Return of the Mashup!

I have just started working on an epic mashup project, but it will take awhile. To tide you over, here is a mashup I made actually back in September, just for my own listening pleasure. It is my favorite mashup so far. I figured it was time to share it.

Kate Bush - "Hounds of Love (Alternate)" v. Kylie Minogue - "Speakerphone"

I'm Chuck Bass!

So, my friends Dustin and Hannah came to visit yesterday. After we (ok, me and Hannah) discussed Gossip Girl at length, we searched youtube for a clip of Hannah's favorite character, Chuck Bass, saying his signature line - "I'm Chuck Bass." And then we decided we needed to put it to music. I just happened to have an instrumental version of "Break the Ice" by Britney Spears sitting around in my iTunes. So:



A lot of credit goes to Dustin, who actually has the patience and follow-through to make things line up and such.

another mashup?

Last night I perhaps went a bit overboard and made yet another mashup. I was thinking that "Go Deep" by Janet Jackson (one of my favorite songs) might make for a good mashup. Because the title is about depth, I wanted to pair it with something about surfaces. I first tried it with "Lip Gloss" by Lil' Mama, but it was way too unpleasant sounding. Then I remembered the Pussycat Dolls. All of their songs are about being looked at, quite literally. I chose "Buttons." The songs are really interesting paired together, I think.

a beautiful mashup

"Cloudbusting" by Kate Bush vs. "Your Body's Calling" by R Kelly



By chance, I was listening to the song "Your Body's Calling" while reading a blog post about Kate Bush earlier. For a long time, I've thought about the two of them as being very similar: both of them, to me, are musical geniuses who also happen to be insane. So I decided to make a mashup, of course. I randomly picked "Cloudbusting" and was amazed at how pretty it sounds. After the Sparkle vs. Changing Faces mashup and now this one, I guess I make mashups that sound nice now.

I also just today got a fantastic comment on the original Mariah Carey / Leona Lewis mashup:

Please STOP MAKING MASH UP VIDEOS!!! This is not your thing so give up please!!!

more mashups

I made these two mashups earlier this week. They both consist of songs I just discovered mashed up with a song they remind me of.

1 - "Click" by Ciara vs. "Glamorous" by Fergie

"Click" just leaked to the internet this week. I don't know for sure, but I think it was produced by Polow Da Don. I know (from Wikipedia) that Ciara has been working with him on her next album. It sounds a lot like Polow to me, particularly "Glamorous." It has the same hand-clap as "Glamorous" in parts, and it has the swirly, layered prettiness that "Glamorous" and other Polow songs, like "Forever," have. I think of "Click" as being something of a sequel to "Glamorous." It sounds like it and has somewhat similar subject matter. I think I might even like "Click" better, because I like Ciara so much more than Fergie, and instead of bringing in Ludacris or another male rapper for the rapped verse, Ciara just does it herself. The one thing about "Click" that reduces the pleasure I get out of it is that it's in the Sex and the City movie. In the mashup, "Click" stands out over "Glamorous" to me. I've already received a bunch of comments on the mashup, two of which say that "Click" is better. I'm interested in the idea of the "vs." in mashup songs being quite literal - it's a fight between the two songs to which is better.



2 - "Be Careful" by Sparkle vs. "G.H.E.T.T.O.U.T." by Changing Faces

Both of these songs are written and produced by R Kelly. He duets on "Be Careful," as well as a remix of "GHETTOUT" that I didn't use here. "GHETTOUT" is from 1997, "Be Careful" is from 1998. I really like R Kelly, and I really like both of these songs. I discovered "GHETTOUT" a few months ago and "Be Careful" earlier this week. I realized that, when I had been listening to "Be Careful," I got "GHETTOUT" stuck in my head, because of how similar the songs are. Even though they're kind of the same song, there is definitely room in my life for both of them. I like the mashup because it's actually pleasant to listen to.



When pulling up this video on youtube to post it here, I got distracted by the following:

GHETTOUT Chopped & Screwed

I don't know if it's common or not to chop & screw a slow jam, but I've never encountered it before. I think it's brilliant. The sidebar linked to this, which I also feel a need to link to:

Sensual Seduction Chopped & Screwed

Eclectic?

The other day, my roommate had a friend over. A mix CD I made was playing. At one point, my roommate's friend said, "I like listening to other people's music taste sometimes." I asked why, and she said, "Because it makes me feel like my taste is music is less weird." I said that I didn't think my taste in music is weird (it's pretty mainstream), and she said, "Let's just say you're taste is eclectic."

I know that eclectic isn't an insult, but I was angry to hear it applied to my taste in music. I don't think it's eclectic at all. The songs she brought up to demonstrate that my taste is eclectic were "Murder on the Dancefloor" by Sophie Ellis-Bextor and "Pro Nails" by Kid Sister.

"Murder on the Dancefloor"



"Pro Nails"



I've thought about it a lot since this happened, trying to figure out why it bothered me. I understand that sonically the songs are very different. However, disco-y dance pop and poppy hip-hop made by a female rapper are both two genres that historically have a certain appeal for gay men. Both the lyrics and the videos of the two songs can be read as being very campy. It would have never occurred to me that these songs wouldn't go together. From the perspective of the straight woman who thinks my music taste is "eclectic," they don't fit together at all. Her inability to see that these songs go together is because she could not imagine a cohesive queer perspective towards music. Thus, my mix CD was only coherent to her under the rubric of "eclectic."

To help process this, I made a mashup:

Found Mashups

After reading the NYT article I linked to in my last post, I decided to look around on youtube at mashups made by other people. Here are some interesting videos I found:

The first is a mashup of "Call the Shots" by Girls Aloud and "Hole in the Head" by the Sugababes (not embeddable). This one is amazing to me because it's just like something I would make. The track is basically "Call the Shots" with the chorus of "Hole in the Head" layered over the chorus of "Call the Shots." I would have totally picked these two songs to stick together, too.

Abba vs 50 Cent - Queen of Da Club



I found this while specifically looking for something that would make 50 Cent sound really gay, but I never could have hoped to find something this good. Not only is "Dancing Queen" very feminine sounding and gay-ish in its associations, the implication is that 50 Cent himself, in the club, is a dancing queen. I love it.

Anticipating VS Runaway - Britney Spears & Avril Lavigne



I hate how this one sounds, but I love the video. Particularly, I love the interesting punctuation choices on the lyrics for "Anticipating." For example:
- I'll be "Anticipating!"
- You're feeling this right? Let's do this tonight?

With the latter, I never heard those as questions, it changes the meaning a lot. I have no idea what's going on in the former. Is she suddenly going to become the song "Anticipating," which she is currently singing? It's all very mysterious.

The same person also made this video: Lil' Kim vs. Nicole Scherzinger



I don't have much to say about it. I love Lil' Kim, and "Whatever You Like" by Nicole Scherzinger has one of my favorite beats, but somehow I'm underwhelmed. And there's no charming video!

Britney Spears' Gimme More/Madonna's Into the Groove Mashup

Okay, this is kind of amazing and also, to me, really difficult to watch. But it's a live mashup.



There's another one with Rihanna's "Please Don't Stop the Music" and J Lo's "Waiting for Tonight:"



And last, not exactly a mashup, but I can't help but post it:

Queer Mashups

I made a couple more "mashups" today. I wanted to make queer mashups / use mashups to "queer" pop songs. Here's what I came up with:

Kelis' "Bossy" with Shareefa's "I Need a Boss"



Cher's "Take Me Home" with Lisa Lisa's "I Wonder if I Take You Home"



The Cher and Lisa Lisa songs, like pop songs in general, are in second person, they address someone, a "you." This "you" is a man, but when the two songs are put together, they are addressing each other. Cher becomes the person trying to convince Lisa Lisa to take her (originally him) home.

As hip-hop-tinged R&B / pop songs, "Bossy" and "I Need a Boss" are not sung to another character, they are sung to the audience. So, while Cher and Lisa Lisa seem to be having a straightforward conversation with each other, Shareefa and Kelis seem more to be flirting when the songs are put together. Shareefa says, "I need a boss" and Kelis replies, "I'm bossy."

My original thought was that, with the mashups, the mode of reception is listening - you listen to the songs together. However, they're pretty much unlistenable. Since most of the queer meaning of putting these songs together is in the titles, anyway, I think that the mode of reception is thinking the songs together.

Finally, these mashups are both women / women mashups because I mostly listen to female vocalists. I would love to make some male / male mashups. Any ideas?

Mashups

About a month ago, I became fascinated by the idea of mashups, when someone edits together the instrumental track of one song with the vocal track of another song. They were a big phenomenon about 5 or 6 years ago, and I was interested (if not surprised) to find out that people were still making them. I started thinking about the possibilities that came with collapsing two pop songs together, the ways that could change their meanings. I quickly ascertained that I did not have the technical skills or software to make my own mashups, but I figured out something I could make: fake mashups. Here's what I came up with (in the order I made them, the first three over a couple of days and the fourth a week later):

Mariah Carey's "Touch My Body" vs. Leona Lewis' "Bleeding Love"


Britney Spears' "Piece of Me" vs. Rihanna's "Don't Stop the Music"


Robyn's "With Every Heartbeat" vs. Girls Aloud's live acoustic cover of "With Every Heartbeat"


Lil' Wayne's "Lollipop" vs. Aqua's "Lollipop"


As you can probably tell, these are not mashups at all, but simply the two songs played over each other. My method is to import two songs into Garage Band, line them up, then cut off the longer song when the shorter song ends. Then they're finished.

When I figured out how to do this, I was excited by the idea of posting them to YouTube disguised as "real" mashups so people would watch them and leave comments. I wanted to see if I could trick people into thinking I genuinely thought I had made mashups. To this end, I was trying to make combinations that people would want to listen to (at least until they heard them). At the time, "Touch My Body" and "Bleeding Love" were the two most popular songs on the Billboard Hot 100. I made the "With Every Heartbeat" video to see if a more obscure song would get more views because it would have less competition in search results. The Mariah/Leona video has the most views, 463. Britney/Rihanna has 195, Robyn/Girls Aloud has 282, and Lil Wayne/Aqua has 184. Here are some of the comments I've gotten:

this is absolute fucking shit

this is so terrible, i love it. overlapping two songs whether they match in any way or not? excellent dj skillz!

WTF??

Do you really think this sounds good? It's nothing but gibberish! I have a headache!!!

who did this? a 6 year old? I have to vomit now, excuse me.

This is truly awful! lol

its basically 2 song mashed 2gether with no editing. soz but thats basically what it is

doesnt really fit

wow this is trash

not really a mashup- just the two songs playing over eachother.

this is one of the worst "mash-ups" i've ever heard. they don't even fit together

I've gotten a lot of joy out of these comments, but I think I could do more with these than just getting comments from people who think I'm trying to make real mashups. I've been thinking a lot about the possibilities of changing the meanings of songs by mashing them together. I have a few ideas for playing with this, so I might try making some new ones soon.