Girl Talk (Gregg Gillis) whips the Houston crowd - onstage and off - into a frenzy.
Burn your guitars – Girl Talk is one of the hottest live acts goin’ for this particular 15 minutes and a frenzied crowd piled into Houston’s Verizon Wireless Theater for the most outrageously anticipated show in recent memory.
Our Austin correspondent Lily Angelle, on the tail end of her holiday break from college, attended the event. She took some photos and as soon as we can wake her up, she’ll give us a few words about the show.
Girl Talk is Gregg Gillis, who mashes up dozens of samples from existing songs both famous and obscure to create new works of art. Although his “concerts” consist mainly of Gillis onstage with a couple of laptops and a sound system, he creates a crazed party atmosphere with toilet paper cannons, light shows and a blizzard of confetti.
UPDATE: OK, here’s the review …
Girl Talk succeeded in keeping the Houston crowd cheering, with toilet paper guns, mountains of confetti and balloons, and a beat that did not stop. He came onstage fairly quickly- there was little to no waiting to get into the venue, and even after the opener(Penguin Prison) the wait seemed short.
Gregg Gillis was accompanied onstage with a slew of promiscuously dressed fan girls that were believed to be chosen from the crowd before the show. Misinformed, many people in the standing area saw the girls onstage and thought they were letting people onstage from the front.
Meetin' the fans: from left, Jave Del Rosario, Gregg Gillis aka Girl Talk, Lily Angelle, Jessica Smith.
At one point the superficial, self-important tweens, who were pretty much the primary demographic, took a break from texting and updating their facebook statuses to start drama in the crowd, trying to push their way to the front, thinking they could find a way to get onstage. At times it seemed these people did not come to see Girl Talk; they came to be noticed and get new profile pictures for their facebooks. There were a few shouting matches, and many of the kids could not withstand the inevitable jostling from the crowd.
Gillis played mash-ups from his new album All Day, and as he clicked away on his Saran-wrapped laptops, the crowd sang along and jumped to the beat. What’s cool is that Girl Talk is not all just rap/hip-hop mash-ups; he incorporates completely different genres of music into one song. Towards the end of the show he played John Lennon’s “Imagine” mashed with a hip-hop song.
After the show, as people were slowly filing out, we called to Gregg as he was walking towards the back of the stage. He was nice enough to come down to shake our hands and take a picture, and thanked us for coming. He even gave us his sweat-soaked shirt sleeve he had ripped off and placed around his head. What a nice dude!
Tonight's forecast: party, with periods of intense light and confetti flurries
Girl Talk, aka Gregg Gillis, partying hard
Girl Talk official website (download the current album All Day for free)
30 Days Out 