Put ’em together and what have you got?

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Noah kindly asked me to list some of the mash-ups we like to listen to over at Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k) and Newswire as part of the copyright roundtable. This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive history, nor an exhaustive list, nor anything more than some of the form’s developmental high-water marks cribbed from Wikipedia’s Bastard Pop article and our personal preferences.

There was a time when mashups and audio art required relatively expensive and rare control rooms, a razor blade to cut recording tape montages together, and multi-track machines to lay them over one another. Frank Zappa borrowed from Edgard Varese‘s musique concrete. John Oswald examined the power of rock ‘n roll and preaching — later he would prove a dab hand at deconstructing a king’s pop.

In the digital age, the means of audio production became cheaper and more accessible with each passing year. By the late 1980s, hip-hop artists looped and dropped samples into their tracks with little difficulty, producing masterworks: De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising, Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, and Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique. But the constant roar of James Brown’s repeated screams came to a halt in a shitstorm of lawyers and bills for sampling rights.

Click to play video: Negativland – U2
 
Negativland’s struggles defending the U2 sound-collage EP from the band U2 itself and its label define the difficult intersection of art and commerce, fair-use and copyright, parody and trademark. Happily, everyone involved eventually got over it.

Turns out that, if you are going to do this thing legit and clear the samples (and make money), you end up with weak raps over one monotonous bit of a song performed by one of music’s least-deserving billionaires. Goofy and tame sci-fi football chants also perch atop the charts. The worthwhile and entertaining experiments in laying bits of songs over one another have mostly moved underground.

Here is the promised list of mashups we think you might enjoy.

Now that the form, post-Danger Mouse, has solidified, mashups are mutating. Poor Mojo editor Morgan Johnson asked me to add, and this is apropos the final selection: “Honestly, with the whole remix culture thing, the line between remix and mashup has become terribly thin. Look at the Popular tab on Hype Machine, usually 50% of this most downloaded or listened to songs are remix/mashups.”

1 thought on “Put ’em together and what have you got?”

  1. A Facebook friend has learned that we like mashups and asked that I pass this along:

    LEAGUE OF INDEPENDENTS (LOFI)

    http://www.lofilounge.org/remixed-media-festival-2010/

    RE/Mixed Media Festival 2010
    Video Remixers Needed! Festival Submission Deadline Extended to March 31!

    The RE/Mixed Media Festival celebrates remix as a legitimate, responsible form of visual art by bringing together remix artists from all disciplines to display their works publicly. The festival will be held in Brooklyn, NY on Sunday May 30, 2010 at Galapagos Art Space in Dumbo.

    We are currently soliciting videos & films from lo-fi artists that utilize remix/mashup techniques, and that are under 10 minutes in length. Selected works will be screened at the festival, judged by a panel of experts, and one winner will receive a $500 cash prize.

    The RE/Mixed Media Festival is our way of contributing to the ongoing conversation about remixing, mashups, copyright law, fair use, and the freedom of artists to access their culture in order to add to and build upon it. While there are numerous events addressing these issues, they are usually discussion-based, featuring lectures and panel discussions about policy. We believe that one of the best ways to make the general public aware of these types of issues is by demonstrating all the types of art and culture that remix touches. To that end, on May 30th we will transform Galapagos into a multimedia art space.

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