Mashup (music)
A mashup (also mesh, mash up, mash-up, blend, or bootleg[1]) is a creative work, usually in a form of a song, created by blending two or more pre-recorded songs, usually by superimposing the vocal track of one song seamlessly over the instrumental track of another, increasing the tempo and pitch while adding or reducing gaps to make it flow.[2] To the extent that such works are "transformative" of original content, in the United States they may find protection from copyright claims under the "fair use" doctrine of copyright law.[3]
| Mashup music | |
|---|---|
| Other names | Mesh, mash up, mash-up, blend, bootleg, bastard pop, |
| Stylistic origins | |
| Cultural origins | Late 1990s, 2000s; Europe, North America |
| Derivative forms | |
| Regional scenes | |
| |
History
The 1967 Harry Nilsson album Pandemonium Shadow Show features what is nominally a cover of The Beatles's "You Can't Do That" but actually introduced the "mashup" to studio-recording.[4] Nilsson's recording of "You Can't Do That" mashes his own vocal recreations of more than a dozen Beatles songs into this track. Nilsson conceived the combining of many overlaying songs into one track after he played a chord on his guitar and realized how many Beatles songs it could apply to.[5] This recording has led some to describe Harry Nilsson as the inventor of the mashup. Another version of the song appears on the 1971 Harry Nilsson album Aerial Pandemonium Ballet, the first studio remix album.
The 1990 John Zorn album Naked City features a version of Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman" set over the bassline of Roy Orbison's "Pretty Woman".[6]
In 1994, the experimental band Evolution Control Committee released the first modern mashup tracks on their hand-made cassette album, Gunderphonic. These "Whipped Cream Mixes" combined a pair of Public Enemy a cappellas with instrumentals by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. First released on home-made cassettes in early 1992, it was later pressed on 7" vinyl, and distributed by Eerie Materials in the mid-1990s. The tracks gained some degree of notoriety on college radio stations in the United States.[7]
The name Pop Will Eat Itself was taken from an NME feature on the band Jamie Wednesday, written by David Quantick, which proposed the theory that because popular music simply recycles good ideas continuously, the perfect pop song could be written by combining the best of those ideas into one track. Hence, Pop Will Eat Itself.[8]
The mashup movement gained momentum again in 2001 with the release of the 2 Many DJs album As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt. 2 by Soulwax's Dewaele brothers, which combined 45 different tracks; the same year a remix of Christina Aguilera's "Genie in a Bottle" was also released by Freelance Hellraiser, which coupled Aguilera's vocals with the guitar track of "Hard To Explain" by New York's the Strokes, in a piece called "A Stroke of Genie-us".[9]
Launched in San Francisco in 2003, Bootie was the first club night in the United States dedicated solely to the burgeoning art form of the bootleg mashup, and now hosts monthly parties in several cities around the globe, including Los Angeles, Paris, Boston, Munich, and New York City. The party's slogan, "Music for the A.D.D. Generation" also inspired the creation of "A.D.D", Israel's first mash-up dedicated party.[10] The Best of Bootie mashup compilation series is compiled and produced each year by A Plus D, creators of the international mashup club Bootie. The compilations have been released in December every year since 2005, and are annual Internet sensations, with each album garnering over 5000GB+ of downloads.[11]
See also
References
- Rojas, Pete (1 August 2002). "Bootleg culture". Salon. Archived from the original on 17 June 2006.
- Geoghegan, Michael and Klass, Dan (2005). Podcast Solutions: The Complete Guide to Podcasting, p.45. ISBN 1-59059-554-8.
- "Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video". Center for Social Media, American University. Archived from the original on 2 June 2010.
- Fennessey, Sean (6 August 2013). "Deconstructing Harry". Grantland.com. Retrieved 20 January 2021.
- Myers, Mitch (6 March 2019). "How Harry Nilsson Made the Beatles' Catalog Into His Own Russian Doll, Creating Rock's First Great Mashup". Variety.com. Retrieved 20 January 2021.
- Santoro, Gene (1994). Dancing in Your Head. ISBN 9780195356427. Retrieved 18 December 2014.
- "Who the hell is Clint Mansell?". Sickamongthepure.com. Archived from the original on 10 October 2004. Retrieved 18 December 2014.
- Wolk, Douglas (21 January 2008). "Barely Legal". Villagevoice.com. Archived from the original on 3 August 2008. Retrieved 18 December 2014.
- Jam, Billy (23 May 2007). "Music For Generation ADD: Mashups quietly mature into a thriving subculture". New York Press. Archived from the original on 25 July 2008.
- "Mashup best-of 2006 album". Boing Boing. Retrieved 18 December 2014.
Further reading
- Paul Morley (2003). Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City. Bloomsbury. ISBN 0-7475-5778-0.
- Jeremy J. Beadle (1993). Will Pop Eat Itself? Faber & Faber. ISBN 0-571-16241-X.
- Brøvig-Hanssen, Ragnhild, 2018. "Musical Recycling: Mashup Aesthetics and Authorship." Selected Paper of Internet Research, SPIR, 2016: The 17th Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers. Berlin, Germany. http://spir.aoir.org.
- Roseman, Jordan (2006). Audio Mashup Construction Kit. ISBN 0-471-77195-3.
- Hughes, J. & Lang, K. (2006). Transmutability: Digital Decontextualization, Manipulation, and Recontextualization as a New Source of Value in the Production and Consumption of Culture Products. In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences – Volume 08.
- Sinnreich, Aram (2010). Mashed Up: Music, Technology & the Rise of Configurable Culture . ISBN 1-55849-829-X.