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Mash It Up And Dance
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
The club was packed and sweltering. Boys wearing leather pants and lip-gloss and girls sporting hot pants had paused in their dancing to crowd around the stage. "Bootie," the U.S.'s first mash-up party, was having its two-year anniversary and the band, Smash-Up Derby occupied the stage. Adrian, the lead singer grasped the microphone, flicked his long red dreads over his shoulder and cued the band. The crowd thrashed in unison as the lead guitarist began playing the opening riffs of Nirvana's "Teen Spirit," and they sang along as Adrian began belting out Michael Jackson's "Billy Jean" over the music.
Many people became aware of the mash-up, or bootleg phenomenon in 2004 because of all the controversy surrounding Danger Mouse's The Grey Album . Three hundred web sites and blogs came together for Grey Tuesday, where they posted The Grey Album for the public to download freely, in defiance of the record label EMI who had refused to allow Danger Mouse to distribute his album which was a mash-up of Jay-Z's The Black Album and The Beatle's The White Album. The controversy made The Grey Album a must-have for any audiophile, catapulted Danger Mouse to indie-god status, and introduced a wider audience to mash-up music.
In it's current incarnation, a mash-up song is usually the music from one song spliced with the lyrics from another. Now, the idea of mashing songs together and borrowing musical elements from different pieces isn't new. It's one of the foundations of hip-hop, and precedes hip-hop by decades as well. What makes the current mash-up phenomenon so interesting is that computer programs like Acid and ProTools allow virtually anyone to make mash-up music, and the Internet allows mash-up artists to easily share their creations with a wide audience.
As you can imagine some music critics aren't too excited with the idea that everyone and their mama can join in the mash-up fun. They worry, and rightfully so, that as mash-up becomes more ubiquitous it will become watered down and boring. While they do have a valid point, they're forgetting one of the key principles of mash-up itself: the importance of crossing boundaries. Mash-up songs cross a variety of musical boundaries by smashing disparate genres together. Deejays also use mash-up as a way to play around with music and make statements about sex, gender, or politics with their arrangements. One can look at mash-up in and of itself as being a political statement because it willfully ignores copyright laws to create art, which the artists then, generally, distribute for free. The current technology allows mash-up music to blur the boundary between audience and artist and allows the listener to stop being merely a consumer of music but a producer as well.
The Bootie dance parties also feature a lot of boundary crossing. The first time I went to Bootie I found the most diverse gathering of people I'd ever seen in a San Francisco club. I saw the Marina crowd, or San Francisco's version of the yuppie, with their crisp Gap jeans, blonde highlights, and button-down shirts. There were glam kids of both genders sporting leather, hot pants, eye shadow, and corsets. Hipsters wore ties and white belts while grooving in their worn jeans and Converse shoes. Boys danced with boys. Girls danced with girls. Drag queens danced with whomever they pleased. Everyone moved together in a cross-culture mash-up on the dance floor.
But while most people would applaud mash-up for crossing musical and political boundaries, inevitably one has to ask about the concept of originality. Does the pastiche and collage nature of the music point to a lack of cultural originality? Are we mashing old songs together because we're unable to create new quality music? One could argue that the mash-up phenomenon is symbolic of our inability to come up with innovative responses to current problems, like the archaic heavy-handedness of the "War on Terror" or the cultural backlash seen in conservative movements.
However, such arguments neglect the fact that while creating mash-up music does borrow from existing sources it still takes vision and imagination to have the ability to look at familiar objects and re-envision them as something new. Mash-up music reaches back into the past and tries to refashion the present in a way that is fun and innovative.
The mix of familiar music in unfamiliar ways can also reinvigorate popular songs that have grown tired due to radio and video over-play. A good example is the over-familiar song "Somebody Told Me" by The Killers which deejay Party Ben paired with The Clash's "Rock the Kasbah," to make something infinitely fresher and far more interesting.
Also by pulling together disparate elements in a conscious way, not trying to rub out the seams and allowing the edges to show, the mash-up phenomenon is a reflection on the fragmentary nature of our lives. It echoes the fact that our selves are willful piecemeal constructions. Just like mash-up music, we're all a hodgepodge of disparate elements, musical, sexual, political, and anything else we could possibly imagine.
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