Early Achievements In Mash-Up History
:: Club House - Do It Again/Billie Jean ::
The kids love their mash-ups, don't they? Christina Aguilera vs. The Strokes, Destiny's Child vs. Nirvana, Kelly Clarkson vs. just about anybody. Hell, just last weekend Phil and I were grooving to Dangermouse's Grey Album (on vinyl of course, we have standards.) Well this here is a mash-up, sort of. Back then, they quaintly called it a medley. Some enterprising DJ or producer realized a similarity in the bass lines of Michael Jackson's then-ubiquitous Billie Jean and the yacht rock classic Do It Again by Steely Dan, and blessed the post-disco club culture with this funky Frankenstein.
It actually works pretty well... but frankly it's rather dull. It doesn't make me want to dance, not even mockingly. It does however make me miss buying waxpacks of baseball cards and opening them in front of the tube while watching Greatest American Hero. My biggest problem with it is that they've recreated the music rather antiseptically instead of combining the original songs. They probably didn't have that technology, or else we'd have surely gotten a controversial mash-up of I Want A New Drug and Ghostbusters. Also, the Donald Fagen dude, while doing a respectable imitation of him, sounds like English is his second language, giving it a surreal quality like it was ripped from a karaoke scene in a David Lynch movie. But hey, it was 1983. People were actually buying crap like Stars On 45, which is even more sterile and less adventurous than this.
I am sure this has likely appeared elsewhere, probably on some aerobic workout club mix that's gone platinum in Europe, but here you get it with all the pops and crackles, as Vinyl Jesus intended.
Tony
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on Wednesday, August 31, 2005 at 7:00 AM.
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Friday, September 02, 2005 8:27:00 AMI think the only real survivor of the mash-up scene is Richard X, but I don't think he was really interested in mash-ups, only making really good pop tunes. That's what most of the other tended to forget. He produced a few hits actually. You should check out the Annie record, it's VERY good! There's the Soulwax/2ManyDJs as well, but damn it I'm trying so hard to forget about'em. ;-) What a bunch of poncey Belgian waffles! ;-)
The best mash-up was the Anita Howard one that the Sugababes *covered* as well as that Destiny'sChildvsTenCC. And oh yeah Kylie Minogue VS New Order. :-)
All in all a really short lived scene, thank god. It quickly became boring: no real humour, it was all about juxtaposing the right 2 (or more) songs which most people forgot. They just thought it was slamming two songs together. Yeah right. Not.
Friday, September 02, 2005 8:27:00 AM
Yes, yes, you can read all of it on that wikipedia page. ;)
Thursday, March 16, 2006 9:28:00 AM
This kind of reminds me that thing on Golden Throats 4, where Alan Copeland leads a group of studio singers through "Norwegian Wood" over the Mission: Impossible theme. I think they won a Grammy for that...
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