Listen to Girl Talk

Greg Gillis is not the most obvious pop star. He does not sing, does not play an instrument and has never spun a disc in his life. Yet he’s such hot property at clubs and music festivals all over the world, he’s had to give up his day job. On stage, under his pseudonym, Girl Talk, the 27-year-old biomedical engineer makes a curious sight. Stripped to his underpants, with long, sweaty hair, he prods a battered, Cellophane-wrapped laptop with one hand while the other struggles to keep his pants from falling down.

Gillis is not a musician (though he has been in bands) and he is not a DJ (though he plays music through his laptop). He is somewhere between the two, creating new material from old. You could call him the living proof that pop really did eat itself. His albums boast an astonishing all-star cast of guests. The latest, Feed the Animals, features Jay-Z, Roy Orbison, Twisted Sister, Sinead O’Connor and Rage Against the Machine — just on the opening track.

Overall, it uses samples of some 300 songs, in genres ranging from rap to rock and jazz to pop. Girl Talk’s trademark sound is digital beats and hip-hop vocals, mixed with familiar pop and rock hooks spanning the 50-year history of popular music, with a particular penchant for classic soft-rock hits. Gillis, whose role is somewhere between a curator, a conductor and a producer, sources them, speeds them up, slows them down and loops them in a joyful celebration of music. In doing so, he is navigating a legal minefield. Gillis admits he has never asked for permission for a single sample in a career that is now reaching its fourth album on the tellingly named Illegal Art label. Yet he has never been sued. How does he manage to steer clear of the law?

“I spend a lot of time reading about ‘Fair Use’ on the internet,” he replies with a grin. Under this aspect of American copyright law, designed principally for teaching (and to allow journalists to quote lyrics), Gillis argues that his appropriation of existing pop songs does not deprive their owners of money, but, if anything, brings their music to a new audience.

“Most of my audience are aged 18 to 25 and I know they haven’t heard many of the songs that I sample,” he says. “They might not go out and buy a James Taylor album just because I use a bit of one of his songs, but at least a new generation now know who he is.”

Mash-up has come a long way since the karaoke mixes of Jive Bunny, and has moved far forward from the pick’n’mix floor-fillers of Fatboy Slim. Gillis’s contemporaries include the Venezuela-born Kid606, who mixes electronica with punk and metal, the Berlin–based electronica wizard Jason Forrest, who shares Gillis’s taste for classic rock, and a Florida DJ turned producer, Diplo, who has a weakness for 1980s pop.

While Gillis acknowledges them, he says: “I feel like my biggest contemporaries are the thousands of kids on the internet who remix every single pop song.” His own influences come neither from hip-hop nor DJ culture, but from the art world, specifically the sonic collages of avant-garde experimentalists such as John Oswald.

“John Oswald physically cut up tapes, he made insane cut-ups using pop music, and when you hear them now, they sound surprisingly similar to the hip-hop production techniques that would come along 20 years later,” Gillis says. He is also influenced by Negativland, the pioneering LA-based samplers / satirical pranksters who, like Oswald, have been successfully sued.

Michael Jackson forced all unsold copies of Oswald’s album Plunderphonics (which featured a cut-up version of Bad, retitled Dab) to be destroyed by court order, and Negativland had to withdraw their U2 EP after the band’s label objected to their unrecognisable cut-and-paste adaptation of I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. Illegal Art was threatened with legal action over its first release in 1998, Deconstructing Beck, but the case was withdrawn when it became apparent that there would be little for Beck to gain, and potentially much to lose in the way of negative publicity, by going after a small independent label.

As his samples have become more recognisably mainstream, and therefore more likely to prompt legal action, Gillis has constructed a defence of his actions by taking a leaf out of Radiohead’s book. In advance of release, he has offered his album online for whatever fans choose to pay. The response so far has encouraged Illegal Art to decide to distribute its entire catalogue on a “pay what you want” basis.

Gillis argues that as long as his treatment of existing sources is “transformative”, it remains within the law. “It doesn’t create competition for the source material, especially in 2008,” he says. “In the internet age, anyone can hear anything for free on YouTube or MySpace or a file-sharing network, so it is up to the consumer to decide whether they want to pay for anything and how much they want to pay. I don’t really see what I am doing as negatively impacting anyone.”

He adds: “I never sample anyone ironically, and I never want to be tongue-in-cheek. I understand that some of these songs are cheesy or corny or tacky to people, but I try not to think about music in those terms any more. I feel like everything has its place. It’s entertainment. And, for me, it has always been about one thing — celebrating the world of pop.”

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