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Mashup (music)
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A mashup , bootleg or blend (also mash up and mash-up) is a song or composition created by blending two or more songs, usually by overlaying the vocal track of one song seamlessly over the music track of another.
In full swing at the end of the 20th century, mashups have been described positively as "ultimate post-modern pop song[s]" or "'culture jamming in its purest form'" They have also been described negatively as "the logical extension of the sampling fever of the '80s taken to its dumbest extreme".
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Encyclopedia
A mashup , bootleg or blend (also mash up and mash-up) is a song or composition created by blending two or more songs, usually by overlaying the vocal track of one song seamlessly over the music track of another.
In full swing at the end of the 20th century, mashups have been described positively as "ultimate post-modern pop song[s]" or "'culture jamming in its purest form'" They have also been described negatively as "the logical extension of the sampling fever of the '80s taken to its dumbest extreme". Due to the questionable legal status of mash ups and little chance of profits "there's a real punk rock attitude attached to the movement".
Cultural critic and legal commentator Siva Vaidhyanathan has commented that "The most interesting and entertaining phenomenon of the MP3 libraries on peer-to-peer systems is the availability of "mashes" - new compositions created by combining the rhythm tracks of one song and the vocal tracks of another." Noting that mashups have a rich history he observes that "It is merely the latest incarnation of a widely shared, deeply embedded cultural habit of cultural recombination across time and space."
Synonyms
Mashups are known by a number of different names:
- Bootlegs (mostly in Europe)
- Boots (but not Booty which is a branch of Electro)
- Mash-ups
- Smashups (or Smash-Ups)
- Bastard pop (as in the combined songs are unofficial)
- Blends
- Cutups (or cut ups, a term originally coined by William S. Burroughs to describe some of his literary experiments that involved literally "cutting up" different texts and rearranging the pieces to create a new piece.)
- Powermixing (Usually the pace has to be sped up to allow for more song to be played and thus cannot play any single blend for the full length of the song)
In addition, more traditional terms such as "edits" or (unauthorized) "remixes" are favored by many "bootleggers" (also known as 'leggers).
History
Though the term "bastard pop" first became popular in 2001, the practice of assembling new songs from purloined elements of other tracks stretches back to the beginnings of recorded music. If one extends the definition beyond the realm of pop, precursors can be found in Musique concrète, as well as the classical practice of (re-)arranging traditional folk material and the jazz tradition of reinterpreting standards. In addition, many elements of bastard pop culture have antecedents in hip hop and the DIY ethic of punk.
The 1999 Eminem album The Slim Shady LP with a cappella vocals from the track "My Name Is" combined with the music of many other artists, including "Back in Black" by AC/DC, "Ice Ice Baby" by Vanilla Ice, and "This Charming Man" by The Smiths served as an early inspiration for the British bastard pop movement.
In the mid-1990s, bastard pop was not yet a distinct genre, but formed a significant portion of the output of a few North American experimental artists such as John Oswald, Negativland, the Evolution Control Committee, and the Emergency Broadcast Network. At that time the tracks, when they were referred to at all, were often just considered "remixes", though some other terms were used, such as tape manipulations, cut-ups, and mashups.
Precursors
Classical
"Quodlibet" is a classical form of "remixing". While these examples are not always strictly illegitimate, they capture the sense of genre collision (A v B) characteristic of "bastard" pop. Modern classical analogues include various works by PDQ Bach such as the "Unbegun Symphony" which is composed entirely of others' works, notably a passage blending of Tchaichovsky's "1812 Overture" with the song "You Are My Sunshine". John Oswald has also composed several concert works he labels as Rascali Klepitoire, which are radical transformations of well-known pieces from the classical repertoire. As J. Peter Burkholder shows in his book "All Made of Tunes, Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing" American composer Charles Ives frequently quoted the works of others throughout his compositions, including hymns, popular tunes, marches, and often the music of Stephen Foster.
I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue
The popular BBC Radio 4 panel show I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue features a section known as One Song To The Tune Of Another where the panelists have to, quite literally, sing the words of one song to the tune of another one, usually in the form of piano accompaniment.
Some of the humour derives from the incongruity caused by differences between the songs involved. They may differ wildly in genre, structure, tempo, and time signature, but unlikely combinations have sometimes worked surprisingly well. Examples include:
A contribution to the effectiveness of the rendition is made by the pianist Colin Sell who, given the poor vocal skill of the panelists, often has a much more difficult task than is usually required.
"The Flying Saucer"
In 1956, Bill Buchanan and Dickie Goodman caused a musical sensation by releasing the first mainstream bastard pop single (though they referred to it as a "break-in" song, i.e. material from one song would "break-in" to another), "The Flying Saucer". The track, a reinterpretation of Orson Welles' celebrated War of the Worlds mock-emergency broadcast interspliced with musical snippets comically dramatizing the portentous patter of the announcer, spawned a raft of imitations and quickly became a craze, only to pass into oblivion within the space of a year.
Novelty records
There have been a number of novelty records and one-off hits that have
included uncleared samples. The song "Your Woman" by White Town features an uncredited sample from a 1932 song "My Woman" by the Lew Stone Band taken from the soundtrack of the Dennis Potter series Pennies From Heaven. Other notable one-off bootlegs include DNA's dance remix of Suzanne Vega's "Tom's Diner" (1990) and "You Got The Love" by The Source featuring Candi Staton (1991). Vega received quite a few unsolicited mixes of her (a cappella) song, and eventually issued an entire c.d. of "Tom's Diner" mixes, one notable example being "Jeannie's Diner", in which a resung verse based on Vega's composition describes the premise of the situation comedy "I Dream of Jeannie". "Tom's Diner" is likely to be the first song that was "mash mixed" as we now know the process.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, during the disco boom, DJ pools would sometimes issue medley discs to their members. While not technically featuring a sample, one such record that achieved moderate chart and club success in the U.S. was Club House's 1983 medley of Steely Dan's "Do It Again" with Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean". This medley hit both the Pop and R&B charts in August/September 1983.
One series (and probably the first) was John Morales' (later one half of M and M productions) "Deadly Medley"s, in which he mixed-up disco hits of the moment to form beat-consistent collages. In the 1980s, Dutch producer Jaap Eggermont produced the Stars on 45 series of records. These records attempted to cram as many hits as possible into the space of a three and a half minute pop song, and are perhaps more accurately described as medleys. Though these singles have never received critical plaudits, the medley idea would later resurface in a more respectable form (for instance Coldcut's "Beats and Pieces"), and, moreover, the deliberately humorous tone of the "Stars on 45" singles has not entirely disappeared. One must also remember the huge successes of "Weird Al" Yankovic's lyrical parody of pop hits, which earned him a seemingly tenured spot on MTV during the channel's heyday. Many bastard pop songs have been produced in jest, with the emphasis very firmly on satire, "irresistible" puns, or simple throwaway fun.
Frank Zappa
In the 1970s, Frank Zappa developed a technique he called "xenochrony" in which a guitar solo was extracted from its original context and placed into a completely different song – essentially bastard pop for guitar rather than vocals. His recording engineer referred to this as "the Ampex guitar". In his rock opera Joe's Garage (1979), for example, Zappa's xenochrony can be heard on every track apart from Packard Goose.
"Rubber Shirt" from the album Sheik Yerbouti consists of a bass track and a drum track taken from two different live performances melded together in the studio.
John Oswald
John Oswald has been devising illegitimate compositions since the late 1960s. His 1975 track "Power" married frenetic Led Zeppelin guitars to the impassioned exhortations of a Southern US evangelist at the same time that hip hop was discovering the potency of the same (and related) kinds of ingredients. Similarly, his 1990 track "Vane", which pitted two different versions of the song "You're So Vain" (the Carly Simon original and a cover by Faster Pussycat) against each other, was a blueprint for the contemporary bastard pop subgenre, glitch pop. Oswald coined the term "plunderphonics" to describe his illegitimate craft. In 1993, he released Plexure. Arguably his most ambitious composition to date, it attempted to microsample the history of CD music up to that point (1982 - 1992) in a 20 minute collage of bewildering complexity. The ambition of this piece would later be recalled by the British bootlegger Osymyso, whose "Intro-Inspection" captured the pop-junkie feel of Plexure. Osymyso, who at the time was unaware of Oswald's work, used the same structure of an accelerando (arranging his source material in order from the slowest tempo to the fastest) to link a few bars each of 100 songs, creating a simpler sound than the thousands of overlapping and morphing pop "electroquotations" in Plexure.
Negativland
Though Negativland are seldom acknowledged as musical antecedents of bastard pop, lacking perhaps the sense of fun many contemporary practitioners seek in their craft, their struggle against various forms of "censorship" (in their terms) and legal coercion (for instance, their single "U2" was one of the first pieces of music to be withdrawn for its use of unauthorised samples) has made them poster children for some bastard pop commentators who approach the issue from a more critical perspective, and with an eye to the complicated cultural issues raised by both accidental and deliberate plundering within music and culture generally.
The JAMs and The KLF
In the wake of these somewhat academic explorations, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, entered the arena in 1987 with an album of plunderphony which, while still serving as a critical reflection on the nature of pop music and the power and potential of the sampler, upped the ante by being (almost) music one could dance to as well as think about. Their debut album, released under the name The JAMs, 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?), was banned (thanks to its raft of uncleared samples, most notably the bulk of ABBA's "Dancing Queen"), and a number of the songs have the same "laptop punk" "anyone can do it" attitude that characterizes bastard pop today. The JAMs morphed into The KLF (rumoured to be short for "Kopyright Liberation Front") in 1988 and continued to pursue the same art-prankster agenda, most notably with their number 1 hit (under the name The Timelords), "Doctorin' the Tardis".
Double Dee and Steinski
Though the JAMs grazed the charts and The KLF, for a while at least, practically dominated them, illegitimate pop had remained largely an underground affair since the original "break-in" craze swept the US in 1956.
Working under the name Steinski, New York copywriter, DJ and self-confessed record junkie Steve Stein began (in conjunction with engineer and fellow studio boffin Doug "Double Dee" DiFranco) the next chapter in the evolution of illicit pop by producing a trio of underground 12" singles (entitled "The Payoff Mix" (1983), "Lesson 2 (The James Brown Mix)" (1984) and "Lesson 3 (History of Hiphop)" (1985)) which exerted a powerful influence on an entire generation of "samplists" and continues to be cited to this day as a landmark in the history of "sampledelica". Indeed one can trace a line from Double Dee and Steinski through Coldcut's "Say Kids What Time Is It?" (which begat Bomb The Bass' "Beat Dis", which, in turn, begat LA Mix's "Check This Out") to DJ Shadow (who paid his dues on a track entitled "Lesson 4") and The Avalanches - and (through M/A/R/R/S' "Pump Up The Volume") to Black Box, whose "Ride on Time" spread the gospel of sample wizardry far and wide, from the depths of the underground to the top of the charts. Black Box proved to the major labels that a legitimate (and more appealingly to a corporation) profitable market was springing up from bedroom turntables. After an initial white label period, Black Box sought (and received) legal clearance for their usage of Dan Hartman's song "Love Sensation" and samples of the Salsoul Records recording of such by Loleatta Holloway.
Emergency Broadcast Network
In 1995, Emergency Broadcast Network released "3:7:8", the first exclusively video sample based song.
The three Rhode Island School of Design graduates - Joshua Pearson, Gardner Post and Ron O'Donnell - released their self-titled video on TVT Records. It combined video and audio samples of politicians and celebrities in such an artful way that U2, despite their earlier skirmish with Negativland, invited them to accompany them on their Zoo TV Tour as video artists.
Evolution Control Committee
In 1994, the experimental band Evolution Control Committee released what are widely credited as being the first modern bastard pop tracks on their hand-made cassette album, Gunderphonic. These "Whipped Cream Mixes" combined a pair of Public Enemy a cappellas with instrumentals by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. First released on home-made cassettes in the early 1990s, likely in 1991 or 1992, it was later pressed on 7" vinyl, and distributed by Eerie Materials in the mid 1990s, the tracks gained some degree of notoriety on college radio stations in the United States. On the heels of this release, the band gained a larger following with tours in the United States, Europe, and Australia, and has since released several well-known mashups while continuing the pursuit of other experimental styles.
Renaissance
2 many DJ's and "A Stroke of Genie-us"
The name Pop Will Eat Itself was unabashedly "stolen" from an NME feature on the band Jamie Wednesday, written by David Quantick, which proposed the theory that because popular music simply recycles good ideas continuously, the perfect pop song could be written by [combining] the best of those ideas into one track. Hence, Pop Will Eat Itself.
The movement gained momentum again in 2001 with the release of two seminal landmarks: the 2 Many DJs album, by Soulwax's Dewaele brothers (As Heard On Radio Soulwax Pt. 2), which combined 45 different tracks in a frenzied vindication of the "pop will eat itself" prophesy, and a remix by Freelance Hellraiser of Christina Aguilera's "Genie in a Bottle" which coupled the (then) demure pop princess with the raucous guitars of "Hard To Explain" by New York's The Strokes in an infectious concoction entitled "A Stroke of Genie-us". This track became one of the most talked about underground hits of 2001, and was featured in many "best of" lists at the end of the year.
2manydjs is the "nom-de-turntable" of two Belgian brothers, David and Stephen Dewaele, who spent two years clearing the samples for their album, so their landmark was not entirely illegitimate, though they continued to work in the shadowy interzone between legitimacy and copyright "felony".
The Freelance Hellraiser track, in contrast, was never officially released, and indeed most bastard pop songs are only made available (for free) online (i.e. not commercially) in a not-always-successful attempt to avoid "cease and desist" notices from the copyright holders.
Occasionally, however, a song gains so much underground momentum that a commercial release becomes inevitable. The earliest example of this was Richard X (working under the name Girls On Top), whose 2002 track "We Don't Give a Damn About Our Friends" grafted an old Adina Howard a cappella onto the music of Tubeway Army's "Are 'Friends' Electric?". The song became so popular that it was released with re-recorded vocals by Sugababes (under the title "Freak Like Me"), though their version was, by design, almost indistinguishable from the "original". The single went straight to number one in the UK charts, making it the first bastard pop crossover hit.
2001 also saw the release of DJ Z-Trip and DJ P's mashup project Uneasy Listening Volume 1, an eclectic mix of rock, hip hop, electro, and pop from the 1960s to the 1990s that melded Metallica to Midnight Oil, Naked Eye to Public Enemy, and AC/DC to DJ Red Alert. DJ Z-Trip had made earlier excursions into the genre with live performances such as 1998's Live at the Future Primitive Soundsession: Vol 2 and Future Primitive 45 Night. DJ P won the DMC Midwest Championship and in the 1999 DMC finals in San Francisco received the only standing ovation of the event with his innovative style. Where both of these DJs differ from most "mashup" DJs is that they can perform most, if not all, of their blends live with only their vinyl records and their turntables ... a feat that takes much more skill than most other DJs of the genre who have gained more notoriety.
In the same year, Kylie Minogue lent her support to the burgeoning genre by performing Soulwax's mashup of New Order's "Blue Monday" and her own hit "Can't Get You Out Of My Head" entitled "Can't Get Blue Monday Out of My Head" at the BRIT Awards.
More recently, Go Home Productions has released "Ray of Gob", which splices together Madonna's "Ray of Light" and the Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant" and "God Save the Queen". The single, which was voted "Bootleg of the Year" in 2003, was cleared by the representatives of both parties and the track even earned the approbation of the Pistols' guitarist Steve Jones.
Napster and Audiogalaxy
In the wake of these developments, hundreds of bedroom DJs and songwriters were inspired to make their own "bastard pop" confections. The demise of Napster and Audiogalaxy, while initially making it harder for amateurs to acquire the precious raw materials (i.e. a cappellas and instrumentals) cheaply (i.e. for free), quickly led to the birth and meteoric rise of alternative P2P networks such as Kazaa, Limewire, Emule and, more recently, BitTorrent (although the latter is more commonly used to distribute entire albums, rather than individual tracks). Where once music aficionados could trade only MP3s, it now became possible to acquire not only music, but the technology to manipulate that music freely and easily.
The general description of mashups is the result in which a vocal from one song is laid over the music from another. However, others view mashups as a form of rebellion to the commercialization of pop music. With music piracy issues aside, one critic believes that a mashup is "an expression of consumer dissatisfaction. Armed with free time and the right software, people are rifling through the lesser songs of pop music and, in frustration, choosing to make some of them as good as the great ones." Many prominent mashup artists and communities believe that the objective of the consumptive power of the mashup and home remix community is to encourage record labels, publishers, and artists to consider giving the high quality productions of "illegitimate" music a legitimate consideration as a promotional avenue for all music.
Software tools
As a result of this, industry standard tools such as the digital audio workstation Cubase and the sound editors Wavelab, Soundforge, WavePad and Cool Edit Pro quickly became ubiquitous. Moreover, new tools such as Ableton Live, MixPad and, most popular of all, Sonic Foundry's (now Sony's) ACID Pro were tweaked to accommodate the needs of this new "scene". Most notably, such features as beat-mapping (a technique which simplifies the synchronization of samples of different tempos) and online previewing (allowing the composer to audition a sample, playing at the right pitch and tempo, alongside their existing composition) made it easy for many people with musical ability but little professional studio experience to knock together new combinations in a fraction of the time it would take with traditional tools, such as the magnetic tape John Oswald (and even Coldcut) slaved over in their early days.
Mark Vidler, known as Go Home Productions, summarized it by saying the benefits of such technology of AcidPro: "You don't need a distributor, because your distribution is the internet. You don't need a record label, because it's your bedroom, and you don't need a recording studio, because that's your computer. You do it all yourself.
Boomselection, Get Your Bootleg On, Sound Unsound, Mashuptown, Bootie
Every new scene must have its "water cooler" and its journal, and in the case of bastard pop, established itself as the former while took on the role of "blog of record". Not merely reflecting the scene, Boomselection publicised various challenges which resulted in hundreds, if not thousands, of new bootlegs being uploaded to sites around the world. While the scene began as a primarily British phenomenon, the USA, France and Germany are currently the hotbeds of the modern mashup movement. However, there are notable bootleggers to be found in practically every corner of the globe - wherever an Internet connection and a record collection can be found - including Australia, Belgium, Switzerland, and Sweden.
The name "Get Your Bootleg On" comes from the Missy Elliott track "Get Ur Freak On", which alongside Eminem's "Without Me" remains perhaps the most bootlegged, manipulated, remixed and reinterpreted song of the genre. Other popular artists include Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Madonna, and Beyoncé.
The Get Your Bootleg On site (affectionately abbreviated to GYBO) is the main launchpad for new bastard pop tunes, and is the home of a lively community of bootleggers who offer critiques of new songs, tips for newbies, pointers on where to find a cappellas, legal advice, publicity for bastard pop events and general discussion of issues surrounding the bastard pop phenomenon.
In early 2005, Boomselection retired itself after a long period of inactivity. The year also marked a series of cease and desist orders brought against a number of bootleg sites, and in early 2006 GYBO received its first such notice. To survive, the site prohibited the posting of direct links to copyrighted material within the forums, but allowed users to post links to their own sites containing such material, the defense being that now GYBO was no more in violation of copyright law than Google. For the most part, the community has rallied around the site, and continues to support it in its new form.
The void left by Boomselection's demise was rapidly replaced by which was started in early 2005 is currently the biggest blog source of mashups on the internet. The site has recently become the official supplier of Mashups to Adam Curry's Daily Source Code podcast.
In addition, the scene has a number of other sites which provide downloads, links, podcasts, previews, user vote based rankings such as , , , , the forum and news.
Also, the blogroll is a Web mashup of data feeds from over one hundred mashup artists, blogs and news sites and combines them into a single feed.
The world's biggest mashup party Bootie (club night) hosts the monthly , which host the 10 best mashups selected by Bootie creators and DJs Adrian & the Mysterious D, for free download every month. Their mashup compilations have become annual internet sensations every year they are released, with over 5000GB+ of downloads.
was launched in January 2008 as a reaction to GYBO's enforced ban on long mixes and podcasts. Since it's inception it has released several critically acclaimed Mashup albums. differs from GYBO in that there is enhanced interactivity between members through communal compilation albums, an integral Licensed Radio station, Chat room, Arcade and soon a Market place .
Bonna Music and Enjoy The Sheket
Legal mashups are hard to find, but in some relatively small music markets, publishers have understood the potential of clearing the rights of major international artist to be combined with local repertoires, to create a wider consumption for both artists on a given track.
In Israel for example, a group called Bonna Music remixed the Depeche Mode song Enjoy the Silence with Balagan's Sheket (which means silence in Hebrew). The mashup was approved by Martin Gore and released officially a month before Depeche Mode's new album Playing the Angel in 2005. It was a major hit locally and when Depeche Mode's first single was released they were more welcome in a market where the local repertoire is dominant.
Subgenres
A vs B
Putting an a cappella against a completely different backing track in order to make a "third song" is the original "mission" of bastard pop, and it is no surprise that, in the wake of "A Stroke of Genie-us", the genre has continued to focus on this basic premise.
Another notable "versus" song is Zombi - Zombie Nation which combined Zombie Nation's Kernkraft 400 with Goblin's Zombi theme and is featured on Shaun of the Dead's official soundtrack.
In addition, Lionel Vinyl, Soundhog, Go Home Productions and Party Ben, amongst many others, have produced a number of critically acclaimed songs in this vein, and in some instances have secured record deals on the back of these exercises, which arguably serve as "demo MP3s" of their songwriting and production skills.
However, not all mash-ups are as simple as A vs B. In some cases, DJs will mash 3, 4, 5, and even 6 songs to form one complete track. Mixing more than two tracks together can be a daunting task, and it requires a great deal of skill. Notably, DJ Earworm has combined the top billboard 25 into a single mashup for 2007 and 2008.
Version vs Version
Mixing two or more versions of a song to create a duet or alternate version of a song is what a version vs version is set to accomplish. It can mix 2 different versions of a song, such as an Ballad and Original version, or a cover version of the song. Some of the more popular version to version mixes are language mixes. Mixing multiple languages into one song. Version vs Version mashups usually have the same original instrumental but sometimes it is changed to benefit the song.
Glitch pop
Glitch pop is a subgenre of the bastard pop scene which marries the Digital Signal Processing (DSP) wizardry associated with Kid 606 and Tigerbeat6 records to the ostensibly familiar contours of pop. Sometimes this is done in a spirit of homage; sometimes it serves merely as a form of ridicule and even vilification; often it is both at the same time.
An example of the "double science" at play in glitch pop is Skkatter's "Dirty Pop", which takes a song that is already an epic of carefully constructed digital micro-malfunctions (BT's deconstruction of *NSYNC's "Pop") and pushes it even further out to the margins of musical mayhem. Similarly, Australian bootlegger and glitch pop co-conspirator Dsico has reworked a number of R'n'B tunes by such artists as The Neptunes and (again) *NSYNC in a spirit that is at once both satirical and steeped in fanboydom. In most cases these remixes render ostensibly mainstream songs avant garde and fresh, sometimes by working against the spirit of the original, but often by leveraging the sugar rush at the heart of much of the best contemporary pop, and adding sonic CGI to its emotional armoury.
In the UK, the most notable exponent of the genre is Poj Masta, a teenage schoolboy whose work has been keenly supported by DJs such as Eddy Temple-Morris and James Hyman of London's Xfm radio station. Their weekly show, The Remix, has played a major role in nurturing new bootleggers and bringing them to the attention of a wide audience.
Remixes
Technically, all bastard pop songs are remixes. But while most are made up entirely of plundered material, some bootleggers have fused old a cappellas with completely new compositions of their own devising.
The most popular example of this phenomenon is the , which contains hundreds of remixes of Björk tunes (for which the a cappellas are rarely, if ever, available - the vocals are typically extracted by the application of clever equalization or "").
Another popular example with fans of Japanese pop is Evil Morning, an album which combines vocal tracks from Morning Musume and their associated artists with new instrumental tracks that rearrange or replay the original music in the style of hard rock or heavy metal.
A remix can show up in the form of a Mashup song as in the 2007 hit song Sweetest Girl (Dollar bill remix) in which Wyclef Jean infuses the vocals of his song with the beat and melody of Wu Tang Clan's 1993 hit C.R.E.A.M. showing a mash up of two hip hop songs and artist. However, he adds a new verse from hip hop artist Raekwon of the Wu Tang Clan within the music video for the song, effectively creating a "mashup remix". The mashup comes about from the message presented in each song about money. This remix also presented a mashup of two hip hop artist challenging the notion that a mashup had to come in the form of two different genres of music.
Bootleg albums
DJ Danger Mouse's critically acclaimed remix project The Grey Album effectively launched a new pop subgenre. While The Beatles had made appearances on several mash-up tracks prior to this album (for instance PPM's "A Life In The Day" and JPL's "Let It Be Missy Elliott (Beatlesmix)"), The Grey Album distinguished itself by being made up entirely of samples from The Beatles' White Album and vocals from Jay-Z's The Black Album. The project received considerable attention following EMI's legal threats towards distributors of the album.
The Dean Gray (a collaborative between Party Ben and Team9) 2005 mashup album American Edit is highly regarded as the most influencial mash-up album since The Grey Album. American Edit was banned by Warner Music in November, 2005, less than two weeks after its release and received massive attention due to an online protest formed by mash-up supporters which reportedly recorded over 40,000 participants on Dean Gray Tuesday.
In 2009, World Famous Audio Hacker announced a project named The Post-Turntablist spanning mash-up and cut-up styles, releasing a new audio segement every two weeks that is produced to be joined into a final exquisite corpse of original mash-ups and cut-ups on the last week of the year.
Beyond That, Several mash-up albums had been released online or elsewhere, one of the great examples is french bootlegger ToToM who released three albums within the first three years (from 2005 to 2007) before he released both an album trilogy focusing on Nine Inch Nails and an sequel to his compilated album in 2008.
These albums (which can be listened ) include:
- Bastard Pet Sounds (mashup version of The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, including The Beatles which predated The Beachles)
- With_Boots (mashup version of Nine Inch Nails' [With_Teeth], with one Nine Inch Nails mashup mixing with three of their songs and became famed on remix.nin.com)
- Bootwards (aka Boo+wArds, an compilation of various rock and pop artists mixed with hip-hop/r&b instrumentals)
- Bootleg Is Resistance Volume 1 (the first of BiR trilogy, mixing NIN's vocals from Year Zero album with various forms of instrumentals)
- Bootleg Is Resistance Volume 2 (the second of BiR trilogy, mixing NIN's instrumentals from Year Zero album with various forms of a cappellas)
- Bootleg Is Resistance Volume 3 (the third of BiR trilogy, featuring bootlegger's outtakes of the previous two volumes)
- Bootwards II: Mash Up Side Down (an sequel to Bootwards and collaboration with French bootleggers including Mighty Mike, Bogoss, ElectroSound, The Bootleague, Métamix, MichMash, Sebwax and Comar)
Notable mash-up albums include:
Cut-ups
While there is some overlap between the terms "cut up" and "mash up", the former has increasingly come to refer to pieces that rely on the humour (or pathos) of reconstructed spoken word and video material. This may be due to the fact that the term "cut up" was used decades earlier by novelist and artist William S. Burroughs to refer to his literary cutups as well as his tape recorder experiments, which featured spliced vocal tracks in the same way that his written cut-ups literally cut up and rearranged various texts.
The best known cutups remix political speeches and rallies to satirical effect. Johan Söderberg's "Endless Love", in which George W. Bush and Tony Blair appear to serenade each other like lovebirds, Chris Morris' "Bushwhacked", a détournement of Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address, or by Polémix and La Voix Off, a cut-off of Nicolas Sarkozy's speeches.
Notable cut up artists include Cassetteboy, Osymyso, rx, Cartel Communique and Evolution Control Committee.
Video Art
Visual artists involved with installation art, performance art and VJing closely related to music production have recently taken up the concept of bastard pop in their work.
Forerunners of the genre include , a British trio who have created mashups and video remixes for MTV. They released the world's first audiovisual mashup DVD album, We are not VJs, in 2005.
Another notable visual artist is Belgian artist Danny Devos, who mashed up Gordon Matta-Clark's "Descending Steps for Batan" and Dan Flavin's "Icon IV" in his own piece "Diggin' for Gordon".
Notable mash ups
- "Smells like Booty" by Freelance Hellraiser (2001)--Rob Fusari/Beyonce/Faionte Moore/Stevie Nicks/Kurt Cobain/Dave Grohl/Krist Novoselic), The Best Bootlegs in the World Ever. (Combines "Bootylicious" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit")
- "United State of Pop" by DJ Earworm (2008) - A mashup of the top 20 billboard hits of 2007.
- "United State of Pop 2008" by DJ Earworm (2008) - A sequel to the previous mashup above with billboard chart hits of 2008. Earworm currently released a mix called "Viva La Pop" because it used Viva La Vida by Coldplay as the backing instrumental track.
- "Numb/Encore" by Linkin Park & Jay-Z, the most popular of the six mash-ups on their album "Collision Course". The song was a hit amongst radio stations and eventually went on to win a Grammy.
- "Tick-Toxic" a mash-up between Gwen Stefani's "What You Waiting For?" and Britney Spears' "Toxic"
See also
Further reading
- Paul Morley (2003). Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City. Bloomsbury. ISBN 0-7475-5778-0.
- Jeremy J. Beadle (1993). Will Pop Eat Itself? Faber & Faber. ISBN 0-571-16241-X.
- Roseman, Jordan (2006). Audio Mashup Construction Kit. ISBN 0471771953.
- Hughes, J. & Lang, K. (2006). "Transmutability: Digital Decontextualization, Manipulation, and Recontextualization as a New Source of Value in the Production and Consumption of Culture Products." In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - Volume 08.
External links
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Cut-ups
Visual Art
Websites
Articles
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