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

Margaret Atwood is my hero

Margaret Atwood is, and has long been, my favorite author. (Fashioning the Body alums, and everyone else, should check out her novels Bodily Harm and The Edible Woman). Today, I found the following amazing quote from this article online:

An 800-word Harry Potter prequel is one of 13 card-sized works to be sold at a charity auction in the British capital. Waterstone's Booksellers Ltd. says the cream-colored A5 papers — each slightly bigger than a postcard — were distributed to 13 authors and illustrators, including the boy wizard's creator J.K. Rowling, Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing, novelist Margaret Atwood and playwright Tom Stoppard.

Rowling used both sides of her card to hand-write a prequel to her seven-book Harry Potter saga, while Lessing penned a story about the power of reading. Stoppard wrote a short mystery and Atwood was due to fill out her card remotely using a robotic arm controlled by computer linkup.

What could be better than this?

Thoughts on Jawbreaker

I'm not generally a huge fan of movies. I'd rather watch the same 5 movies over and over again than see something new. Last night, I watched two of those movies (Jawbreaker and Spice World) with a roommate. My two favorite mediums of pop culture are pop music (where I repeatedly listen to songs) and reality television (where I rarely repeat-watch an episode, but each episode repeats the same structure). Movies just don't have the level of repetition that I like in pop culture.

I've been thinking a lot about camp the past few months. I decided that, in my opinion, the two main elements of camp are excess and an overcommitment to the marginal. Watching Jawbreaker again reminded me of another element that is often, though not always, present in camp: failure. So many of the plot points and conversations in Jawbreaker simply don't make sense, and it adds to the general campy charm of the movie. Spice World is also very campy, but I don't think it's a failure on any level. I know that many people would disagree with me about that, which points out the important fact that failure is subjective. When something is campy (because it's excessive and features an overcommitment to the marginal), moments of failure (as perceived by the individual viewer) can add to the campiness (for that individual viewer).

Back to repetition: I would imagine that I have seen Jawbreaker about 20 times. I feel like I could watch it many more times, but it's difficult to sit through a movie so many times. I've listened to the song "Glamorous" over 200 times, but I listen to it while doing other things. I've watched over 100 episodes of America's Next Top Model (many twice), and while there's a lot of repetition (of episode structure, activities, themes, the word "fierce," and the judge comment "The camera loves you!") each episode is different. I want to watch Jawbreaker more, but since the same thing happens every time and movies demand that you not do other things while you watch them, it can become almost boring.

I'm considering trying to convert Jawbreaker into other forms. What I've come up with so far is to print off screen captures and put them up on the walls and to convert the audio to mp3 files, about the length of a pop song, and listen to them while doing other things.

Producer as Artist?

Last quarter, I examined authorship in popular music. One things I was arguing against was the way the producer starts to be viewed as the true "author" of a song. In a 1993 scholarly article, Barbara Bradby wrote, " The new textual practices of bricolage, intertextuality and 'stealing' tend to be subsumed back into the old notion of authorship through the ideology of the creativity of 'the producer.'" This is still very true today, perhaps more so with producers like Timbaland becoming famous and subsequently recording their own music. In the course of my project, I developed a viewpoint in which the performer / vocalist was the main "author" of a song, if there can be said to be an author. I am not convinced that this is true to how I listen to music, however.

A few weeks ago, the song "Forever" by Chris Brown jumped into the Billboard Hot 100 top 10 songs. I didn't pay any attention because I'm not particularly a fan of his. However, today I heard that it was produced by Polow Da Don, and right away looked it up on youtube then downloaded it. I absolutely love the song.

I was only interested in the song because of the producer. Polow Da Don was the producer of what is possibly my favorite song, Glamorous by Fergie, as well as a bunch of other songs I love. All of those songs but one are by artists I already loved before they put out a song produced by Polow. However, through these songs, I now like Polow too, enough to check out a song he produced by an artist I don't particularly care for.

It still bothers me when a song is considered to belong more to its producer than its performer, but I should acknowledge that the producer is an important part of the song. Pop music is a collaborative medium. As with featured artists, when a performer collaborates with a producer I like, it makes the song that much more interesting.

On the subjects of producers, in addition to Polow, I am very fond of Danja, particularly the songs he produces by himself (i.e. not co-produced with Timbaland). He produced some of my favorite songs on "Blackout" (Britney's recent CD), as well as couple other favorite songs of mine.

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:

Alice

A lot of my posts on this blog, particularly that involve mashups, have to do with taking things from culture and making something new out of them. Today, Videogum, a blog I recently started reading, posted this music video to a song made up of sounds from Alice in Wonderland.



I think this is an amazing and beautiful object made out of other cultural productions. Of course, this is in contrast to other things I've been making and collecting here, which are more about failure, which is why I wanted to post something that I find incredibly successful.

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: