0.4.2 - Let's work it out on the remix
I said in my Linkin Park post that my desire to listen to Collision Course originally made me want to write about mashup albums, but instead I ended up listening to the entire Linkin Park discography. Well, I did that, and I still wanted to write about mashup albums, so here we are.
It's 2004, and I am sat in my private office in the University of Sheffield where I should be working. However, it's summer, and there's not much going on, but that doesn't stop me having to be in the office, making myself useful somehow. What I'm actually doing is sitting on an IRC channel I share with a subset of people I got to know through the Something Awful forums, a kind of Reddit precursor back before the internet was as terrible and useless as it is now that big money has its grubby mitts all over it. I'd joined SA back in 2003, before all the terrible posters registered from 2004 onwards, after finding links to some forum posts and proto-memes which had gone viral. Like Reddit, it was a big tent, and encouraged you to be self-selecting. The Games and Traditional Games (read; board and RPG games) forums were my stomping grounds, and specifically inside the Traditional Games forum, there was a small but healthy community of people who played the old parlour game Mafia/Werewolf together online, of which I was one.
The IRC channel (like a proto Discord server before the internet was awful) I was on was the official Mafia Goon IRC channel, but was mostly used just for people to chat throughout the day while they should have been working, something I was very good at. And on this fateful day, I am sat on IRC specifically because it's a momentous day - there's a new Girl Talk album, and me and forums poster and mafia player flatluigi (note: flatluigi styles themselves all lower case and we respect peoples' choices about their online handles, even when they are wrong) are waiting to listen to it.
Because I am who I am, I definitely talked about music on there; I don't remember any specific conversations, nor do I have a concrete recollection of the circumstances which led specifically to this memory; just fragments. I know for sure that at some point, flatluigi had recommended The Night Ripper to me during one of our music conversations when I had talked about my interest in mashups; I know just as certainly that I'd found it on a torrent site somewhere, and wore out the illegally downloaded mp3's to the digital bone with repeated listening since. And on this day, on this afternoon, somehow across the internet and the Atlantic ocean, flatluigi and I listened to the new Girl Talk album in approximate sync, and spent the afternoon picking out and identifying the various samples and song stems laden throughout and woven together to produce the album. It was like an audio cryptic crossword for a specific type of music nerd, and it has remained burned specifically into my memory for the past two decades.
The Napster/Limewire era of music consumption (though, in truth, I never used either; I had tech savvy friends and I knew where the hidden internet torrent sites were) may have been terrible for artists (though I wonder if they would trade places now with how music consumption existed back in the early 2000s), but it was a verdant garden of accidental or intentional discovery; the democratisation of the internet, the proliferation of early software which made bedroom remixes possible, led inevitably to people doing weird stuff with existing music and putting it out for people to find.
The first mashup I remember hearing was Don't Call Me Song 2. I think someone had included it in a folder of other Blur songs I had downloaded, and when I heard it, it lit in me a fire of curiosity. Were other people out here doing this? They were, and I ended up finding A Stroke of Genie-us and Freelance Hellraiser soon after. Every couple of months, I would scour the torrent sites, check the Music forums on Something Awful for any signs of this weird fledgling musical style that had tickled my brain just right. After a couple of years, I had a decently sized folder full of mashups of various qualities, both in audio and execution. It wasn't until my conversation about music with flats over IRC that I learned how far it had spread. It wasn't just one-off novelty singles; a weird proof of concept that dropped unbidden into some DJ's mind; instead there were now whole albums dedicated to the form. I listened to 2ManyDJs and Girl Talk and a plethora of other songs or mixes flats had found, or produced themselves. Sometimes I would log onto IRC to some DM from them linking to some music blog, or their own corner of the internet, with a new mashup for me to listen to. Halcyon days.
Eventually, I left that job, started having to work for a living, had less time to myself to goof around; I stopped going on IRC (though I kept in touch with a surprising number of mafia players through Steam or other social media to this day), stopped logging into Something Awful, stopped playing Mafia online. I never stopped loving mashups though, and while nearly every single internet development since 2003 has been bad, the archiving and discoverability of mashups, which you used to have to hunt for across torrent sites like panning for gold nuggets, has made the exposure of wider audience to the joys of the mashup far easier.
I'm not going to go song by song or really album by album through what I listened to here; mashups are, I think, either something you find curious and delightful, encouraging you to seek them all out regardless of their split across genres; or, you think they're a dumb gimmick, and you'd rather just listen to the songs you like without them being interrupted by some other song you don't know. Like the allure of the Supergroup, there's a power in wanting to know "what would those songs sound like mashed up together? Is there some beat matching/cross mixing equation which means The Ketchup Song by Las Ketchup and tv off by Kendrick Lamar can sound great when mashed together? And would you call that song "Good on a hotdog?".
Instead, I'm going to implore you to take the time to go on the journey I went on; listen to any of these albums (but I'd maybe recommend Feed The Animals if you don't know which one to choose to get the genuine experience), take it in, and see how many of the over 300 songs sampled on this album you can pick out. By the end of it, you'll know for sure if this is the start of a new musical journey of exploration (in which case, my next recommendation would be the Kleptone's Uptime/Downtime, which though it's a double album, skews less Rap centric if you're not into the Rap scene as much), or if mashups just aren't for you.
They're definitely for me though.
Sidenotes:
*Since I didn't call all the albums out specifically by name as I've done with every other post so far, I feel compelled to do it here; also worth noting that because of the nature of what mashups are, with some exceptions none of these albums are on Spotify, and I listened to all of them except the two Girl Talk albums through Youtube. So, here are the albums and links for where to find them:-
2ManyDJs - As Heard On Radio Soulwax Part 2
Dean Gray - American Edit
Danger Mouse - The Grey Album
Girl Talk - The Night Ripper
Girl Talk - Feed The Animals
**Did I think twice about listening to the Kleptones album considering it's a double album and would mean nearly two and a half hours spent on one album? I did, and I rejected the thought of counting it as two albums (when I do Speakerboxx/The Love Below I'm gonna call that a double album, so this is as well), and I didn't want to warp my choices of what I listened to just to pad my stats, so ultimately I made my peace with it and listened to the whole thing, and it was great.
***I feel bad for not talking more about American Edit, which is my favourite 'single album, totally remixed' version of the Mashup album. If you know American Idiot, maybe listen to this one if you are curious. 'Dr Who On Holiday' and 'Whatshername (Sussanna Hoffs)' are my favourites, but the whole album is a triumph.
****The Girl Talk albums are great, but if you listen to them with any regularity they will totally ruin some classic songs for you by inserting the mashed up rap hooks into your head every time you hear them. I still can't listen to Jessie's Girl or Bittersweet Symphony without filthy brain pollution floating to the surface of my consciousness.
