Interview In The Pit with Gregg Gillis aka Girl Talk at Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival - This classic episode of Moe Train's Tracks is legendary. Here's the backstory: MTT was supposed to be interviewing Gregg Gillis (Girl Talk) backstage at Bonnaroo. King B and The Train were chilling backstage waiting for Greg, and they were enjoying a few backstage beverages. Nothing out of the ordinary.... Gregg showed up, and the crew hit it off right away. They all were talking, and Tool was getting ready to take the stage on the other side of the backstage wall. Gregg said, "Do you want to go see Tool?" King B and The Train said, "Hell yeah. Let's do the interview some other time! Let's party it up a bit before hand!"
Quite a few shots later, the entire group was feeling loose and pretty hammered, and Gregg said, "Why don't we bring the mics out into the crowd and interview people while they crowd surf?!" And at that point, INTERVIEW IN THE M.F. PIT was born!
This cluster F of a recording is nothing but pure excitement and mayhem with an amazing soundtrack of Tool playing in the background! This is a don't miss episode!
Girl Talk produces mashup-style remixes, in which he uses often a dozen or more unauthorized samples from different songs to create a mashup. The New York Times Magazine has called his releases "a lawsuit waiting to happen",[8] a criticism that Gillis has attributed to mainstream media that wants "to create controversy where it doesn't really exist", citing fair use as a legal backbone for his sampling practices.[9]
Gillis has given his own different explanations for the origin of his stage name, once saying that it alluded to a Jim Morrison poem[10] and once saying that it alluded to an early Merzbow side project.[11] In 2009, he attributed the name to Tad, the early 1990s SubPop band, based in Seattle.[12] Gillis has said the name sounded like a Disney music teen girl group.
In a 2009 interview with FMLY, Gillis stated:
The name Girl Talk is a reference to many things, products, magazines, books. It's a pop culture phrase. The whole point of choosing the name early on was basically to just stir things up a little within the small scene I was operating from. I came from a more experimental background and there were some very overly serious, borderline academic type electronic musicians. I wanted to pick a name that they would be embarrassed to play with. You know Girl Talk sounded exactly the opposite of a man playing a laptop, so that's what I chose.[14]
