Mashups

Mashups are a funny kind of music. A mashup basically consists of bits and pieces of existing songs spliced together, i.e. mashed up together. There are quite a few different varieties of mashups - the simplest is to just take the vocals from one song and add them to the music of another. Others take that concept to its extreme, adding tiny pieces of different songs together to make an incredibly complex new work, often changing what songs are used quite rapidly. I'll give some great examples after the break


First off, one that a friend of mine just sent me. This is Iron Maiden's heavy metal classic The Trooper mixed with the Monkee's I'm A Believer. Even the metal solo fits perfectly with the classic rock backing! Who woulda thunk it? Many times, this kind of two-part mashup will be given a witty name. This one doesn't have one, but it might be called The Believer, or I'm A Trooper.




Probably the most well-known mashup artist today is Gregg Gillis, more commonly known as Girl Talk. Girl Talk's music is truly a product of the 21st century. He pulls minuscule samples from a mind-boggling array of music, classic rock to hip-hop and everything in between. However, since most of the lyrics in his songs do come from hip-hop and rap, they tend to be rather full of profanity. I did my best to find a video without any, and I'm pretty sure this one is fine, but be warned. This particular video is actually pretty cool - it shows the album covers of each song being sampled as they go by. You can find a second-by-second list of samples here. One of my favorites parts of Girl Talk's music is the contrasting music that's presented together, and this song has my favorite example of that ever at about 2:25 - hard hitting Metallica vs a song called Lip Gloss.