PITTSBURGH — The last time Girl Talk rocked Pittsburgh, Joe Biden was the vice president, Donald Trump had yet to come down the escalator, and a coronavirus, for all people knew, was something that happened to your computer.
The Pittsburgh artist also known as Gregg Gillis was ringing in 2015 at Stage AE, the North Shore venue he had christened five years prior, with one of his ecstatic sets of mashups and the full gamut of festive New Year's Eve frills.
Earlier that year, he made his main stage Coachella debut, joined by a slate of rappers including Too Short, Juicy J, Busta Rhymes, Waka Flocka Flame and Freeway, with whom had released the EP "Broken Ankles."
After that, Girl Talk got pretty quiet, at least in Pittsburgh. For the next few years, he was working behind the scenes as a producer and playing summer festivals all over the world, while rarely doing clubs.
"It doesn't make sense sometimes with the production that we bring to be able to do that," he says. "In order to do clubs, we kind of have to do a full tour. Over the years, I've gotten used to festivals, just kind of one-offs, so it feels like I have gotten around to most cities, one way or another. For whatever reason, Pittsburgh, it hadn't happened."
The first full Girl Talk tour since 2014 was set for 2020, but, of course, was pushed back because of the pandemic. Now, Gillis is finally back on the road, and opening the Stage AE Outdoors season on Saturday, having just released "Full Court Press," a hip-hop joint with Wiz Khalifa, Big K.R.I.T. and Smoke DZA.
Girl Talk's connection with Khalifa dates back to 2006, the year Girl Talk was releasing his third and breakout album, "Night Ripper," and the Pittsburgh rapper was dropping his debut, "Show and Prove."
"I heard Wiz on WAMO," Gillis recalls. "They were playing 'Damn Thing' and I liked the song, so I started following him online a little bit, and at that time, a close friend of mine lived in the apartments on Fifth Avenue, across from Shadyside, and I saw that Wiz was playing a show at a venue in Shadyside, like a Mexican restaurant. Upstairs. So, I was like, 'Oh, we gotta go check this out. I like this guy's song.' And at that time, I had finished 'Night Ripper,' but it wasn't out yet, and I had a bunch of burned copies on CD-R that I was just giving to anyone who would listen. So, I remember going to this Wiz show and there's probably like 50 people there and I went up to him after the show and introduced myself and talked to him for a second. And I gave him a copy of 'Night Ripper' before it was out, which is, like, a funny thing in retrospect. So, we kind of had a little moment. I don't know if he would even remember that."
Within a year, Girl Talk was making his Coachella debut and Khalifa was starting to appear on the hip-hop charts and signing to Warner Bros. In July 2009, Girl Talk headlined and curated one of the most memorable local music shows ever at the Amphitheater at Station Square with Khalifa, the Modey Lemon, Don Caballero, Grand Buffet, Donora and more.
"Looking back, I'm very proud of that lineup.," Gillis says. "It was just a very interesting collection of Pittsburgh musicians. At that time, Wiz was doing well, but, you know, I think he appreciated the look, getting on that show, and I think it was a few months later, I was playing these pool parties in Brooklyn and I got Wiz on that show with me. It was probably like 5,000 people and a lot of press, so after those two shows, he appreciated the fact that I was reaching out and supporting what he was doing. So, we were cool. And once 'Black and Yellow' came out and he blew up, we would run into each other at festivals or see each other at the airport and always had a nice, friendly relationship."
In 2017, he ran into Khalifa's manager, Will Dzombak, at a Strip District club and was invited to attend the rapper's video shoot the next day. While he was hanging out there, he mentioned to Dzombak that he was interested in doing another hip-hop collaboration, like he'd done with Freeway.
"I really hadn't even considered Wiz," he says. "I knew he was busy with a million things and Will mentioned, 'If you ever want to get in the studio with Wiz, we could set that up.'"
They did, and one of the songs from the session, "Steam Room," ended up on a Khalifa mixtape. Meanwhile, Girl Talk was also working with Big K.R.I.T. (who had been on Khalifa's mixtape "Kush & Orange Juice") and Smoke DZA (who was on "Taylor Allderdice"), so it was three rappers who had some "shared history," Gillis says.
"At one point, I got K.R.I.T. on one of the Wiz songs and I got DZA on one of the K.R.I.T. songs and I was kind of sitting at home listening to it all together and I was like, 'This might be cool as a group project,' but I didn't think that I would actually get them in the same room together, just because it's three different artists with different schedules and management and labels and all that sort of stuff. But I reached out to everyone, and they were down. They liked the music we already made and that's when we made plans to get together in LA. We didn't know what was going to happen or how it was going to go."
A few days in the studio in late 2019 was more than enough to produce the 10-song "Full Court Press" album, which captures the natural flow of the three distinctive rappers over Girl Talk's warm, seamless production. It feels nothing like one of his frenzied mashup projects, but there are samples from Nile Rodgers (who re-recorded a Chic sample for "Ready for Love"), Toro Y Moi, Aldous RH, Little Murray and the Mantics, Michael Henderson and Özdemir Erdoğan.
"Over the past decade, I've done production for a lot of different people and sometimes there's no samples on it, other times it's more sample-heavy," Gillis says. "One thing I've learned just getting in the studio with the artist is they have to really be into it in order for the song to be good. That sounds like an obvious statement, but you can't just present them with anything and be like, 'All right, make some magic.' Everyone has to be feeling it, it has to hit the right tone for that moment. So, it's kind of meeting somewhere between us. It's not fully me.
"Obviously, I made all of the beats and I'm proud of them, but you have to figure out where exactly your interests intersect with theirs and what could be unique about that. So, with the project, it is almost entirely sample-based, but if you compare it to my albums, it's completely different in terms of the pacing and the recognizable samples are not there, but it's still in essence the same thing where I'm ultimately choosing samples that I think are going to fit well with these vocalists and making a song out of it."
In the post-production, which he did during the pandemic, there was a temptation, he says, "to take it home and chop it up and have a bunch of beat changes and go crazy with it," and he did that. In the end, though, he decided, "I don't think this is the look for it. I could always make it more hyperactive or use more recognizable samples. I just didn't think that's what's working for this particular body of music."
A few interesting things emerged in the review by Pitchfork, the site that helped break Girl Talk's career with its "Night Ripper" rave in 2006. One is a mention of the three rappers being "just past their commercial and critical primes," an indication of the brutal industry in which rappers work.
"I know that's how they're recognized, and me too," Gillis says. "People are always looking for that new story. What's the new narrative? Young artists rule the world, and I'm very into that. But at the same time, I think at this point in my career, and I think for Wiz and K.R.I.T. and DZA, I really respect people who have been working on their craft for 10 years and really fine-tuning it and figuring out how to keep it evolving and getting better over time, and it's more nuanced as opposed to being like, 'Here's an 18-year-old with a brand-new sound.'"
The review references the mashup, which is still the core of Girl Talk's live show, as being a relic.
"I feel no need to defend the merits of mashups or remixes or anything," Gillis says, "but the crazy thing is, I thought they were fundamentally off with their synopsis of the current state of remix culture. On Tik Tok, remixes and mashups just dominate. It's weirdly a huge wave right now. It's really bigger than it's ever been with young people. And I think I'm in my own lane, because I feel like my fan base has grown with me over time and aged with me, but it's interesting just to see how as the technology gets easier for people to do their own remixes and mashups at home, it's really kind of like everywhere now."
Girl Talk's show introduces bits and pieces of "Full Court Press," along with new mashups and old favorites from the albums. As for when there might be a new Girl Talk mashup album, it could get dropped in an instant like "All Day," which nearly broke the internet in 2010, or it might not come at all.
"I don't know," he says. "I think about it every day and check my Twitter and people ask me when I am going to release one. It's not like I would ever dismiss the idea of doing that. For the live shows, I actively work on that stuff all the time. Putting it on an album, to me, is just a different decision in terms of, like, you're making a statement. I've always wanted an album to be something where that's unique. I've never wanted to make an album where it's like Girl Talk Mashup Volume 48. But things change, and at some point, it's gonna be like, 'Right now would be an interesting time to do something like that.' And there's many different forms it can take. I did albums prior to doing mashup albums, so I want to evolve in many directions. There are many different things you can do with sample-based music."
