GIRL TALK aka Gregg Gillis brought his larger-than-life dance party persona to the Pomona Fox Theater Saturday night.
And I was there for the all-night rager.
Mixing the likes of hip-hop legends like Notorious B.I.G. to teen pop melodies from Miley Cyrus and Britney Spears, Gregg Gillis and his plastic-wrapped Panasonic Toughbook can really move a crowd.
The Pittsburg native, whose hometown mayor named an official day after him, is every bit rockstar and just as much geek.
He spends hours carefully crafting his now infamous mashups, only to come on stage in a sweatshirt and headband with a laptop as his only instrument.
And while that keeps costs low on that front, Gillis reportedly goes through three computers a year. I’ve had one computer for more than three years.
By the end of the night, Gillis has stripped down from sweatsuit to nothing but pants, with a head of long brown hair drenched in sweat due to excessive rocking out behind his computer screen (thus the plastic wrap). Well, that and the 20 fans he brings on stage to dance with him for the full hour-and-a-half long set.
But the glorified “DJ” knows how to put on a show. And if you’re one man and a laptop playing to a sold-out crowd of at least a couple thousand, you damn well should.
There were toilet paper shooters, giant balloons and blow ups, a stellar neon LED light show, plus lots and lots of confetti.
The music rarely stopped, beats thumping behind blends of the Beastie Boys to Outkast, Journey and Rhianna; changing fast enough to give your parents a seizure.
Surprisingly, for an “artist” who makes his living mixing other people’s music to make his own, he has yet to be sued.
And Gillis has used more than 300 different samples on his last two albums, “All Day” and “Feed The Animals”.
This from a former biomedical engineer who quit his day job to sell-out dance parties across the country.
Girl Talk was featured in a New York Times Magazine cover story a few months back and has been featured as one of the Times’ Nifty 50. Read more about him here and check out an interview here.
You can download Girl Talk’s latest album free HERE and see a list of all the samples used HERE.
Videos below from the performance. Enjoy!
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