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rfmcdonaldOf late, whenever I've been at the Grey Region I've been listening to mashups. I last wrote about mashups (briefly put, innovative mixes which fuse two or more songs into one) in June, in my mashup-style review of Landsberg's Prosthetic Memory and Barnes' The Merchants of Souls. At first, I listened to them simply because these songs were readily available in mp3 format and could be played with a minimum of fuss. More recently, I think I've become a significant fan.
There's some places you should visit if you're interested in this genre. Mashmix is a good site to start, while DJ Matt Hite's site has good links to a wide variety of sites, while McSleazy and Bumtschak host a variety of interesting remixes and mashups. A few songs have caught my fancy. There's "What Have I Done to Deserve Another Slow Boot?" (mp3 format), combining the Pet Shop Boys' 1987 hit with Dusty Springfield "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" with Kylie Minogue's recent "Slow." DJ Zebra's "Come Together" is an interesting fusion of the Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" and the Beatles' "Come Together." The Thin Gold chain mashup "Sweet Insomnia", which mixes Faithless' "Insomnia" with the Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams" has been a long-time favourite of mine. A more recent favourite of mine is DJ Matt Hite's "Model Goes Missing", which weaves together Everything But the Girl's "Missing" with Hite's remix of Kraftwerk's "The Model" to make a passionately and sparsely melancholy song.
My favourite mashup, I have to admit, is Bumtschak's "The Boy Will Make Me Crazy" (mp3 format), a mashup of Felix's 1992 song "It Will Make Me Crazy" with Brandy and Monica's 1998 summer hit "The Boy Is Mine." I remember driving down a North Shore road with my coworkers that summer, fresh from the summer-end outing hosted by my Tourism manager at her North Shore residence in Rustico, the lush green of farmers' fields to either side and the blue sea hemmed in my red cliffs behind us, listening to "The Boy Is Mine" over Magic 93. At the song's end, one of my coworkers concluded that the song was pure cheese. Which it was, and which this mashup is. It isn't a mildly exotic cheese like Gouda, either, but rather something that comes sprayed out of a can. And it is so good.
In last Saturday's The Globe and Mail, there was an interesting article ("Who are they to say that Britney's trash?") examining the question of what exactly was durable in popular culture. The author, Carl Wilson, argued that there was a bias in North American culture towards denigrating the popular musics enjoyed by "girl people, or black people, or gay people," and a tendency to cling to more traditional He cited the failure of the house, trance, jungle, and other related popular musics assigned the genre of "electronica" to successfully cross the Atlantic, arguably because of the late-1970s backlash against disco music (itself closely identified at the time with unpopular gays), as a data point in his thesis' favour. It's in the margins, Wilson suggests, in the authentic margins of ignored and denigrated identity groups, that truly innovative creative projects are produced.
Wilson concludes his article by talking about the career of the late American musician Arthur Russell, who before his 1992 death from AIDS managed to produce an extensive discography. Almost a member of the Talking Heads, Russell's solo work reflected his location in a time and place (late 1970s New York City) where borrowing across genres (of music, of art, of literature) was possible, as Andy Battaglia describes in his 2004 Slate article "Disco Fever".
The samples of Russell's work available via Battaglia's article interest me, although they don't strike me as being immediately compelling. Russell's sound, though, has a playful syncretism that's decidedly futuristic; or rather, was futuristic in the 1980s. Mashups have realized, in a different fashion, Russell's musical imagination. From one data point to another, a trend can be traced connecting the two. (Ending where, mashups regularly in the top ten? Perhaps the mashup review as an established convention of literary commentary?)
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto tried to write his 1995 Millennium from the perspective of the galactic museum-keepers, blessed with a vantage point far in the future so as to enjoy the advantages of the longue durée in determining trends in human civilization over entire centuries. To my mind, Fernandez-Armesto succeeded interestingly. You don't need Fernandez-Armesto's vast sweep for studies of contemporary popular culture, but it's a good idea to possess some fragment of his superlative trend-tracking ability.
There's some places you should visit if you're interested in this genre. Mashmix is a good site to start, while DJ Matt Hite's site has good links to a wide variety of sites, while McSleazy and Bumtschak host a variety of interesting remixes and mashups. A few songs have caught my fancy. There's "What Have I Done to Deserve Another Slow Boot?" (mp3 format), combining the Pet Shop Boys' 1987 hit with Dusty Springfield "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" with Kylie Minogue's recent "Slow." DJ Zebra's "Come Together" is an interesting fusion of the Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" and the Beatles' "Come Together." The Thin Gold chain mashup "Sweet Insomnia", which mixes Faithless' "Insomnia" with the Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams" has been a long-time favourite of mine. A more recent favourite of mine is DJ Matt Hite's "Model Goes Missing", which weaves together Everything But the Girl's "Missing" with Hite's remix of Kraftwerk's "The Model" to make a passionately and sparsely melancholy song.
My favourite mashup, I have to admit, is Bumtschak's "The Boy Will Make Me Crazy" (mp3 format), a mashup of Felix's 1992 song "It Will Make Me Crazy" with Brandy and Monica's 1998 summer hit "The Boy Is Mine." I remember driving down a North Shore road with my coworkers that summer, fresh from the summer-end outing hosted by my Tourism manager at her North Shore residence in Rustico, the lush green of farmers' fields to either side and the blue sea hemmed in my red cliffs behind us, listening to "The Boy Is Mine" over Magic 93. At the song's end, one of my coworkers concluded that the song was pure cheese. Which it was, and which this mashup is. It isn't a mildly exotic cheese like Gouda, either, but rather something that comes sprayed out of a can. And it is so good.
In last Saturday's The Globe and Mail, there was an interesting article ("Who are they to say that Britney's trash?") examining the question of what exactly was durable in popular culture. The author, Carl Wilson, argued that there was a bias in North American culture towards denigrating the popular musics enjoyed by "girl people, or black people, or gay people," and a tendency to cling to more traditional He cited the failure of the house, trance, jungle, and other related popular musics assigned the genre of "electronica" to successfully cross the Atlantic, arguably because of the late-1970s backlash against disco music (itself closely identified at the time with unpopular gays), as a data point in his thesis' favour. It's in the margins, Wilson suggests, in the authentic margins of ignored and denigrated identity groups, that truly innovative creative projects are produced.
Here, I have to admit that after their second album Radiohead's music has struck me as meandering, obscure to the point of incomprehensibility, and horribly self-indulgent. Good vintage 1980s stuff or more recent electronica of various kinds has consistently struck me as more innovative, exciting, and enjoyable. What is it about Radiohead, anyway?
Wilson concludes his article by talking about the career of the late American musician Arthur Russell, who before his 1992 death from AIDS managed to produce an extensive discography. Almost a member of the Talking Heads, Russell's solo work reflected his location in a time and place (late 1970s New York City) where borrowing across genres (of music, of art, of literature) was possible, as Andy Battaglia describes in his 2004 Slate article "Disco Fever".
Russell's era marked a time when pop music and art music and dance music had not yet been divided. This was the freewheeling downtown New York where disco was in bed with everything that moved: from the roly-poly pop of Talking Heads to the fitful dance-rock of James Chance and the Contortions to the rhythm-bandit exploits of unsung acts who worked up to the point where rock recoiled from the notion of "dance music" and disco splintered into house, electro, techno, and so on.
The samples of Russell's work available via Battaglia's article interest me, although they don't strike me as being immediately compelling. Russell's sound, though, has a playful syncretism that's decidedly futuristic; or rather, was futuristic in the 1980s. Mashups have realized, in a different fashion, Russell's musical imagination. From one data point to another, a trend can be traced connecting the two. (Ending where, mashups regularly in the top ten? Perhaps the mashup review as an established convention of literary commentary?)
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto tried to write his 1995 Millennium from the perspective of the galactic museum-keepers, blessed with a vantage point far in the future so as to enjoy the advantages of the longue durée in determining trends in human civilization over entire centuries. To my mind, Fernandez-Armesto succeeded interestingly. You don't need Fernandez-Armesto's vast sweep for studies of contemporary popular culture, but it's a good idea to possess some fragment of his superlative trend-tracking ability.
