Girl Talk

So, last week Joanna and I went to see Girl Talk. I tried to get Brent and Megan and Russ to go too, but I'm glad they begged off. Because it was weird.

Why? Because I realized something that I bet I'm going to have to realize a lot over the next 30 years or so.

I'm old.


There's no other way to describe what we witnessed. Or what we experienced, I guess I should say.
Girl Talk is a guy from Philly. One guy, one laptop, one ugly sweatshirt. He looks like he's about 23, but apparently he's in his mid-30s and has been making mashups and remixes for nearly a decade.

And his deal is that he encourages his audience to get onstage with him. At last year's Be the Riott Festival, his set got shut down after 10 minutes because so many people climbed up that the venue staff freaked out. This didn't happen at the Independent. No, they allowed around 100 people to jam up there onstage with him.


So what we got to watch was a bunch of incredibly young and dorky suburban dudes and their underage girlfriends poorly act out routines they'd witnessed on MTV or BET. Wow. A little of this goes a long way, unless you're a pedophile or addicted to bad reality TV shows. Neither of which I am, thanks.

As for the music, it was fine. Fun, almost. But something was missing. He was sort of the laptop version of Cut Chemist or one of those turntablists who are all fancy shmancy and not dancy. Not that the crowd wasn't dancing. Or Girl Talk wasn't trying. Here he is showing us his underwear.


But it felt like the Emperor's new underoos, er, clothes. These kids were up there dancing because Pitchfork told them to, not because it was that great.

I thought that maybe I was just not getting it. But then we ran into some more older folks, people who put on a dance night of their own, and they reiterated my comments. Of course, they were high and one of them kept grabbing my neck and jamming her breasts against face, but they agreed with our assessment.

See, this year I'm trying to be more careful in my criticism. Because recently someone used my last name as a verb which meant to criticize incessantly and without information. And while I was touched by this usage, I would like to think that it could be used to mean criticizing something after being informed or experiencing it.

Or even better, it could stand for making sweet sweet love.

You decide.