Girl Talk Gives The Plex A Workout

The long hidden inner-hipster of the Boston College student body came out Saturday night when mash-up artist Girl Talk, Greg Gillis, performed at the Plex. Known for his electric performances, the concert was a much anticipated event, as evident by the infamously long lines at the box office the morning tickets went on sale. The crowd arrived decked out in '80s fashion and ready to party, and almost all of the people in attendance were crammed on a single basketball court, making for a rowdy but energetic atmosphere.

 Gillis has said that he chose his stage name Girl Talk because it was the least serious and most commercial sounding thing he could come up with that would allow him to stand out from his sometimes geeky and pretentious peers in electronic music. It was a fitting choice, because his live show is oddly commercial and rife with mass appeal. From the moment he took the stage, he never included a song in his mash-ups that the crowd did not know, keeping things going with such a fast, fluid pace that the dance party never stopped.

Being a mash-up artist, Girl Talk's primary instrument is a laptop computer, but that did not bring down his stage presence at all. In fact, it was this lack of an obvious thing to do on stage that forced Girl Talk to be so inventive and keep his performance action-packed. For one thing, he moved around the stage with a tenacious energy that immediately flowed into the crowd. He opened the show by running onto the stage, jumping on the table where his laptops were set up, and yelling at the crowd to get into the performance. Rolls of toilet paper were then shot into the crowd, building the wild, no-rules atmosphere that made the night a sucess. Had Girl Talk been on the stage alone, there would have been too much empty space and not nearly enough of a spectacle to suit his tastes. So, he smartly chose to simultaneously build an aura of elitism and access by bringing audience members on stage to dance with him, but only those that were allowed to pass by bouncers on both sides of the stage, who controlled the flow of would-be dancers.

In truth, the on-stage party was equal parts performance and example, as the same thing happened on stage as in the crowd, except for the fact that the people dancing on stage actually had room to breath. For those who dared to venture into the middle of the pit, it was a sweaty, raunchy, and overly compact dance party. Everyone moved with the beat and sang along with the words they knew in Girl Talk's mixes, building a very communal feel. The sense of community in the crowd was impossible to escape, as most people in the middle of the main section were pressed up against four or five different people at any given moment. Many in the pit seemed to enjoy getting lost in the crowd and reveling in the anonymity such a mass of people brings, as the dancing (and other dance floor activities) got progressively less inhibited as the night progressed.
Musicianship might not be the right word, but Girl Talk is indubitably skilled at doing what he does in the studio in front of a live audience. There were never awkward breaks in the music, and the entire concert had a steady, fast tempo, allowing dancing to go on unencumbered. Girl Talk's mash-ups are always eclectic and pull from unanticipated sources, but that does seem to be a slight pattern he follows when selecting tracks. To give the audience something to sing along with, Girl Talk had a commercial rap or pop song playing at all times, ranging from Kelly Clarkson to Dr. Dre.

To keep the audience on their toes, though, he loved to balance out the current hit songs with backing instrumentals from older bands. Case in point: Ludacris' "Move B—h" was combined with Black Sabbath's "War Pigs," and Girl Talk frequently relied on the likes of Journey, Van Halen, and Elton John to provide musical backdrops for his mixes. The one shortfall of the performance was that the lackluster sound quality didn't always allow the complexity of the two or more samples being used to fully emerge, but the crowd was singing so loudly anyway that this probably did not make much of a difference.
The Undergraduate Government of BC made a very smart decision to host the concert in the Plex as opposed to the Rat or Conte Forum. Especially in the context of the Akon debacle last fall, the large, open space of the Plex basketball courts was the perfect location. Sure, the sound was terrible (the strangely shaped roof probably doesn't help), but what else is new for a concert at BC? Girl Talk put on a powerful show and gave students a great night of fun. His energy and ability to create a party that everyone felt comfortable going wild at are a testament to his skills as a performer, and the flawlessness of his mash-ups always impresses.