Mashup De Place

So I ran across Stephen VanDyke’s well-compiled Tunes For the Weekend, a nice roundup of mashups culled from wild and wooly message boards. Between that and all the buzz that mashup masterpiece The Gray Album by DJ DangerMouse has gotten as of late I was all set to do a mashup show for Selection 3. That is, until I listened to a bunch of them.

The Gray Album is something else. It is transcendental, a beautiful and artful creation as impressive as its already stellar component parts. It is the pinnacle of what a mashup can be. Unsurprisingly, then, it is lonely in the crowded mashup field.

Mashups, generally, are nothing more than party music. Not that party music has no currency, it’s just not valuable for long. We use party music and move on to next weekend’s anthems. Nothing wrong with that. But I say that nothing inherent about the mashup “process” imbues these audio chimeras with any further artistic merit; if DangerMouse had done a crap job of blending together The Beatles and Jay-Z, nobody would be talking.

And that’s why people aren’t talking too much about mashups anymore. Most of the stuff Stephen links to would make a great soundtrack for your weekend partying (as he suggests), but you’ll be sick of it by Monday. It’s not a quality-devoid genre, just one that requires a little something extra to really stand out. Not to many mashup artists can be DangerMouse or even Dsico. So you’ll not likely be hearing mashups on Selection 3 next week. I’ll leave the one-weekend party music discovery to y’all.

Still, I can’t help but want to make a mashup myself, if just for the title. It’d be a mix of The Darkness and Lil’ John, and I’d call it “I Believe In a Thing Called Crunk.”

Solid gold.