Let The Kids Dance: Girl Talk

By Christian Lipski

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Roseland Theater, Portland OR
March 17, 2011

Girl Talk played the Roseland Theater on Thursday, a sold-out all-ages show. All Ages meant that the booze was at the bar on the balcony for those with ID. It also meant that the floor was crowded with under-21 girls in fine 80s fashion, and their boys in fine ironicwear. There was a great deal of excited running around and kissing, which reminded me of self-conscious high school dances.

You could cut the painful self-awareness with a knife. In fact, I’m surprised that there wasn’t a kid there with a big knife labelled “to cut the self-awareness with.” There were more sweatband headbands and rat-tail haircuts than there should be in any era. Is the guy wearing the PBR t-shirt aware of its long identification with “hipster” culture? Is he now wearing it as an ironic comment on how people have been wearing it ironically? The mind reels.

The first of the two opening bands, Junk Culture (and a precious self-aware name it is, too) was made up of a drummer and a keyboardist/vocalist who yelled lyrics about wanting to have sex with Rachel Rae and projected images on a bedsheet. In typical ironic fashion, the duo spent a good three minutes of their spotlight time screening a clip from famously bad movie The Room. British musician Max Tundra was more professional, referencing music from popular culture on his keyboard and singing bits of songs as he jumped around the stage to a deep pounding bass. To his credit, he did not stop for even a second during his 45 minutes, but the results were ultimately not even danceable.

It’s certainly possible to see Girl Talk’s Gregg Gillis as ironic; he takes diverse elements from popular music and juxtaposes them in often deliberately-mismatched fashion. That kind of artform would certainly appeal to kids who prefer a more oblique approach to emotional content. But the artist does have a true love for all the music he’s mixing, from J-Kwon and Jay-Z to Joe Jackson and the Grateful Dead, and this love is what gets forgotten by imitators.

Girl Talk took the stage at 9:45 and launched into “Oh No” from his latest CD All Day. The crowd began partying in earnest. Certain members of the audience had been selected ahead of time to join the performance on stage, which added some movement to what was essentially a DJ set. The onstage light show was impressive, with “PORTLAND” floating up the back of the stage and images moving across a geometric screen. Girl Talk kept the momentum going throughout the evening, and I didn’t see anyone who wasn’t shaking it, even up in the balcony’s seating area.

For his CDs, he carefully crafts a series of mashups mixed into each other, so Girl Talk can’t possibly create his performance live. What he does on stage at his table is anyone’s guess, but it was a non-stop party for everyone there. Huge nets of balloons hovered above the floor for the final hurrah, a long tube filled with confetti made its way from the stage until it was torn apart, stagehands with leafblowers streamed toilet paper into the air, all in the service of the environment Girl Talk created with his music.

The people at the Roseland, ironically-attired or not, were there for Girl Talk, not because it was the place to be seen. Everyone was into the show, no one was conducting loud conversations over the music or sitting down to drink and text. Minds and bodies were focused on the stage and responded in kind to the dancing folk up there. In a setting drenched in irony, there was unabashed enthusiasm and shameless participation.

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