MUSIC: Girl Talk sweats up the House of Blues

    The kids were onstage, dancing and mugging for the camera like they were at a taping for an emo “American Bandstand,” while the dude in the sweaty white v-neck T-shirt making them jiggle and bounce often was indistinguishable from the crowd that engulfed him.  
    This was the point.
    On his records, mash-up artist Girl Talk (aka Greg Gillis, at right) blurs the boundaries between different genres of music into a colorful, indivisible whole, like a box of crayons melted in a microwave.
    Live, this same kind of barrier busting takes on a physical dimension.
    At the House of Blues on Monday, Gillis negated any distance between himself and the crowd, performer and audience, by inviting scads of fans onstage with him while also hurling himself onto the crowded floor and riding atop dozens of outstretched arms.
    This was the visual, corporeal manifestation of Gillis’ free-range electronica, which is a hooky, bass-heavy pastiche of pop staples, punk chestnuts and parent-advisory-stickered hip-hop.
    It’s something different every time, and changes on the fly.
    At the House of Blues, “Louie Louie” went crunk, Kelis’ “Milkshake” came armed with the black sludge riffing of White Zombie’s “Thunderkiss ’65,” Lil Wayne’s “A Milli” got gene spliced with Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So,” while Khia’s impossibly bawdy “My Neck, My Back” and Cheap Trick’s “I Want You To Want Me” were morphed into a desperate, breathless and sexy Frankenstein. 
    And that was but one 15-minute-or-so stretch in the perspiration-drenched show.  
    Through it all, Gillis was a study in kinetic energy, headbanging with enough force to put the longhairs in Meshuggah to shame, clasping hands with the crowd and pistoning himself up and down, up and down above his laptop like an army grunt doing push-ups.
     You got fatigued just watching the dude, wherever he was, frequently lost in a throng of wide-eyed revelers to whom he was one in the same.