Mad for the Mashup
Five Dance and Techno Music Mashups Worth a Second Listen
What's in a mashup? A little artistry, a little drama, and sometimes even a piracy fight. Here's to the home DJ mashup, as well as 5 great mashups to seek out.
What’s a mashup? There are several definitions, but in dance and techno music, a mashup generally refers to an artful mix of two songs, usually created by a home DJ, a software whiz on a laptop. The best mashups combine tunes with seemingly incompatible beats per minute, clashing melodies, disparate styles, and improbable genres to create a sound that, while not necessarily new, is at least fresh and unexpected. And of course, as with any sonic experiment, they don’t always work.
Before “mashup” became a commonly used term, most dance-music lovers identified these mixes when browsing peer-to-peer files from the word “versus,” as in DJ Danger Mouse vs. The Beatles. In fact, most mashups were created by home DJs tinkering with software and creating one mashup at a time.
Danger Mouse changed the topography somewhat, however, when he released “The Grey Album,” if not the first then certainly the most controversial full mashup album. He mixed The Beatles’ White Album with Jay-Z’s Black Album to create something inimitable.
The Beatles and Jay-Z? Blasphemy! Yet Danger Mouse made it work, especially in songs like “99 Problems,” which sampled “Helter Skelter,” and “Moment of Clarity” vs. “Happiness is a Warm Gun.”
Of course, one major problem for Danger Mouse, and a lesser problem for other single-song mashup artists, was copyright. How exactly does one go about selling or even distributing an album that’s based entirely on a reworking of samples? When DJs do compilation CDs, they typically ask permission of each artist’s label. And singers often release vocals-only versions of their hits exactly so that some enterprising DJ will remix them. But the hope is that the remix will be an original electronic composition, not a mashup.
In Danger Mouse’s case, however, The Beatles’ label was livid that the DJ hadn’t asked for (or more importantly, paid for) permission to sample The White Album, and they did what they could to block the distribution. As they learned to their chagrin, however, there’s just no fighting free peer-to-peer. And Danger Mouse went on to make legit money as one half of the mega-selling, Grammy-winning Gnarls Barkley.
Interested to hear what some of popular mashups sound like? Type in “white label” or “versus” into the search line of your favorite peer-to-peer program. Here are five you might enjoy:
The Beatles vs. Masters at Work—Get Back (K-Vic white label mix (“Get Back” vs. “Deep Inside”)
Robbie Williams vs. Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg—She’s the Next Episode (“She’s the One" vs. “The Next Episode”)
The Police vs. Underworld—Don’t Stand so Close to Me 2004 (“Don’t Stand so Close to Me” vs. “Born Slippy).
Madonna vs. Junior Vasquez—If Madonna Calls, Hang Up (“Hung Up” vs. “If Madonna Calls”)
Robin S. vs. Aretha Franklin—Show Me a Deeper Love (“Show Me Love” vs. “A Deeper Love”)
And be sure to try Mashups and Gravy, featuring a different mashup and a mishmash of artist news and miscellaneous nosh.
