My biggest problem with taking road trips with strangers is I’m never sure what types of music they’re going to be into. Generally I make some assumptions based on their physical appearance and how they present themselves to take some stabs in the dark at appealing tracks. I begin by searching around until I get that “Ohhh- YES” that signifies I’ve tickled their eardrum in just the right spot. Sometimes I resort to 90’s rap, sometimes to some sort of 70’s or 80’s pop, it all depends.
Recently I had landed on a pop radio type of road trip and had decided to throw in “Tiny Dancer” by Elton John. A solid choice no matter who the listener is, but I was thrown off when one of my companions in the car began moaning with frustration. “Weird, I expect Biggie to come in right there,” she said referring to the part of the song Greg Gillis aka Girl Talk had used in his song “Smash Your Head.” It was this precise moment in my life when I realized Mash-Ups had infected our culture past the point of no return.
We have actually reached the point when we recognize a song by someone like Elton John more for the way it has been remixed and mashed-up than for the way the song was originally written and recorded. Mash-up is no longer a subculture, but rather a full-fledged genre of pop music, like it or not. What does this mean for the future of pop music, now that we have a new contender the same way that hip-hop was in the late 70’s and early 80’s? First we must look to the history of the genre.
The roots of mash-up can be traced back to sampling which was pioneered in the public eye by The Beatles in songs like “I Am The Walrus” and “Revolution 9” but not popularized in the form of a DJ until acts like Grandmaster Flash began appearing in early 80’s New York City. The use of samples became popular in hip-hop and DJ culture to the point where now we don’t even flinch when we recognize a Led Zeppelin drumbeat in the middle of a club banger.
Fast forward to 1996 when DJ Shadow changed the world with the first widely known album made entirely of samples: Endtroducing… Incorporating sounds from hip-hop to psychedelia to spoken word and television clips. The ensuing years brought many early mash-ups, none reaching universal fame until 2004 when DJ Danger Mouse mixed samples from The Beatles’ White Album with a cappella tracks from Jay-Z’s faux retirement record The Black Album. From there the culture took off thanks to the Internet until you now can’t scan anyone’s iPod without finding Girl Talk or Super Mash Bros.
It seems that the popularity of the genre can come from many sources depending on how the music is consumed. It seems to immediately lend itself to dance music, but frequently it pops up in non-party atmospheres. Artists like DJ Earworm create year-end mixes of the top 25 Billboard tracks as essentially pop music time capsules condensed into danceable three-minute blips. These are almost more like history lessons than songs, but there is something attractive in them to what is commonly labeled as the “ADD Listener” who can only stand to hear the twenty seconds of chorus from each song.
Another attraction is the novelty of songs that are unlikely but well paired, thus the listening experience becomes about consuming the songs in a new context. This would suggest that prior knowledge of the songs is essential; as there would be no novelty in hearing mash-ups of songs you’ve never heard the original versions of, no matter how effective the DJ was at pairing them. This phenomenon helps to explain why the songs used are almost exclusively Top 40 pop songs that are known to the widest base of people. Mash-ups are entirely dependent on original work, but are completely unoriginal in terms of audio content.
This isn’t to say a mash-up DJ is unoriginal, just that the originality lies in the sequencing of pre-recorded sound, and never production of new sound. As a leach genre of sorts to radio pop, there would presumably be a shift in mash-up output if there were a shift in pop radio output. An interesting possibility is music produced to be mashed-up, perhaps as the consumer becomes less willing to pursue music that isn’t mixed or sample based.
If there were to be another rise in, say, grunge music, what would happen to the mash-up culture? Radio rap doesn’t appear to be going anywhere and neither does hook heavy teen pop, two popular genres for mash-ups to leach from. However, the era of pop bliss has to come around to an end at some point to usher in the utter rejection of form that movements like Punk and Grunge were. Though rejections of this sort are short lived and get old fast, they change the face of pop music, which would undoubtedly change the face of mash-up music. A logical progression would be towards the darker, glitchier sounds of Grime and Dub music. When this shift over will take place is up to debate, but history has been proven to repeat itself, and pop music is no exception to that rule; the cycles have to come around again at some point.
We live in an exciting time of new musical horizons, the use of the Internet being the greatest mark our generation has made on the music world. As formats of music change, so does the way we consume it, which leads to even broader scopes of where pop music can travel. Someday our kids will laugh when they dust off our iPods in the basement and ask us who in the hell Girl Talk was. Then it’ll be hip to have an MP3 collection in your dorm room, how old school.
