5 minutes with Girl Talk's Gregg Gillis

Lollapalooza '08, Day 2

By Carlye Wisel
Published: August 5th, 2008 | 7:25pm

Fresh off the name-your-price internet release of Feed The Animals, Gregg Gillis, the man known as Girl Talk, discusses his love of, well, everything and how closely his musical past is related to broken televisions.

Gregg Gillis: I’m so easy to buy for.

Venus Zine: How so?
If you went to Spencer Gifts, and you got anything there, I’d be so —

Like, in the darkroom area?
Everything. If you could go anywhere right now, if there’s merchandise at this festival, I want it. Everyone I know knows that about me. If you go to a CD store and there’s a CD there, I probably want it.

What’s something you’ve bought or gotten recently that you’re excited about?
Mmm … a house. I [just] bought a house. Bedroom set, that’s real cool. Shower curtain, was pretty pumped about that.

Was it hard to pack for that?
Yeah, but I just lifted everything individually. I didn’t do it very well. But the thing is, I didn’t have any furniture I wanted to keep, and I lived on the third floor and there’s a fire escape right near my place, so I got this friend of mine from grade school to come over. We used to throw stuff at cars like water balloons, and we just launched all this crap out of my door … like a giant TV. I had an old grandpa-style TV and we launched it off the third floor.

Did you kill anyone?
No, it was cool. Everything was cool. The garbage was near there, I wasn’t trying to be an asshole, I cleaned it up once I threw it over there, but throwing a couch off of three stories is fun.

What was the most rewarding object you threw?
TV set. It smashed. The thing is, in old TVs there’s a tube in it. I don’t think that exists anymore with all LCD screens, but the tube will explode. It can like, shoot a hole out the center of the TV. Sometimes, if you take an old TV and you hit it with a baseball bat or something, the back of it, a small, bb-shaped hole will like shoot out of it.

How do you know this?
In high school I was in a band where we just like, broke tons of stuff all the time. Computers, TVs, we’d light them on fire. We’d smash TVs all the time and these small, little holes would shoot out the side.

Wait, you were in high school …
'96 to 2000.

So, weren’t computers kind of, hard to get your hands on to break?
No, because it was of the era when home computers were becoming normal, so older IBMs and stuff like that [were available] if you went to a flea market in Pittsburg. Especially TVs. TVs are always so disposable, especially now, but even back then it was like that. Computers, same thing, especially monitors, [which] are different than a computer. Those are a dime a dozen.

What would be your dream find of something to break?
I mean, we weren’t like trying to up the ante … like what we would do is, there’s something called a contact microphone, and you put it on something … and you can hit them, they’re hard to break. So, we’d put contact microphones in all these objects, and run those through a series of effects and delays. It was not about finding a giant TV to break, it was just the act of breaking more things. It wasn’t always about breaking things, but lots of times.