Artist Review: Girl Talk

Girl Talk is the odd moniker of mashup DJ, Gregg Gillis. With nothing but his laptop, he creates songs out of unlikely mixtures from other songs. He has a lot of fans, who rush the stage at his concerts while they dance to his remixed tunes.

While this is certainly not new in music, Girl Talk definitely takes it to a whole new level. Very few DJs would venture to mix Mariah Carey, The Pixies, Ludacris and Weezer all in one song. And that's just a fraction of the number of songs that he has mixed into his own 3 minute creation.

But is his music any good? At first listen, the concept is absolutely amazing. When I first heard a Girl Talk song, my jaw dropped every few seconds as more and more songs mixed together. The most interesting part was how diverse all the different songs were.

I quickly got my hands on the entire CD, Night Ripper, and that stayed on my most recently played list for a few days. But before long, the songs began to grate on my nerves. First of all, it is really unlikely that you will like every single song that he mashes up. I could bare listen to most of my favorites on the CD's, because I only really enjoyed about a third of them.

Also, upon further listening, you start to notice the inconsistencies and badly put together tracks. Of course, for a mashup to sound good, particularly when two songs are playing at once, they should have the same timing. Gillis cheats sometimes by speeding up one song so it'll match the background beat of another. This sounds ridiculous and sloppy, sometimes even a little like chipmunks singing.

When I discovered GarageBand, a program that comes with Mac laptops, I lost even more respect for the artist. I realized I can easily do what he does. It takes time and just like a lot of Girl Talk songs, it doesn't always sound good or really mix well together.

Aside from the poor lasting power his music has, I also find it hard to pay to see him perform when I know all he will be doing is playing music on his laptop. That sounds like another night at the club to me.

Girl Talk emphasizes quantity, not quality. There are many other mashup DJs who are better at their craft because they strategically mix only two or three songs which sound good together. Girl Talk amazes with the sheer amount of mashed up songs but once you get past that, there's really nothing there.