6 posts tagged “mashup”
/ First up is a mix by DJ Bling and the Urban Expedition Project (UEP) titled King of Rock. True to the title, it features a lot of hip-hop, rap, and R&B mashed with rock from the '60s to '90s, as well as a lot of '80s electronic pop hits. It's also likely to be true to mashup's general "bastard pop" genre label; I can imagine a lot of purists and hardcore rock fans being very pissed off about hearing their favorite rock anthems being mashed with contemporary hip-hop/rap artists! But if you're really into a nice chocolate-vanilla swirl flavor of rock and rap, I would highly recommend giving King of Rock a listen.
The mix can be found at DJ Illa's site here. It's long and continuous-- perfect for a nightclub or dance hall setting, but you can download it as a zip file with separate tracks, which is easier for burning a CD copy.
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That said, I wouldn't call it a mashup in the strictest sense of the word, since mashups usually encompass two or more complete works that are independently whole. Furthermore, this doesn't feature all of the tracks of the original album, although I would say it's fairly representative in what is used. The Mick Boogie site calls it a complete reinterpretation-- and since most of the tracks are listed as remixes (without listing the artists sampled/mashed specifically), I would say it's more accurately called a remix. Then again, mashups and bastard pop have been called forms of the remix, so the distinction is academic.
This download is also available for free, along with further details concerning Adele 1988 here at the Mick Boogie website.
Links:
djilla.com
mickboogie.com
Sometimes DJs/VJs release mashup tracks individually, and others create compilations, often where the tracks have common elements or a unifying theme. Mark Vidler, as the one-man Go Home Productions, released Spliced Krispies in May 2008 and I was very interested in the content. Not only had he created videos (in the manner I described above), but he also had chosen a lot of older material. I'm a very firm believer that mashups are not a passing fad and the music can be very accessible to everyone-- if only to show that history can very much repeat itself in the music business, especially in popular genres.
Mark Vidler is based in Watford, UK and produces remixes as well as mashups. His work extends into radio and television, such as XFM's 'The Remix' and 'Rinse' radio shows as well as projects with MTV Mash. His hit mashup "Rapture Riders" was included in Blondie's Greatest Hits on the EMI label, and his "Ray of Gob" mashup of Madonna and The Sex Pistols (featured on Pistol Whipped on Half Inch Recordings) has become quite notorious. (I've referenced the "Rapture Riders" video here. I was very surprised that for a time, an excerpt was featured on the Blondie official website.)
As I said before, Spliced Krispies features a lot of older tunes, and I think that's a very good thing. It gives both the younger and older generations a fresh perspective on some old favorites. As some mashups are, it sometimes takes a few listens to get used to the songs if you're very, very familiar with the original tunes. While it would be nice for Vidler to have some studio magic to make the tracks very clean and smooth-sounding (say, compared to Simon Iddol), I think he's worked very well with the material and likely the recordings that were available to him.
My favorite on the album was "3 X A Raindrop", which takes Burt Bacharach's "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head", and the Commodore's "Three Times A Lady". The video splices scenes from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, in which movie "Raindrops" was featured, with cuts of Lionel Ritchie singing the other song in a live performance.
"This one will probably piss-off the purists, I dunno. After acquiring the REM 'parts' I thought it would be funny to put them with something completely alien to their style. Don't get me wrong, I'm a massive fan of REM's early stuff. Chronic Town, Murmur and Reckoning [were] definitely brilliant...but to put them with something more disco or funk was the intention."
The album with mp3s and videos is available at the Mark Vidler // Go Home Productions site here.
Links:
www.gohomeproductions.co.uk
myspace.com/markvidlerGHP
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I generally don't think much of mashups. Some of them are really creative--"The Ghosts That Feeds," combining Ray Parker Jr's "Ghostbusters" and Nine Inch Nails' "The Hand That Feeds" is brilliant, as is the entire-musical-spectrum-raping insanity of Pittsburgh's Girl Talk--but for the most part, mashups are almost always poorly-thought-out, and even more poorly-executed exercises in the cut'n'paste aesthetic that Negativland and Emergency Broadcast Network pioneered but few, few, can master as well.
WHA?! Studios latest mashup monsterpiece, Summer of Love 2008, proves that there are brilliant mashup artists Out There who can combine elements of various songs into mind-melting frankensongs that manage to transcend the mere sum of their parts. Yeah, it's cool to hear Jim Morrison's laconic vocals from "Rider On The Storm" synced up to Blondie's "Rapture," but are you prepared for the sheer musical chimerism of "Buffalo Springfield VS 808 State VS Deee-Lite VS Prince VS Duran Duran"? Because that's exactly what "What's That Sound?" by World Famous Audio Hacker, on Summer of Love 2008 is.
The whole idea behind Summer of Love 2008 can be succinctly described in the words of WHA?!'s press-release for the comp: "[Summer of Love 2008] is our tribute to the second Summer of Love, the acid house and rave culture which started 20 years ago in the UK. It was just as important as the first Summer of Love in the late 60's. So we took songs from the Flower Power era and we took songs from the Acid House Revolution and mashed them together." And that's exactly what you get. Album opener, "Step Together," by the brilliantly-named Phil RetroSpector, combines the Happy Mondays with The Beatles, while "Pinball Wizard in the Drivers Seat" splices together elements from The Who, Dogtooth, and Cook's County. I'd have to say this is my favorite track, because it turns The Who's "Pinball Wizard," one of my alltime favorite Who tracks, into a synthpop dancefloor destroyer that sounds more like a strange, contemporary remake of the song rather than a traditional remix. Bobby Martini's "Here Comes the Sunscreem" is a seamless mercuric amalgamation of Sunscreem and The Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun." Though sometimes the vocals don't quite match up with the music, it's still an incredibly ballsy track that will electrify hippies and britpop fans alike and will keep dancefloors rocking. Flying White Dots' shiversome "Land of Oz" is a beautiful, almost ambient space/dance/trance track built from pieces of Manuel Gottsching, Latino, Grace Jones, Pink Floyd, The Orb, Opus 3, Björk, Masters At Work, and The freakin' KLF to boot! We're talking ten minutes of space music so lush and mindblowing it proves, beyond any shadow of a doubt...this one track proves that music is better than acid for achieving altered states of mind. Yes. There. I said it. It's my story and I'm sticking to it!
Again, what makes this compilation work so well is that it's not a one-trick pony. Yes, it's built around a basic gimmick, combining music from two different eras, flowerchildren plus early rave culture, blah blah blah--but it only uses that gimmick as a starting point, not an endpoint. These individual tracks achieve much, much more than simply stitching together the familiar hooks from a bunch of random pop songs from the late '60s and the late '80s/early '90s. The combination of Summers of Love produces vibrant new music, not merely zombie tracks consisting of reanimated samples from old songs. A few of them, the first two tracks in particular, sound like remixes--but good remixes that do what remixes should do: create all new songs out of the components of previous tracks. But the other tracks...the other tracks are truly unique examples of, and triumphs of, the mashup genre.
Best of all...the entire EP is free! Free as Love! First, you can listen to all songs in streaming format at the album's homepage, then you can download the entire album here (Divshare link), or, even better, you can download it as a torrent. Plus, the torrent version contains a special extra: "The Caravan of Love Collection is the bonus gift of the Summer of Love 2008 compilation. Each artist from the album has designed a VW bus and you can find them in a handy print ready booklet feature in the zip file. Print them all and set up your very own Caravan of Love!" That's right, you get a collection of papercraft microbuses to print out, fold up, and display proudly in your cubicle while you blow your coworkers minds with the psycherobodelic sounds of Summer of Love 2008!
Somehow, in the shower today, of all places, I got to thinking about how much I loathed Madonna. I blame this conversation I had with a friend late this morning. Anyway, I don't care about that Kabbalah, or the issue with her adopted kid. In fact, I'd say those controversies are a symptom of her overall problem. She's old, crotchety, and hasn't got a clue.
She used to create reasonably intelligent and interesting controversy. Her tensions with the roman catholic church back in the 80's veered from straight up derision to tacit agreement - Papa Don't Preach, anyone? It was kind of exciting, from what I read of it. (in full disclosure, I was too young to experience that) Now when she dances on a cross it seems tired, because she adds nothing new and even after twenty years could that theme be freshened up? What really bothered me though, was when she got all paranoid about her failed disc American Life leaking, and personally helped poison peer to peer networks with fake files.
So I thought it was quaint when she sampled ABBA for her single, Hung Up. It was okay for her, since she's Madonna and has no trouble getting permission, but the song and album basically revealed that her and her producers were out of ideas. Let's make a modern 70/80's dance record! Lady, you've lived through the eighties. You've done that. It's bad enough when people half your age succumb to that sort of fetishism, but I think you're getting to the point where you're creatively done. Now, in her defense, the record was well produced and did sound contemporary, but this is from the lady that did great songs in the past that needed no retro point of reference. I may loathe you, but I acknowledge your past achievements. And if you're going to sample a relatively well known clip, you might as well do it well.
Now this is where mashup artists come in. By taking sampling to another level, they can take the most dated tunes and flip them inside out and stop them together to make something new. And if that sounds like another form of retro fetishism, some truly great mashups have been made with the latest chart hits, often surpassing the quality of the originals. Everything is fair game these days. This mashup, by DjMonsterMo, is kind of old but still a favorite of mine. He took the backing track of Hung Up and threw it together with the vocal from M.I.A.'s URAQT. It gets a bit of bite with M.I.A.'s almost obnoxious attitude, a little spice that Mrs. Richie's been missing from her music lately. And I think that after listening to this mash up and comparing it to the original, the original seems weak, since it also goes on for an interminable five minutes, the song's weakness, an overreliance on the sampled hook, becomes apparent. The mashup, while a little silly, is quite refreshing, and yes, it has no problem with brevity.
DJ Earworm posted a mashup called "The Night Of Kittin's Messy Dream", which basically consisted of the duet Thom Yorke & PJ Harvey song "The Mess We're In". Plus there's some "Rippin Kittin" by Golden Boy and Miss Kittin and "I Wear My Sunglasses at Night" by Corey Hart. Plus some Human Leagues (no idea, probably "Dreams of Leaving").
Viewing his myspace, I can see that he's 21 and based out of San Francisco. According to his brochure:
MASH-UP producer/deejay, DJ EARWORM
DJ Earworm was born into a family of musicians, ranging from bluegrass to rock to classical, and raised on a hippie commune in Eastern Iowa. He earned degrees in music theory and computer science before gravitating toward the West coast. Having developed as a songwriter, music producer, and pianist, he dropped out of a successful career in the stock market to pursue his first love -- music. Inspired by mash-ups heard during a stay in London in the early 2000's, he switched gears toward mash-up creation, finding the format able to satisfy his hunger for various genres of music. His productions include wide-ranging genres such as electro, rock, 80's, Top 40, and even country, blended together into a style that is uniquely Earworm. He is writing the definitive guide on *Mash-up construction to be released soon by Wiley Publishing. Most days, he can be heard blasting music out of an artist-filled Victorian mansion in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco or deejaying at corporate parties, underground gigs and at promotional events for MTV.
It St. Patrick's Day tomorrow, and in the spirit of the season I'm posting up this mash up of Run-DMC's It's Tricky and The Dubliner's Whiskey in the Jar. The Pogues's version is involved also, as MacGowan's slurring gets a feature. It's absoultely crazy and fun, and a different take from the usual folky/punky stuff that you'll hear during the season.
Apparently it's not the thing to get really plastered on this day in Ireland, as that's for american tourists and alcoholics, but wherever you are, please be responsible as you're enjoying the festivities. that said....
Serve with a pint of guinness, or a glass of whiskey or Baileys. Sobriety optional.
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