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Girl Talk is Gregg Gillis.

Gregg Gillis was a biomedical engineer in Cleveland, Ohio; a twenty-something year old cubicle dweller in a white lab coat.

Here's Gillis in 2006.

That same year, he released his first critically acclaimed and off-the-fucking hook album, Night Ripper, under the name Girl Talk.

The music Gillis creates is called mashup (māsh'ŭp'), a new style of music that proves itself to be hypnotically addictive, maddeningly unpleasant and debatably illegal, all at the same time. Depending on who you ask.

(Note: I just came up with that description myself, and as I read it it looks like I just described a powerful narcotic.)

Girl Talk is not the first mashup wizard. I remember the first time I heard one, I was a junior in high school, in class with my "cool" English teacher. He played us a song from his iPod that mixed the lyrics of Destiny's Child over the music from Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." I was thoroughly impressed with the sound. It was humorous but also powerful. It was youthful and crazy.

Girl Talk took that seed and cultivated a forest of digital musical force, with only a laptop, two software programs and an encyclopedia of popular music knowledge.

He is infamous for his sweaty live shows: thrashing dance parties that bring animals out of hip youngsters. Here's Girl Talk in action --

I've seen Girl Talk live in concert twice before, and I'm about to see him again this weekend. And while the last concert was severely disastrous -- the show was vastly over sold and there was little room to breathe or dance, and Gillis' equipment came unplugged and the stage collapsed -- I am optimistic about the next one. I can't help but love the music he makes. It's intoxicating.

We did get right up in GT's face, though. Here's the proof, snapped from a cell phone.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about Gillis and Girl Talk is the seemingly impossible way his music is allowed to exist, considering its almost solely created from the copy-written works of other artists. He knowingly pokes and prods at the uptight rules of "fair use" and his been able to release four albums under the label Illegal Art. I know this, and much much more from the documentary "RiP! A remix manifesto."

But that's a whole other story.

So wish me luck as I worship the sweaty, electronic deity known as Gregg Gillis known as Girl Talk, known as the sound of my generation and as a hero of stealing art to make new art.

Here's the best example of such a concept.