Girl Talk's Massive NYE House Party
By Sarah Cobarrubias in Arts & Entertainment on Jan 5, 2010 7:00PM
Girl Talk’s New Year’s Eve show was just what we expected: the biggest, craziest, hoppin-est dance party we’ve ever seen. Except for the traditional ball drop, it had all the familiar elements of a NYE party. There was the standard midnight countdown, a whole lot of borderline-porno PDA, a drunk girl simultaneously dancing, crying and vomiting, and an on-stage marriage proposal that got the whole crowd all sentimental and teary-eyed. And of course a few thousand people dancing wildly as Girl Talk (A.K.A. Gregg Gillis) mashed together a non-stop flow of guilty pleasure pop songs and hip hop beats.
The stage set embraced the whole house party theme, featuring an actual life-size house, complete with fully furnished rooms and what appeared to be a huge ornamental lawn boulder that doubled as a table for Gillis’s laptop. An endless shower of confetti, balloons and unwinding toilet paper rained down on the crowd, a fog machine filled the room with a hazy glow, and the house displayed a mesmerizing light show of flashing red, green and pink lasers and strobes synced to the music, enhancing the show’s rave-like quality.
Girl Talk appeared in the second floor hallway of the house, sending the crowd into a wild frenzy that would continue at full force through the night. He made his way downstairs, and before heading to his laptop to mix up the magic, screamed out to his fans, “From the front to the back, can we all move together right now?” With one hand on the mouse and the rest of his limbs free to dance, Gillis rocked out with an insane energy that even the dancers surrounding him on stage couldn’t keep up with. He started the night in a hoodie, but quickly abandoned his sweat-drenched clothes and played most of the show shirtless.
The set started with Durrough’s “Ice Cream Paint Job,” and the crowd ate it up, creating an enormous, pulsing dance pit that nearly filled the room. Gillis played a lot of his usual mash-ups, such as Kelly Clarkson’s “Since You’ve Been Gone” backed up by NIN’s “Wish,” and The Cranberries’ “Dreams” mixed with M.I.A’s “Boyz.” But honestly, it was all such a seamless stream of pop favorites and hip hop rhythms that one could barely keep track. It seemed like one moment Pilot’s “Magic” melded into Biggie’s “Hypnotize” which segued into Peaches’ “Teaches of Peaches,” and the next moment Gillis was saying goodbye and closing the show with a shamelessly sentimental sample of John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
Sure, the show would have been better without Congress Theater’s annoying echo and overbearing security. But who cares? It was still a crazy good time. And being in the center of that pit, pressed up against all those sweaty, booze covered bodies, singing and dancing uncontrollably to our favorite nostalgia-inducing tunes in a drunken euphoria was a pretty awesome way to ring in the New Year.