360DigitalInfluence

Have you ever had one of those moments where you’re walking down the street or driving in your car and the perfect song comes on?  The beat matches your mood, the lyrics apply perfectly to your own life, and you start boppin’ along?  For me, that’s why music is great – because it connects to something in your own life and resonates with your mood, your mindset, the situation – whatever, really.  Those songs become your life’s own soundtrack, and it’s crazy to me that you weren’t always able to listen to the perfect music track at the perfect time.

The concept of setting music to experiences is not very new - before movies and television shows incorporated soundtracks, there were plays, musicals, and operas.  We’ve been setting life experiences to music and vice versa for hundreds of years.   It’s just that now we can control when we bring that concept into our own personal lives at a level that did not quite exist before.  And, in the wonderful way that social media is ultimately an expression of vanity, we can make our every day experiences into art by soundtracking them as if they were movies.

This usually isn’t a unique process.  There are hundreds of thousands of millions of songs in the world, and one of them can usually fit an experience pretty well.  But, what about, for certain situations, where one song just can’t cut it? - When only pieces of certain songs will do?  That, my friends, is the beauty of music mashups. 

Music mashups have been around since 1956 when Bill Buchanan and Dickie Goodman released “The Flying Saucer,” which comically spliced musical bits into Orson Welles’ mock-emergency broadcast, War of the Worlds.  Frank Zappa, John Oswald, Negativland, and other artists and DJs continued to make mashups through the ‘60s, ‘70s, and on to today.  However, even while this genre of music has been around, it’s really been in the past fifteen or twenty years that it’s come into its own.

Since mp3s and audio mixing software have become so common it’s become easier than ever to create mashups.  Mashup artists like Girl Talk, Diplo, Max Tannone, and DJ Earworm have popularized the genre, mixing popular hits of all types together with more unknown tracks.  Many mashups are also free, since the music they sample is usually copyrighted, making the music that’s created even more accessible to fans. 

Since mashups contain more varied material, they can sum up a larger experience that would be difficult to evoke in just one song.  DJ Earworm’s annual United State of Pop mashups are just one example of this.  These yearly mashups take the biggest pop songs of the year, and role them into single track experiences.  His track release for this year, “Don’t Stop the Pop”, mixes Ke$ha, Rihanna, Usher, Train, Katy Perry, Ne-Yo, Taio Cruz, Lady Gaga, and more into five and half minutes of music that remind me of different parts of the entire year.  When each different artist comes on, I’m brought back to where I was when I first heard the original song, and then am also able to appreciate how it was spliced and mixed into other songs from the same period in time.  Aside from my musical interest in how these songs technically fit together and become a greater whole, the fact that five and a half minutes of music can remind me of an entire year is almost magical.  These artists create and share something new out of what already exists, just the greatest social media tools do - they allow us to tweak, perfect, and share media in a way that makes it more relevant to our lives.

Do you agree?  What are some of your favorite mashups?