“I don’t collect vinyl. I have a small collection. I’d say none of it is prized.”
That’s Gregg Gillis speaking in episode 4 of Hulu’s, A Day in the Life, from documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock. The quote comes as a series of interviewers repeatedly and mistakenly ask the musician about his career as a DJ:
I never play with DJs; I never really associated with DJ culture. I never came out of that. For six years, from 2000 to 2006, no one had ever referred to it as a DJ thing. It’s live electronic music based around samples. There were other people who had done that before me and only when it blew up a little bit and got into this new crowd that people started saying, “Oh it’s that DJ Girl Talk” or “Will you DJ this party?”
Gillis doesn’t just get up on stage, press play and dance around. During the course of a set there will be some 400 samples he triggers in sequence, live on stage.
“It really takes a long time to carve out these different sets,” says Gregg, “and that’s why it really takes me over two years to make a record.”
A Day in the Life is a six-episode documentary series that follows a notable personality around for 24 hours. While it has had its share of exclusive content, the series is the first time Hulu has participated, creatively or financially, in making long-form content.
A long time Girl Talk fan, I went back to see if I had applied the DJ label to him. While I didn’t, I did quote others who have.
At a nightclub in New York I recently commented, “The laptop is my favorite musical instrument.” My friends chuckled. I was serious. Sadly, the laptop didn’t even exist way back when in my teen years.
I played the violin instead.
RELATED: A Billboard interview with Gillis in which we learn, among other things, that Spurlock wasn’t there the day the Girl Talk doc was shot. “His impact, and the crew’s impact, was really what they chose to edit and chose to show. It was focused more around the world day and the work process, which is cool because that’s a thing I go through day-to-day that I don’t think a lot of people get to see.”