Thanks to New York City’s restrictive cabaret licensing laws, dance shows of this magnitude rarely happen in the city known as one of the nightlife capitals of the world. The queue outside the club was more reminiscent of a night out in London’s heavy club scene, and inside, the line for coat check made the line outside seem manageable. After my friends and I chucked our coats at the slightly cooler smoking room, we headed to the stage to catch the end of Parts & Labor’s set of danceable spazz rock. Pushing our way to front and center along with the other 500 attendees created an ambiance similar to the outdoor performance of Radiohead I saw at the Hurricane festival in Germany in 2003, except this was happening in an overheated indoor space slightly larger than Bowery Ballroom. “This better be good,” was all I was thinking as a fellow concert goer spilled beer in my eye, rendering me temporarily blind in a crowd that was more packed than an Indianapolis bar during the Super Bowl. As Gregg Gillis set up his laptop onstage, wearing an innocuous blue T-shirt with orange tie-dyed circles, people heated up around to a less schizophrenic DJ set with everything from Pat Benetar’s “Heartbreaker” to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

Gillis mainly played mash-ups from his 2006 release Night Ripper. While the consensus of playing straight off an album usually makes for a boring live set, Gillis is limited with a laptop. Unlike most of his laptop counterparts, Gillis ups the ante by being hyper expressive. In true form, Gillis invites people onstage around “Smash Your Head.” The stage started to fill up with sweat and beer drenched bodies. Bodyguards started kicking people off the stage about a third of the way through the set as Toto’s “Africa” echoed in the background. Only the Dawson’s Creek song, a la Paula Cole, seemed more inappropriate jacked in with hip-hop beats and top 40 dance-pop hits. Studio B was prepared for the onslaught of stage crawlers with two beefy bouncers occasionally pushing women half their size into crowd surfing submission.

Moshing at a Girl Talk show is like watching hundreds of hipsters spastically dance in front of an imaginary mirror, except in a room with hundreds of people. The moshing at hip-hop, punk and noise shows seem to be more of an outward expression of inner angst or rage. Even when Gillis pulled out Night Ripper gem “Bounce That,” which features a clip from Neutral Milk Hotel, no one seemed angsty or depressed as they danced around to Sir-Mix-A-Lot, 2 Live Crew and Paula Abdul in the same three minutes. The only angst in the room may have been from the people pushed offstage by the bouncers.

As for taking notes, this was not a night full of carefully orchestrated sets for journalists to take notes about the nuances of the set. If anyone could raise an elbow in the front of the room, they were probably doing so to take a swig of their empty beer bottle, realizing that most of the beer ended up on the floor, or in someone’s carefully coiffed outfit.

A major part of what makes Girl Talk so engaging is Gillis’ participation – his stage diving and crowd surfing with his fans and his energy as he head banged and danced to the music. At one point he ripped his shirt off and dove into the audience, encouraging even more people to hop onstage and dive headfirst into the crowd.

As everyone exited the show, the freezing temperatures created a steam bath effect over the exit. Outside in the freezing temperatures some people were lying on the ground while others enjoyed a post-coital cigarette. At the end of the night, it wasn’t about the order Gillis played the songs or the originality of what Gillis does. Everyone in that room, sans the couples who may have broken up over gyrating with someone other than their partner, had a great time.

Girl Talk Official Site