for Bootie, the first bootleg mashup club in the United States, launched in San Francisco in 2003.]]
. Image courtesy of Douglas Pledger.]]
A mashup or blend (also mash up and mash-up) is a song or composition created by blending two or more pre-recorded songs, usually by overlaying the vocal track of one song seamlessly over the instrumental track of another. To the extent that such works are 'transformative' of original content, they may find protection from copyright claims under the "fair use" doctrine of copyright law.
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
Mashed hits
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)
Crossovers, but it is in a form of bastard pop, or version vs. version.
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.
Precursors
"The Flying Saucer"
In 1956,
Bill Buchanan and
Dickie Goodman released what they called a "break-in" song, (i.e. material from one song would "break-in" to another) called "The Flying Saucer". The track, a reinterpretation of
Orson Welles' celebrated
War of the Worlds mock-emergency broadcast inter spliced with musical snippets comically dramatizing the portentous
patter of the announcer, spawned a raft of imitations, 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 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.
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. 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
American 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 Tape-beatles
Also known as 'Public Works',
The Tape-beatles have used collage techniques to create works of materials appropriated from various sources.
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"). The JAMs morphed into
The KLF 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
Working under the name
Steinski,
New York copywriter,
DJ 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".
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 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.
Renaissance
2 many DJ's and "A Stroke of Genie-us"
The name
Pop Will Eat Itself was taken 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 the 2 Many DJs album, by Soulwax's Dewaele brothers (As Heard On Radio Soulwax Pt. 2), which combined 45 different tracks and a remix by Freelance Hellraiser of Christina Aguilera's "Genie in a Bottle" which coupled the pop star with the raucous guitars of "Hard To Explain" by New York's The Strokes in an infectious concoction entitled "A Stroke of Genie-us".
The brothers took two years clearing the samples for their album, so their landmark was not entirely illegitimate. 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 an attempt to avoid "cease and desist" notices from the copyright holders.
Occasionally, however, a song gains so much underground momentum that a commercial release follows. The earliest example of this was Richard X (working under the name Girls On Top), whose 2001 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) 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.
Remix.vg
In 2008,
Remix.vg, a site powered by
WordPress, began publishing mashups (as well as remixes and cover versions) produced by bedroom publishers, while allowing users to rate every mashup for a fan-based mashup chart. Bedroom and mainstream mashup producers were added to the website using
YouTube and/or SoundCloud to host the files which could be streamed for free online play from the website.
According to the site's Facebook page, Remix.vg received 10 million visits in the first 7 months of 2010, from 1,100 published tracks, marking the move of mashups and musical bootlegging from niche, bedroom producers played by hundreds or thousands into more mainstream playlists of many millions.
Software tools
As a result of this, industry standard tools such as the
digital audio workstation Cubase and the sound editors
Wavelab,
Soundforge and
Cool Edit Pro quickly became ubiquitous. Moreover, new tools such as
Ableton Live and
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, Mashuptown, Mashupciti, Mashup Hits, Bootie, Sound Unsound, A.D.D
Every new scene must have its "water cooler" and its journal, and in the case of bastard pop circa 2001-2002,
Get Your Bootleg On established itself as the former while
Boomselection 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
U.S.A,
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 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 mashup events and general discussion of issues surrounding the bastard pop phenomenon.
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, frequently-bootlegged artists include Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Madonna, and Beyoncé.
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 Mashuptown, 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.
Also in 2005, Bootie, the biggest bootleg mashup party in the world, began its monthly Bootie Top 10, where it posts for free download its ten best mashups, as selected by Bootie creators and DJs A Plus D. Launched in San Francisco in 2003, Bootie was the first club night in the United States dedicated solely to the burgeoning artform of the bootleg mashup, and now hosts monthly parties in several cities around the globe, including Los Angeles, Paris, Boston, Munich, and New York City. The party's slogan, "Music for the A.D.D. Generation" also inspired the creation of "A.D.D", Israel's first mash-up dedicated party.
Bonna Music and "Enjoy the Sheket"
Legal mashups are hard to find, but in some relatively small music markets, legal mashups have been released. Some say that this is because 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" (; "Silence"). 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.
Good Copy Bad Copy
Good Copy Bad Copy is a 2007 documentary about the current state of copyright and culture. It has a heavy focus on the mashup community, containing interviews with
Girl Talk and
Danger Mouse that reveal an emerging understanding of digital works and the obstacle to their authoring copyright presents.
Glee
Mashups received mainstream attention when they were featured on several episodes of the popular American TV series
Glee. First appearing in the episode "
Vitamin D", it featured mashing up
Bon Jovi's "
It's My Life" with
Usher's "
Confessions Part II" and
Beyoncé Knowles's "
Halo" with "
Walking on Sunshine" by
Katrina and the Waves. An episode titled "
Mash-Up" featured a plot about attempting to mash-up
Sisqó's "
Thong Song" and "
I Could Have Danced All Night" from
My Fair Lady, which is abandoned by the characters and never heard in the episode. Mashups are also featured in "
Hairography" and "
Ballad", with the prior featuring "
Hair" from the eponymous musical and Beyonce's "
Crazy in Love", and the latter featuring a mash-up from
The Police's "
Don't Stand So Close to Me" with
Gary Puckett & The Union Gap's "
Young Girl", and Journey's "
Any Way You Want It" and "
Lovin' Touchin' Squeezin'". Later mash-ups include Madonna's "
Borderline" and "
Open Your Heart" in the episode "
The Power of Madonna", Rihanna's "
Umbrella" and "
Singing in the Rain". In
Never Been Kissed episode, two songs are featured as a mashup, it featured a mashup of Bon Jovi's
Livin' on a Prayer and
The Rolling Stones's
Start Me Up, and
Stop! In the Name of Love by
The Supremes with
En Vogue's
Free Your Mind.
DJ Hero
The 2009 video game
DJ Hero brought mash-ups together with gameplay elements from the
Guitar Hero series using many of the same songs that are routinely cut-up in the online remixing scene. Notably, the tracks which use musical ideas from
Bitter Sweet Symphony credit the sample source
Andrew Oldham Orchestra rather than
The Verve, even though the Verve popularized the frequent use of the sample in mash-ups.
RIP a Remix Manifesto
RIP!: A Remix Manifesto is an
open source documentary created by Brett Gaylor and Greg Gillis (
Girl Talk). The film consists of a remix of clips submitted by numerous contributors to the
Open Source Cinema project. It focuses in particular on the legal
grey area of remixing existing copyrighted works.
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, Go Home Productions, Party Ben and DJ BC, 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.
Another example of a legitimate release on the back of an unofficial one can been seen in Illicit's Sneaky Armada, which combined Groove Armada's I See You Baby with Teddy Pendergrass's You Can't Hide From Yourself. This was subsequently re-played, re-vocalised and re-released on Azuli's Yola label as Cheeky Armada in September 2001 when it reached number 72 in the UK Singles Chart. Illicit also released numerous other unofficial "versus" songs during the same period.
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, 2008, 2009 and 2010.
Girl Talk is known for his style of multi-track mashing; most of his mashups contain samples from 20-30 different tracks. Girl Talk is famous for his style of "cutting" through different songs and often building to the climax of a song, upon which the song settles into a groove before cutting away again.
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 a 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.
Abstract Mash Ups
Music
collages which refer to
avant-garde music practice and
Musique Concrète. These are not intended for the dance floor and are made using all types of music and sound as valid sound sources to be played simultaneously and often manipulated. Beat matching and stylistic or aesthetic similarities are not an important factor in these mash ups. Chaos, dissonance and harmony are all possible results.
An early example of this can be heard on John Cages' multi-radio composition Imaginary Landscapes no.4 (1951) for 12 radios, 24 performers and a conductor. Perhaps the most famous Abstract Mash Up is The Beatles Revolution 9 featuring on their White Album from 1968 which includes samples of conversations, classical music and edited and manipulated samples played simultaneously. Other examples of the psychedelic nature of these mash ups can be heard on Heart Beat, Pig Meat by Pink Floyd from the soundtrack to the film Zabriskie Point; The album The Third Reich 'n Roll by The Residents and early turntable work by Christian Marclay.
A current example of Abstract Mash Ups can be heard on radio shows by Joel Cahen (aka Spax) on Resonance fm in London. The series of shows which began in 2005, feature live abstract mash ups using MP3s, turntables, CDs, DVDs and field recordings as simultaneously played sound sources. The third season of this series, Soundsoup, March 2008 - April 2010, veered the style towards a more narrative based one.
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 Björk Remix Web, 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 "phase inversion").
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.
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 Best of Bootie mashup compilation series is compiled and produced each year by A Plus D, creators of the international mashup club Bootie (club night). The compilations have been released in December every year since 2005, and are annual internet sensations, with each album garnering over 5000GB+ of downloads.
Notable mash-up albums include:
Albums By Dj BC
2004: Let It Beast (under the alias of The Beastles)
2004: DJ BC Presents The Beastles (under the alias of The Beastles)
Albums By Girl Talk
2003: Unstoppable
2006: Night Ripper
2008: Feed the Animals
2010: All Day
Albums By Max Tannone
2009: Jaydiohead
2009: Doublecheck Your Head
2010: Mos Dub
2010: Dub Kweli
Other notable albums
2004: A Night At The Hip-Hopera by The Kleptones (Queen)
2004: Tales of Townshend & Wilson by The Who Boys (Dub and Drum 'n' Bass versions of The Who mixed with The Beach Boys)
2005: American Edit by Dean Gray (a collaboration between Party Ben and Team 9) (Green Day)
2008: Mashed in Plastic by various bootleggers under the umbrella of 1086 Productions. An album created with music which featured in motion pictures directed by David Lynch
2010: Off the Beaten Meter by various bootleggers showcases mashups in unusual time signatures.
2010: "Disrespect Women, Acquire Currency" by DJ Trademark explores pop music through a unique musical collage consisting of 236 songs in a 41 minute continuous album.
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. Simon Hunt, under the pseudonym Pauline Pantsdown used the speeches of Pauline Hanson, an anti-immigration, controversial Australian politician to parodic effect in the songs I Don't Like It and Backdoor Man. 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 Sarkoskanking 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.
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".
In March 2009 Kutiman released ThruYOU, an online music video project creating a mashup from samples of YouTube videos.
Notable mash ups
"Toca's Miracle by Fragma - mashup of Coco Star's "I need a Miracle, and Fragma's "Toca Me".
"A Stroke of Genius" by Freelance Hellraiser (2001) (Combines "
Bootylicious" and "
Smells Like Teen Spirit")
The Grey Album by Danger Mouse (2004) - mashup of Jay-Z's The Black Album with The Beatles' The White Album
"Doctor Pressure" originally created by Phil 'n' Dog in 2004, eventually released by Mylo in 2005.
"
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.
"It's My Life/Confessions Part 2" and "Halo/Walking on Sunshine" from the TV series Glee.
See also
Mashed hits
Mashup (video)
Musical montage
Sound collage
Remix
WhoSampled
Parody music
Sampling (music)
Glitch (music)
Quodlibet
One Song to the Tune of Another
Cover version
Pastiche
References
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
Mashups @ Remix.vg
Category:Intellectual property activism
Category:Musical techniques
