Girl Talk is the stage name of Gregg Gillis, a master of mashup music who makes albums entirely out of classic samples. This is from his best album, Night Ripper.
This tune comes from my all-time favourite party album is Night Ripper by Girl Talk. So much so that I played it at my own 50th birthday party.
Girl Talk is the stage name of Gregg Gillis, a fellow who makes mashup music composed entirely of samples, in the same vein as DJ Shadow and Fatboy Slim.
Although the album plays as a continuous mixtape, it is divided into individual tracks for streaming purposes, and this one – Smash Your Head – is one of my favourites; not least because it kicks off with Poly Styrene yelling out “1, 2, 3, 4” from Oh Bondage! Up Yours.
But also because it comes closest to defining Gillis’s style: based around hip-hop beats and rhymes, interspersed with familiar melodic samples from old pop tunes, all integrated at breakneck speed.
Most tracks comprise more than 20 individual samples: on this track alone you find Public Enemy, Biggie and Lil Wayne rubbing shoulders with Nirvana, Fall Out Boy and, most notably, Elton John. Gillis’s record collection must be enormous and genre-spanning across the decades.
I interviewed Gireg once before a live performance in London and asked my killer question about how he got away with it. To my great surprise, he told me he had never been sued by a single artist, although he had once been threatened with legal action – by Beck.
How did he avoid paying out for all those samples? “By studying copyright law very closely,” he said, “and knowing the precise limits of ‘Fair Use’.”
That seems entirely fair to me because, while you can argue that he is profiting (albeit modestly – he still had a day job when we met) from the work of others, he is also introducing his own audience to a wealth of music they might seek out and buy.
That he is bringing old sounds to new fans was abundantly clear when I saw him perform to a wildly passionate audience whose average age must have been barely out of their teens. The moment he came onstage – just a skinny long-haired guy with a laptop – they invaded the stage and, alarmingly, stripped him to his underpants.
Within minutes nearly all the crowd was onstage with him as he mixed the tunes live – no little skill there – while being jostled, hugged and occasionally borne aloft. He had told me this was a regular occurrence; so much so that he always takes the stage armed with two duplicate laptops wrapped in clingfilm because “drinks get spilt on them all the time.”
I still remember a girl who could not have been much more than 16 standing at the front encouraging the crowd to sing along with her to old songs like Magic by Pilot and Elton’s Tiny Dancer – music made long before she was born.
Almost as impressive as Gillis’s encyclopedic music knowledge, and his ability to stitch clips of different genres together seamlessly, is this video created in the same style: someone has gone to the trouble of matching each sample to its original video and knitting them together.
Anyway, next time you want a party mixtape, stick on the whole Night Ripper album. And if you want to check the samples…
0:00 ‒ 0:16 — Clipse – “Grindin'”
0:00 ‒ 0:26 — X-Ray Spex – “Oh Bondage Up Yours!”
0:00 ‒ 0:21 — Fall Out Boy – “Sugar, We’re Goin Down”
0:02 ‒ 0:15 — Trina featuring Lil Wayne – “Don’t Trip”
0:07 ‒ 0:21 — SWV – “I’m So into You”
0:23 ‒ 0:26 — Public Enemy – “Rebel Without a Pause”
0:26 ‒ 0:48 — Young Jeezy featuring Bun B – “Over Here”
0:26 ‒ 0:42 — Lil Wayne – “Fireman”
0:31 ‒ 2:39 — Nirvana – “Scentless Apprentice”
0:57 ‒ 1:20 — Young Jeezy featuring Akon – “Soul Survivor”
1:25 ‒ 1:46 — The Pharcyde – “Passin’ Me By”
1:27 ‒ 2:39 — Elton John – “Tiny Dancer”
1:36 ‒ 3:00 — The Notorious B.I.G. – “Juicy”
2:29 ‒ 3:01 — Beyoncé featuring Slim Thug – “Check on It”
2:42 ‒ 3:01 — Juelz Santana – “Clockwork”
2:42 ‒ 2:59 — SWV – “Right Here/Human Nature”