maybe this is what they really meant by 'Technicolor Sneeze'

While driving around listing to the local pop station on the radio, I noticed that a lot of the songs were just mashed-up versions of other songs. Which got me thinking.

Are there ever new ideas? Or are they just combinations or modifications of older ideas?

If we look at this dilemma from Hegel's perspective, then new ideas are really just a synthesis of old ideas (as Transcendentalism was viewed as a synthesis of Puritanism & the Enlightenment), or as a reaction against old ideas. Hegel believed that when the new ideas were a reaction against old ideas, they were just the opposite. So maybe if the new thoughts were the opposite of the old ones, then they were original.

But wait. According to Georg Christoph Lictenberg, "To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation." So maybe that theory doesn't work.

The Modernists would say that it's impossible to know whether any of your ideas are original or if they came from someone else. So I give up. This has gotten too academic, too quickly.

* * *

So while it's debatable whether or not mash-ups are creative/original/an art, they are definitely a current trend. Back to the radio again. Here's some songs that I can think of that have at least an influence the mash-up (in no particular order)

Right Round -- Flo Rida
S.O.S. -- Rihanna
Sugar -- Flo Rida
Goodbye -- Kristinia DeBarge
Live Your Life -- T.I. & Rihanna
Let's Go -- Trick Daddy
Help -- Lil Wayne

Ice Ice Baby -- Vanilla Ice (oh wait...he claims he didn't borrow that beat from Queen and David Bowie. Right.)


But while many artists sample one song (and usually pay the royalties to use it) and add some of their own material, others solely do mash-ups. One of the most infamous is Danger Mouse's The Grey Album, which is a mash-up of an a cappella version of Jay-Z's The Black Album & samples of instrumentals from The Beatles' White Album. EMI has tried to prevent the album from being released, but you can find it here.

Much lower-fi version of two-artist mash-ups are the millions you can find on youtube. Some are pretty good, like benmusic89's "I Kissed Right Round A Girl" & pyromaster500's "Just Crushcrushcrush." Some, not so good. 12ADDICT's mash-ups are about 50-50, with high points being "I Gotta Closer Feeling" & "Vertibad."

By far, the most elaborate mash-ups I've ever heard are by a guy who calls himself Girl Talk. Each song on his album contains parts of at least ten other songs. It's ridiculous. Even better, to avoid lawsuits, he has made his album Feed The Animals available online (where you can name your own price). One of the best parts of this is just trying to figure out what songs are sampled in each track (if you get stuck, wikipedia lists them out here).

So Danger Mouse, Girl Talk, and the youtubers can mash up music. But what about videos? That's where Eclectic Method comes in. This group from London combines music videos, clips from tv shows, and even bits of popular youtube videos. The interesting part about these guys is that their work seems more like a study of pop culture than simply following the latest trend. It sounds trippy, but it really seems to work.



So is the mash-up vomit, or a masterpiece? Who knows.