If you’re anything like me, the term “mash up” refers to the action performed upon potatoes prior to their consumption on certain sacred occasions, like, say, Thanksgiving, or, in my case, an autumn trip to my grandmother’s house. But in this age of self-produced albums, the term refers to a different form of nutrition altogether.
According to Wikipedia, mash up, also called ‘bastard pop’, “is a musical genre which, in its purest form, consists of the combination (usually by digital means) of the music [or accompaniment] from one song with the acapella vocal from another. Typically, the music and vocals belong to completely different genres.”
The most famous (and infamous) of these creations is The Grey Album, which for many years was the only album-length mashup in existence, as most creations are one song meticulously formed from two different ones.
While the two parts used to create The Grey Album are linked only by color-themed titles, an enormous underground hit was spawned when Brian Burton, better known as “Danger Mouse” mixed Jay-Z’s The Black Album with the Beatles’ classic White Album. In fact, the result was so successful that The Grey Album was reviewed by Rolling Stone magazine.
But, according to Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker, “The Grey Album is not a great example of a mash up, because the musical bed is processed so radically that its source is sometimes not clear. One of the thrills of the mashup is identifying two well-known artists unwittingly complementing each other’s strengths and limitations: bacchanalian rapper Missy Elliott combined with morose English rock band Joy Division, ecstatic Madonna working with furious Sex Pistols.”
Further criticism of The Grey Album arose when EMI, the record label controlling the copyright to The Beatles’ White Album, attempted to shut down The Grey Album because Danger Mouse had failed to procure appropriate permissions. EMI went so far as to send cease and desist letters to the DJ, a handful of record stores, and web sites that have hosted the songs.
Projects like The Grey Album can be good, says Giles Martin, who it should be noted released his own Beatles mashup album in November entitled Love, but “they don’t stand up to repeated listenings.”
Mr. Martin is the son of legendary Beatles’ producer Sir George Martin, the man in the control room for virtually all of The Beatles’ recording sessions, who was a major force in creating their innovative sound. According to the younger Mr. Martin, The Beatles’ Love album “is a thorough reinterpretation of their work, with familiar sounds in unfamiliar places.”
It should be noted that Martin did procure all required copyright permissions to produce the Love album and even used his familial connection to The Beatles to invite Paul, Ringo, and Yoko to hear early versions of the album. Still, he admits that “there will be a lot of people pissed off about this.”
And such a man is Bob Spitz, author of The Beatles: The Biography.
“I’m disappointed,” Spitz said to AP Reporter David Bauder. “Not by the end product but by the fact that they are the Beatles’ songs and overdubbing them and massaging them allows other people to impose their own creative ideas on something that was so immediate and of a particular time. I thought that legacy was virtually tamper-proof, until now.”
Spitz went on to point out the risk of failure inherent in such tinkering. “Once you meddle with something so fixed in the public’s mind,” he says, “you will risk having a failure of the proportion to Twyla Tharp doing Bob Dylan,” referring to the unfavorably received and quickly-closed Broadway show The Times They Are a-Changing.
But many artists are themselves celebrating the new form.
When Roy Kerr, a D.J. who calls himself the “Freelance Hellraiser,” mixed Christina Aguilera’s vocals from Genie in a Bottle, over the music from the Strokes’ Hard to Explain, a “honking guitar song” to create a mashup he titled A Stroke of Genius, many considered the product to be a perfect pop song that was “better than either of its sources.”
Among those holding this opinion, perhaps, is Aguilera herself, as she has subsequently hired Mr. Kerr to create further mashups of her material. And she is not alone. Upon hearing A Stroke of Genius, Paul McCartney invited the DJ to create an entire album of McCartney remixes.
But while copyright lawyers and profit woes continue to be anxiety-inducing concerns for record labels, “such considerations have little to do with how mashups happen, or why they keep happening.”
In the opinion of The New Yorker writer Sasha Frere-Jones, “mashup artists…have found a way of bringing pop music to a formal richness that it only rarely reaches. See mashups as piracy if you insist, but it is more useful, viewing them through the lens of the market, to see them as an expression of consumer dissatisfaction. Armed with free time and the right software, people are rifling through the lesser songs of pop music and, in frustration, choosing to make some of them as good as the great ones.”
