The Source: So for those who have no idea who you are. Who is Girl Talk?
Girl Talk: I’m a guy who’s basically been doing this project for about 13 years now, and I specialize in cutting up pop music, everything ranging from like the last 70 years, usually kind of focused around hip hop, but just kind of cutting up pop music and collaging it together, and trying to take in other people’s songs and recordings and piecing them back together to something new.
TS: I’ve seen you referred to as a “mash-up maestro” along with other kind of ambiguous professional titles. Do you have a particular label for yourself as a professional in the music industry?
GT: I mean it’s kind of vague, but on the most basic terms I’ve always just kind of considered myself a producer, you know just a sample-based producer. I think it’s a little removed from what people potentially involved in the rap world would call “producer.” I haven’t made beats for rappers that much, but to me a producer is a person who makes electronic music, or someone who makes beats for rappers or all of that so yeah. All my stuff has been sampled based, but I’ve always just kind of considered myself a producer.
TS: I read that the New York Times once described your music as “a lawsuit waiting to happen,” and I know you’ve gotten that type of criticism a lot, how do you combat those types of claims?
GT: You know I feel like kind of the way that the mainstream media portrays sampling is often time as just this illegal activity that either floats below the radar or doesn’t, but there is a part of copyright law called “fair use” and it allows you to sample without asking for permission, but it has to fall under certain criteria. I’ve always kind of based my work around wanting to fall under that criteria, not only for legal reasons, but also just for the goals of what I wanna do creatively cuz under fair use it says you can sample without asking for permission if your work is transformative and if it doesn’t negatively impact potential sales of the people you’re sampling. It kind of looks at the nature of your work and what you’re going for so I’ve always thought with what I’ve done even though I’ve sampled all these artists, it’s always something where I want it to become its own entity. I don’t put together my albums and mixtapes in order to play 300 songs for people. I wanna make something new out of them, which is always the goal and I think especially kind of in the rap world people understand that often times when you do a remix of a song, take it somewhere else, that’s not negatively going to impact the sales of the original.
TS: Right. I mean I actually just read an article talking about All Day in which you sampled something like 350 songs, and that the artists that you did sample experienced increases in sales.
GT: That was a really big deal for me, that study coming out, I mean that was just like a week ago, and it was something where I’ve been talking about it literally for years now, and always kind of speculating that I believed that sales would probably be helped out, but I can’t say. I wasn’t about to conduct a study myself so it was always something I thought and believed in. So when the study came out it was like okay finally I can actually say that based on these scientific terms that the last album did actually help sales for the sampled artists, which is cool cuz everything I sample is always stuff I love and I’m a fan of.
TS: Very cool. So let’s talk about what you’re up to today. You’re currently working on this Broken Ankles EP with Freeway and you’ve dubbed yourselves, what is it, the Pennsylvania Dream Team? Tell me how that collaboration came about.
GT: Yeah I mean it’s kind of been a long time building up for me. This is the first year since about 5 or 6 years back that I’ve kind of taken significant time off the road. Every year prior to this I’ve usually played like somewhere between 100 and 200 shows a year, but I wanted to take a break and when I play some of these shows I always kind of am constantly preparing materials for shows, a lot of material, and that material kind of relates to my current sound, or what the last album sounded like, so in that time off the road I was excited just to make music just to make it, and not worry about playing it live, not worrying about it fitting into any box. So I spent a bunch of time and just kind of started making stuff that was closer to just traditional rap production as opposed to the mash-up thing that I normally do, and I started compiling all these beats and all of a sudden I had a lot sitting in front of me, and I was like oh it would be interesting to try to do a mixtape with someone that would be kind of a combination of what I normally do and a mix of maybe more traditional song structure. So I started thinking about artists and I really had a bunch of different ideas going in and I wanted to pick someone who I thought had a nice range of material, someone who sounded good on a variety of different songs. I wanted to pick someone who was kind of in between, someone who I thought I could gel with and kind of go somewhere new. Certain artists have a very specific sound or aesthetic and they stick to that, and I kind of wanted to work with someone who would be open minded, for both of us to go kind of somewhere new with it. So Freeway was one of the first people I thought of. I’ve been a huge fan for years, and I thought with his energy and style, I thought we could click. So I reached out to him and his people and it took a little while but we started talking about it, and he seemed great on the phone, you know, open minded, we’ve actually linked up in Philadelphia and started recording. It didn’t start off rocky or anything, but it took a little while I think for us to find a sound that we were going for. So we put in a lot of hours, and I think eventually it got to the point where I saw a vision of like okay I see kind of the sound that’s working for this, and umm, I think the product, we’re not done yet, but where we’re at right now I’m definitely really excited about it.