Nobody really invites me to house parties anymore, and I sure do miss going to them. For one, the beer is cheaper than at the Paradise or the Echo Tap. Second, there's a good chance you have a mutual friend with most people who are also sitting in your friend's musty basement and drinking Natty Light from a keg, which makes you seem like less of a creep when you talk to all of them.
Not long ago I used to host quite a few house parties of my own. I lived in a central location and my roommates and I had a whole house to ourselves, so we could turn the stereo up real loud and wild out in the living room while people did keg stands in the corner. Those were some of the best days of my life.
Although, other people maybe don't remember them so fondly. In particular, I remember one short shorts-themed party in which someone (wearing full-length pants—that should be enough of a descriptor here) started fiddling with the knobs on my stereo right in the middle of a song by the Avalanches. I, of course, cursed at her a lot until she quit. She, of course, didn't understand why I wouldn't let her and her friends listen to dance music they recognized. Apparently being able to sing along is a prerequisite for dancing around on my furniture.
That was symptomatic of a pretty frequent disconnect between partygoers at my house though, and I suspect it happens elsewhere, too. And I assume that's why most college parties just play music that re-engineers recognizable pop songs into intensely danceable contexts. I'm talking about mashups, but more specifically I'm talking about Girl Talk, a.k.a. famed DJ Gregg Gillis.
If you're a regular reader of this column, you probably have a good idea why I didn't go to the Girl Talk show at the Alliant Energy Center this past Monday. Chances are, you're also probably one of my parents. But the idea is pretty simple: I don't care much about mashups, and Girl Talk hasn't done anything I've really cared about since before I saw him ""perform"" in 2007.
I put ""perform"" in scare quotes particularly because of the feedback I got from friends who attended Monday's show in Madison or Tuesday's show in Minneapolis. Specifically, my friend Jake sent me a text message Tuesday night that read, ""He's in sweatpants and hasn't yet played a new sample."" People in the crowd obviously noticed, and not much later I got another one that read, ""He just replayed his intro music to try to get people to chant his name again. They did not.""
The problem, it seems, is a simple miscommunication, and ultimately the reason why Girl Talk as a performing artist is reaching a dead end—Gillis now enters shows with a specific set of expectations. He plays dance music, and he expects everyone to dance. But the problem is that most people don't expect him to simply play dance music—they expect him to perform it, or at least regurgitate his samples in a way that separates his shows from their own house parties. In other words, the crowd isn't satisfied with Gillis simply facilitating a dance party, they want him to make the dance party. This dilemma is especially daunting for an artist whose primary attribute is his ability to get people to dance by using other artists' songs, and now he's stuck in a precarious position where he needs to re-invent himself as a performer if he wants to keep doing what he does as an artist. Otherwise, he risks being replaced by his own source material.
But of course there were others who genuinely enjoyed his set. They got drunk, they danced, they probably perspired through their clothing, and they left happy, having heard exactly what they expected to hear. But then again, those are probably the same people who hated sitting through every one of my house parties. Sorry, y'all.
But seriously, if that girl who messed with Kyle's stereo is reading this, she can go to hell. If you are her and would like Kyle to send you a going-away-to-hell present, email him at ktsparks@wisc.edu.
