Recap Girl Talk at the Alliant Energy Center

As he’s gone from indie hipster curio to the exuberant kind of act that can turn a Monday night at Madison’s Alliant Energy Center Exhibition Hall into a New Year’s Eve-style party, the controversies and blog wars about the music of mashup artist Gregg Gillis (a.k.a. Girl Talk) have faded into distant memory. Indeed, the crowd that sweated and danced at the Exhibition Hall wasn’t busy considering Gillis’ Jock Jams-ization of gangsta rap, whether he is really a musician, whether what he’s doing is illegal, or the implications of his do-you-remember-this wink-and-a-nod nostalgia trip. This was a crowd that has bought Girl Talk wholesale, the kind of crowd that freaks the fuck out when he drops a Lady Gaga sample in the middle of a T.I. song. This wasn’t a night for think pieces on Girl Talk; this was, as Gillis put it himself, “time to crush fucking Monday night.”

Touring behind his fifth LP, All Day, Gillis worked hard to make the show experience about more than just watching a dude dick around on his laptop: He had a mammoth light show and a couple of hardworking assistants who rained confetti, shot toilet-paper guns, and whipped balloons at the crowd at various well-timed moments. Also keeping him company onstage was a coterie of Madison dancing talent decked out in generic Ray Bans, leg warmers, and at least one douchey Jabbawockeez mask, which spurred on an endless struggle between the bouncers and the left-out crowd members, who tried to goad security into letting them up into Girl Talk’s onstage party. It played like a stadium show in miniature, with more “greatest hits” than you could count.

Trying to parse out exactly what Gillis was playing at any moment was half of the fun here, following along as he mashed up Notorious B.I.G.’s “Juicy” with Kanye West’s “Runaway” and Clipse’s “Grindin,” into Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind” mashed up with Jay-Z’s “Can I Get A…” into dozens of other combinations. Gillis’ shtick is pointedly one-note—the real star isn’t his production, but rather the crowd’s collective nostalgia for old songs—but it’s hard to deny the charms of getting leveled by M.O.P.’s “Ante Up” sinisterly smashing over Miley Cyrus’ “Party In The U.S.A.”

At the same time, it’s hard to become a total devotee when you realize that, at a Girl Talk show, you’re essentially living inside of a NOW! CD that is skipping wildly, and that Gillis is famous largely for being the most ADD-afflicted DJ doing it right now. No experiment lasts longer than 90 seconds with Girl Talk, yet he is somehow able to stretch his show past 90 minutes. It can feel like a never-ending trip inside of a Top 40 radio station’s play list. But there are few concert experiences that are more overwhelming, beguiling, infuriating, and ultimately entertaining than what Girl Talk unleashed Monday night.