| Mash-up music | |
|---|---|
| Stylistic origins | Electronic music, pop, rock |
| Cultural origins | Late 1990s, 2000s; Europe, North America |
| Typical instruments | Digital audio editor, sampler, sequencer, DJ turntables, audio mixer |
| Mainstream popularity | Mainstream and underground |
| Derivative forms | Sampling, sound collage, remix |
| Subgenres | |
| Glitch pop | |
| Regional scenes | |
| United Kingdom, United States, Germany, France, Australia, Norway, Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Canada, India, Belgium, Austria, Brazil, Italy, Japan | |
A mashup or bootleg[1] (also mesh, mash up, mash-up, blend and bastard pop/rock) 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.[2] 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.[3]
Mashups are known by a number of different names:
In addition, more traditional terms such as "edits" or (unauthorized) "remixes" are favored by many "bootleggers" (also known as 'leggers).
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.
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 interspliced 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.
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 CD 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.
Singer-producer Jonathan King anticipated the mashup genre with several novelty singles. In 1987, King accused the Pet Shop Boys of plagiarizing the melody of Cat Stevens' "Wild World" for their song "It's A Sin." To prove the point, King recorded a version of "Wild World" with an arrangement virtually identical to that of "It's A Sin." King performed an analogous stunt with a version of "He's So Fine" by The Chiffons arranged in the style of George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord," making a cheeky reference to the plagarism suit over the similarities between the two songs.
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 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.
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.
Also known as "Public Works", The Tape-beatles have used collage techniques to create works of materials appropriated from various sources.
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".
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".
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.[4]
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.[5]
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".[6]
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.
Around 2001–2002 the blog Boomselection[7] was launched. It 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[8] (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 defence 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[9] 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[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 art form 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.[11]
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" (Hebrew: שקט; "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 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.
Mashups 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 "Singin' in the Rain". In the episode "Never Been Kissed", two songs are featured as a mashup, 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". In the post-Superbowl episode named "The Sue Sylvester Shuffle" the mashup is between Michael Jackson's "Thriller" and "Heads Will Roll" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. In the episode "Born This Way", "Unpretty", by TLC was mashed-up with "I Feel Pretty" from West Side Story. The episode "The Purple Piano Project" features a mash-up between "Anything Goes" from the musical with the same name and "Anything You Can Do" from Annie Get Your Gun. "Mash Off" featured mashups of Hall & Oates' I Can't Go for That" and "You Make My Dreams", Adele's "Rumour Has It" and "Someone Like You" , Pat Benatar's "Hit Me with Your Best Shot" with Blondie's "One Way or Another" and a mashup of the Eddie Rabbitt and Crystal Gayle song "You and I" with the Lady Gaga song of the same name.
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 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.
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 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,[12] 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[13] in September 2001 when it reached number 72 in the UK Singles Chart.[14] Illicit also released numerous other unofficial "versus" songs during the same period.[15]
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, 2010 and 2011.
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.
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.
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 Cage's 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 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.[16]
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.
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.[17]
Albums By Dj BC
Albums By Girl Talk
Albums By The Kleptones
Albums By Max Tannone
Albums By Milkman
Other notable albums
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.
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.
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