Girl Talk @ Yahoo! Open Hack Day 2008
Yahoo! people, you gotta come with me right now. This is not my concert!
This is OUR concert!
— Gregg Gillis, aka Girl Talk, 12 September 2008
It’s hard to believe that a week has passed since Open Hack at Yahoo!. I’ve blogged a ton recently about the Y!OS components that we previewed at the event. And there’s been some amazing industry coverage as well, most recently a nice piece in Mashable and a killer article in CNET.
But being open isn’t all about APIs and SDKs. It’s also about giving people raw tools and seeing what they can do with them.
In that spirit, Girl Talk is a hacker supreme. He finds the tools he needs to be creative and figures out a way to get the job done.
When we were considering who to bring for our musical guest at Hack Day, we knew we had a tough act to follow. But we almost immediately zeroed in on the one artist who we knew was basically perfect for the Hack ethos. And we got him. And he delivered.
If you are reading this blog and don’t know about Girl Talk, aka Gregg Gillis, well let’s do a little recap.
Gregg samples tracks from 264 different songs (!!!) in his latest album, Feed the Animals, according to some crazy analysis done by everyone’s favorite ex-Yahoo!, Andy Baio. Wired has an insane visual that breaks down the samples found in a single track, “What It’s All About” which has 35 samples in 255 seconds ranging from OutKast’s “Ms. Jackson” to “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” by The Police to Faith No More’s “Epic” to Yeah Yeah Yeah’s “Gold Lion” to “ABC” by the Jackson 5. And he does it all while relying on the copyright principle of “fair use”, according to The New York Times. He licenses his own work back out via Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States license. And Feed the Animals is available on his own website in a “pay what you want” model.
And we learned last Friday that his live show brings it. As Sasha Frere-Jones confirms in this week’s New Yorker, Gregg does far more than just hit the play button on an iPod. He mixes his show live every night. He spends at least half of the concert turning samples on and off and mixing the beat, and he spends the other part of the show jumping up and down, losing various articles of clothing, and getting the audience amped up. (Sample quote from mid-way through the show: “There’s been a few Hack Days in the past. There’s been a few regrets. This is the first Hack Day where there will be NO REGRETS. NO FUCKING REGRETS! Even if you lose that hack contest or whatever, I don’t give a FUCK! Maybe you’ll find your wife tonight!”)
As for the actual show, we had the entire stage full of dancing fools (me included!) by the end of the first track. The party amplified throughout the 90 minutes. It seems that people had a good time! But rather than try to describe it, here are some of my favorite visuals:
And there are lots of great videos, but if you’re gonna watch one:
Listen to Girl Talk. Buy Feed the Animals. Have a great weekend!
Cheers!
-c
