Party Girl

DJ Girl Talk is the maddest scientist in the mash-up lab

Comments (0) By Virgil McDill Wednesday, Sep 20 2006

Night Ripper takes Unstoppable's pop fixation to the next level, and while Gillis says the album is primarily a representation of his personal taste, he doesn't deny that there is a subtle agenda at work on some of his mixes.

"My friends and I have always been into a wide variety of music, unlike some people who always have these really knee-jerk reactions based on what they're supposed to think," he says. "When I'm playing 'My Humps' at an indie rock club, I'm not blatantly trying to challenge people, but in the back of my mind I am trying a little to break that alt barrier so people can drop their coolness and just go with what they actually like."

Oh No Whoa!

Not a girl, not yet a woman: DJ Girl Talk is acutually a boy

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Gillis may be the most open-minded DJ you've ever heard, and his omnivorous ethos seems like a fitting groove for the eclectic bouillabaisse of the iPod era. If we're already open to playlists composed of, say, the Pixies and Mary J. Blige and LCD Soundsystem, Gillis seems to ask, then why not take it one step further and collapse these genre-spanning mixes into one three-minute song? In a musical landscape where Bob Dylan can't stop talking about Alicia Keys, and where André 3000 has said that he never could have written "Hey Ya!" without the inspiration of the Hives, the whole notion of musical genres seems to be in flux—and that might be a good thing.