Girl Talk is a musical freak of nature. He can rattle off every genre you’ve never heard of (chopped + screwed, anyone?) while mashing up the likes of Ludacris, ABBA, LCD Soundsystem, and Smokey Robinson into “I can’t help but thrash around to this” dance tracks. In 10 years, he’s gone from undergraduate studies in biomedical engineering to headlining festivals and selling out massive venues across the country, while distributing his most recent album as a free download. We recently caught up with Gregg Gillis atop the Sierra mountains at the Wanderlust festival, where he filled us in on the music he’s feeling these days, his spin on the club scene, and the explosive nature of electronic dance music.
This Saturday saw the launch of a new summer festival for NYC, with the inaugural Governors Ball bringing a lineup that included Big Boi, Girl Talk, Empire of the Sun, Neon Indian, and Pretty Lights to the increasingly popular offshore destination of Governors Island. With perfect weather blessing the festival grounds, spirits were high for the event, which had revelers dancing, soaking in the sunshine, and moving from stage to stage for continuous sets of fest-friendly hip-hop, indie pop, and electronic music. As many area festival attempts often fall flat due to poor execution, the Governors Ball was a pleasant exception to the rule, leaving us looking forward to its return next year. Check out our collection of photos from the event, revealing the sights and spectacles of the Ball, both onstage and off.
Gregg Gillis, a.k.a. Girl Talk, recently took Rolling Stone writer Doree Shafrir on a tour of his computer and showed her how he puts together one of his albums — a method that he explains applies to his live shows as well. “It’s pretty thought out,” Gillis tells her. “But everything is executed on the fly. It’s like playing a song: You wrote the song, you rehearsed it, but you’re doing it live. There might be a little thing you do different night to night, but you are playing it pretty much the same way you always play it. Live, there’s things I give myself freedom on. If people are there and excited, then I can cut things, and just have melodies playing for a bit. And that changes from night to night.” Click through to watch the man in action.
A band that sells out is never cool. Well, that probably depends on how you define “cool” — swimming in a pool filled with gold coins or leaning back against a chain link fence, cursing at everything that moves. When it comes to the music industry, we tend to be more impressed with the latter, despite how nice doing the backstroke in a pool of money sounds.
From refusing to be a cog in the record company machine wheel to straight-up verbal take-downs of the industries pop-music cash cows, we’ve compiled a brief history of bands who flipped the commercial world and its minions the bird, 1990-present. These guys make Dave Grohl’s refusal to license the Foo Fighters’ music for Glee look like child’s play. (Still, we won’t lie: refusing the glorified Kidz Bop treatment the show’s peddling is undoubtedly a noble decision.) Read More »
For those of you who are still getting over the death of All Points West, here’s some news that might cheer you up: This morning we got a press release about the first-ever Governors Ball Music Festival, “a massive mid-summer dance party of epic proportions” which is set to take place at Governors Island on June 18th. So far the confirmed lineup includes Girl Talk, Big Boi, Neon Indian, Pretty Lights, People Under the Stairs, Miami Horror, Reptar, Outasight, MAC Miller, and Passion Pit (DJ set). Additional acts will be announced in the coming weeks.
As our friends at Consequence of Sound point out, “New York City and music festivals have never really mixed… The reasons for this reality are many, ranging from transportation options to location to 1,400 other venues all competing for a limited pool of acts.” Agreed, but we’re rooting for this one to work out. With the exception of MIA’s HARD NYC Fest (which was arguably totally fine, except for MIA’s performance), we’ve always had a really good experience at concerts on the island.
Early bird tickets (which are $75) go on sale this Thursday at 10 am at govball.com.
This is a video of a girl dancing her face off around, on and through the Staten Island Ferry, wearing what we can only imagine is an outfit picked out by a hipster and a middle schooler forced to compromise. She (and two somewhat more put-together gents) dances to Girl Talk blasting from speakers hidden around the Ferry in front of a pretty blase crowd of onlookers. It’s the perfect combination of so-embarrassing-for-them-you-can-barely-watch and actually really impressive. This nearly 8-minute video is part of a project to create an album-length music video to go along with Girl Talk’s newest album All Day, which is 71 minutes long. Well, sounds awesome, but we’ll believe it when we see it. Regardless, this girl’s got skills. But, wait, she also looks like a total crazy person. Needless to say, we love her.
Time for another guessing game — this time we pit you against Spin Magazine’s list of musicians picking their favorite albums of the year. After the jump, we’ve picked 10 of our favorite artists from their list and it’s up to you to match them with their favorite albums. Don’t worry — we gave you a hint by including a quote from each artist about their pick. Highlight the blacked-out boxes to check your answers, and learn what everyone from Bradford Cox to Wayne Coyne was listening to this year.
Friends, Romans, Flavor seekers, lend us your ears. This week we have another batch of winners on the Flavorpill mixtape: There are new tracks from Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen, not to mention sneak peeks of Chromeo’s next 12-inch and Nicki Minaj’s much-anticipated first album. Remember to right click + save as to download single tracks, or scroll to the bottom to get the whole bundle.
Yesterday, at long last, Girl Talk released his new album, All Day. He’s even offering it for free online, at Illegal Art, although the download queues are predictably massive. When you finally get that sweet, sweet zip file onto your hard drive, you’ll notice that Girl Talk’s two-year absence hasn’t dulled his mastery of the sample. Any new Girl Talk album doubles as an unofficial “Name That Tune” challenge, a trivia quiz for those who pride themselves on their pop-music literacy. But never fear! We have a cheat sheet. Your intrepid listeners at Flavorwire have done our damnedest to compile a list of samples on the new album, in roughly chronological order, after the jump. Tell us what we missed in the comments.
1. According to the NY Post, Jim Carrey is renting studio space from Julian Schnabel. Says a source: “Jim is working on a large abstract canvas. His work is actually quite good.”
2. NBC may be moving 30 Rock to a 10pm time slot to make way for the return of Parks and Recreation and a new comedy, Perfect Couples. [via EW]
3. “My whole goal is to reintroduce magic to hip hop. We watched this wizard do his thing. Y’all supported him. And he’s an official Roc Nation signee.” Jay-Z on signing Jay Electronica to Roc Nation
4. Michael Jackson’s first official posthumous single — “Hold My Hand” — is here. A different version of the song leaked back in 2008, but this one is supposedly a lot better. [via Vulture]
5. Watch the five most ridiculous moments from last night’s premiere of Sarah Palin’s Alaska — including its unfortunate theme song. [via Gawker.tv]
