Hofstra USA shook at its foundation when mash-up DJ Girl Talk played on last Friday night. He took to the stage without an opening act to a sold out crowd, who had already been chanting “Girl Talk” for 20 minutes before the first note pulsed out of the speakers.
Greg “Girl Talk” Gillis started DJing on the side as he went to school and later worked as a biomedical engineer. He started releasing albums through Illegal Art, a record label with a penchant for releasing copyright-ignoring projects. Becoming Illegal Art’s most famous and successful act, Gillis is now a full time DJ, leaving his days of bioengineering behind.
Girl Talk has made a name for himself over the years as the DJ that mashes up popular music with such a skill and energy that his frenzied collages of top 40 hits actually become their own songs.
But in seeing a DJ live a curious problem arises, the difference between hardware and an actual performance, the difference between playing songs and physically making music with your own skill and timing. Rappers have it too. What can a DJ do live that can’t be done with an iPod and a set of lights.
To that effect, Girl Talk plays like any other DJ, he plays his music off two very worn and very battered laptops and mixes occasionally new arrangements to play at the show. But he does this extremely well. Pauses between songs were few and far between and he kept on-stage banter light, yelling out over songs, asking the already-sweating crowd to keep dancing.
The real spectacle of Friday night’s concert was the interplay between Girl Talk, the venue, the crowd and Hofstra Concerts’ lights.
Starting alone and clothed, Girl Talk over the course of the performance stripped down to just pants and by the end of the set had dozens of students filling the stage around him.
The crowd pogoed up and down in waves, lit up extraordinarily by Hofstra Concerts’ overhead crowd lightning. It was nice to see a Hofstra USA show not done in the same “Red,” “Blue” and “Green/Yellow.” Instead, Concerts opted for more complex strobe effects, black lit blues and rich dynamic primary colors. It wasn’t quite a rave, but it was definitely as close as Hofstra USA has gotten in the last few years.
And whether it was the fact that Kate And Willy’s was serving beer and wine or just the popularity of Girl Talk, the typical frigid Hofstra crowd was not a problem. Everyone seemed game for whatever Girl Talk wanted to load up.
What was definitely interesting about Girl Talk’s choice of music was that instead of playing mixes off his three albums the DJ opted for more concert-oriented mixes. Like pieces of a lego set, the tracks he played on Friday night were reconstructed with breaks and transitions worked in, most likely to keep the crowd from dying of exhaustion.