act. He worked on the new record for months, testing out different samples, mixing and remixing, listening to songs over and over, searching obsessively for the perfect combinations. He retreated into his computer: He stopped seeing friends, then he quit leaving the apartment altogether; he'd stay up every night till 8 a.m. working on songs, sleep till noon, wake up, open his laptop, and start in again. \"I was kind of losing my mind,\" Gillis says. \"I more or less stopped bathing. It was really mental.\"\n\n These days Gillis bathes regularly, and his creative process has grown a little calmer. He has converted the top floor of his new house, formerly the attic, into a studio, and his setup there is surprisingly simple: an office chair and a desk, his laptop and a couple of speakers, and a desk lamp shaped like a Pittsburgh Steelers helmet. He uses just two programs: Adobe Audition to cut up and manipulate individual samples, and AudioMulch to turn samples into loops and then combine loops into songs.\n\n For Gillis, the first stage in the creation of a Girl Talk song is the easiest one: listening to tons of music, whether it's the local hip-hop station or his parents' old James Taylor records, keeping an ear out for possible samples, anything from the perfect half-second squeal of guitar feedback to a piano intro or percussion breakdown that he can pluck out and turn into a loop. (While working on Feed the Animals, he collected 8,803 samples, which he sorted into sixty-nine different folders on his laptop.) As for vocals, when he finds one he likes\u2014say Ol' Dirty Bastard's rap about inner-city strife on the Pras song \"Ghetto Supastar\"\u2014he'll go on the Internet and hunt down an a cappella version, an audio file with the vocal tracks only, no music or percussion at all. These days, Gillis says, almost every hip-hop hit has an a cappella track that is released officially or somehow leaks out, and if you know where to look, you can find and download them pretty easily.\n\n For Feed the Animals, Gillis tried pairing ODB's rap with dozens of different instrumentals before settling on what sounded to him like the perfect companion: a sepulchral organ part from a moody Yo La Tengo song called \"Autumn Sweater.\" The organ intro was eight bars long, and Gillis looped it, using AudioMulch, so that those eight bars would go on forever, then dropped the ODB sample on top. At the end of the rap, as the \"Autumn Sweater\" loop restarted, he slid in the sweet, melodic chorus to \"Ghetto Supastar,\" sung by the R&amp;amp;B singer Mya. And then, when the organ loop ends for the second time, Gillis unleashed a blizzard of samples\u2014a two-second drum fill from Janet Jackson's \"Nasty\"; a few more words from Mya; the repeated phrase like this, looped in from a Mims song and alternated with Diana Ross singing You're giving love instinctively from \"Upside Down,\" all layered over an Eric B. &amp;amp; Rakim beat, a staccato Swizz Beatz rap, and some whoops from a Swing Out Sister song.\n\n On paper this might sound calculated and show-offy, like a bratty music nerd trying to demonstrate his eclecticism by throwing together the most unlikely combinations he can dream up. And it's true that the first couple of times you listen to a Girl Talk record, you tend to experience it like an extended and ADD-friendly mixtape; it's hard not to be pulled into an album-length game of Name That Tune. (Wait, was that Nu Shooz?) But the more you listen, the more you hear the music the way Gillis intends it: as something brand-new, something that transcends its source material altogether. (Repeated listenings also change the way you experience the songs Gillis samples. I'll never again hear Kelly Clarkson's \"Since U Been Gone\" on the radio without thinking, \"Man, this could sure use a little Nine Inch Nails.\")\n\n Of course, the exact nature of the relationship between a Girl Talk song and the songs that it samples isn't just an aesthetic question; it's also a legal one. Over the last couple of decades, American courts have frequently ruled against musicians for sampling another artist's work without permission. In response, sample-based artists like Gillis generally contend that their music is legal because it is \"transformative\": You could never mistake the Girl Talk song that samples Yo La Tengo for an actual Yo La Tengo song, the argument goes, and Girl Talk's using eight bars of Yo La Tengo couldn't possibly hurt the band's sales.\n\n Recently, Gillis has become a poster boy for the so-called Copyleft movement. Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard law professor who provides much of the campaign's intellectual heft, touts Girl Talk in speeches and discusses Gillis's work at length in his most recent book, Remix. But despite Gillis's celebrity status in the remirs'-rights movement, the legal issues surrounding his music don't actually seem to interest him all that much. When pressed, he will gamely make the fair-use case, but mostly he seems to react to the legal argument against sampling the way most people under 30 do: You gotta be kidding me.\n\n And when Gillis is onstage, where he continues to perform in front of larger and larger crowds, the finer points of copyright law are clearly the last thing on his mind. Last November he played his biggest solo show yet: a sold-out gig at the cavernous Art Deco Congress Theater in Chicago, 4,000 Girl Talk fans packed into every square inch of floor space, strobe lights, toilet-paper cannons, girls onstage grinding in their American Apparel gym shorts. At the end of the show, as the Journey loop played and Birdman rapped Okay, we're popping champagne / Like we won a championship game, thousands of multicolored balloons tumbled down from the ceiling, a wash of color. By this point Gillis had lost his sweatshirt, his pants, his shorts, his T-shirt, his headband, his socks, and his shoes. He was barefoot, in bors, still leaning over the laptop, firing off a few last samples. And then, with nothing left to lose, he ran to the edge of the stage and launched himself into the crowd.\n\npaul tough is an editor at The New York Times Magazine and the author of Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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