Girl Talk feels the wub at Sunshine

culture@dailylobo.com

Although the popularity of electronic dance music (EDM) has indeed grown during the past few years, the market seems a bit oversaturated. Every weekend there is some DJ playing at some club in town who is “so sick, bro.”

I’m sure they are great, and it sounds like fun, but a lot of the time it amounts to indistinguishable EDM that feeds your fix for a weekend dance party. However, there are acts in the industry that are worth losing a bit of sleep on a school night for — which is what I and many of you did Oct. 9 for Gregg Gillis, better known as Girl Talk.

Obviously, I’m not the biggest proponent of EDM as a whole, but I certainly can appreciate those who do it well. I find Girl Talk’s work to be particularly engaging because of its approachability.

You might call Girl Talk the master of mash-ups, as his overwhelming popularity is based solely on his signature style of sampling already popular songs. It makes it easy for an audience, even if they’re unfamiliar with the DJ, to jump right in and have a great time.

A big part of EDM shows is the light show that accompanies the music. Otherwise, you’re just watching a guy going back and forth between turning knobs and cuing up the next transition. Waiting for Girl Talk to go on, I could tell it was going to be a visually stimulating experience: Towering lighting equipment created a wall at the back of the stage, and a similar setup spanned the front of the stage at what would be waist-level for Gillis.

The lights went out and the crowd erupted as Girl Talk arrived onstage, jumping on top of the front stage lighting. When he came down, a large group of lucky audience members took to the stage to dance with him as he took us into a seamless set of songs he crafted for the night, while balloons floated over the crowd. At one point, he pointed leaf blowers with rolls of toilet paper attached to the ends at the audience. I never thought I would see a bunch of people going crazy about toilet paper, but it was just one more exciting element of the experience. It was a welcome change from streamers and confetti, of which there was plenty that night.

Mashing up songs may seem somewhat cheap or uninspiring, but Girl Talk proved to Albuquerque that it’s an art unlike any other. It takes true technique to remix songs made by others and put a signature seal on them to make them your own.

Most crowd members were dancing with everyone around them, but I found myself with an elbow in my back each time I started moving.

I tried to be respectful of personal space as we were all packed on the floor of the Sunshine Theater in a hot, sweaty mess. I don’t understand people who go to an EDM show and only want to stand still, but I do know that the rest of us had a great time dancing till we dropped.