The components required for a successful Girl Talk concert are as follows: hordes of sweaty people, some amount of moderate to severe drug (ab)use, a stage on which said people on said drugs can dance, too much neon and Girl Talk mash-ups. Girl Talk himself however, is by no means necessary.

There can be no doubt that concertgoers had fun at the Girl Talk show last weekend. Unfortunately, those people would have probably had just as much fun dancing around to Girl Talk’s CDs at a frat or house party. The DJ’s show was stale: he reused sample after sample, sometimes rehashing exact mash-ups from his two popular CDs.

The new mixes and samples he dropped were impressive only by virtue of being wildly popular dance tracks already — if you put on “Ice Cream Paint Job” or Lil’ Romeo’s “My Baby,” people are going to dance, regardless of what you lay it over. The music performed at the show consistently lacked innovation and sometimes even danceability: there were moments when even the frantically self-impressed kids dancing on stage found themselves at a standstill.

The amateur DJs at Sigma Chi’s “Ibiza” party that same night put on a significantly better electro concert than Girl Talk’s re-used tracks and discordant mash-ups, a comparison that is obnoxious at best but alarming at worst (considering the thousands of dollars spent to bring Girl Talk to our campus).

Although I was unimpressed by the concert, to be fair, many of the problems with the show overall weren’t all Girl Talk’s fault. The Memorial Practice Gym doesn’t exactly sport ideal acoustics, making it hard to distinguish intricacies within the tracks and their transitions. The DJ did his best to amp up the crowd and mostly succeeded — there was a solid core of partygoers dancing and loving the tracks throughout the night. But from the very beginning of his set, the edges of the crowd gave away what was in reality a lackluster performance: what should have been a tight knot of people dancing and pressing toward the stage was loose with straying fans, slowly filtering out of the gym in disappointment.

After several shots at seeing the DJ perform, this is one Girl Talk fan who is calling it quits in terms of his live shows. Girl Talk-style mash-up music is dance floor magic, but maybe it’s just not meant to be mixed live. Or maybe Girl Talk (Gregg Gillis) himself is the problem, and another artist needs to step in and take the stage with a fresher live aspect.

Girl Talk’s talent as an artist is undeniable, but his performance at our gym last weekend proved his live act lacking — a disappointment to many of our campus’ students, Girl Talk fans and otherwise.