Mash-Up Retrospective

Only a few years ago, mash-ups were a hot topic and they’re not one anymore. If you draw a blank at that term-of-art, you might recall hearing (or hearing about, more likely) the pre-Gnarls Barkley DJ Danger Mouse’s splicing each vocal track from Jay-Z’s The Black Album into samples from The Beatles’ White Album to make The Gray Album back in 2004. That’s just one mash-up – probably the best known – and there have been numerous others. My personal favorite was made about the same time by a British hacker, monikered “CCC,” who most notoriously spliced each track of The Beatles’ Revolver together with sundry bedfellows ranging from Madonna to Norman Greenbaum (“Spirit in the Sky”). The high point for me was the “Good Day Sunshine” track which combined that song with “All You Need Is Love,” “Getting Better,” “Eight Miles High,” “I Can See For Miles” and “Groove Is In The Heart.” Yes, it smoked. No, EMI didn’t stand for it, anymore than it stood for The Gray Album. Record companies and publishers can’t stand this sort of thing, constitutionally, and please don’t break your heart expecting them to do otherwise, not least (or even) when the Beatles are involved, and note also that the Beatles tend to be. Jay-Z’s comparative forbearance at the time probably references the singularities of the mixtape economy as then constituted (and when I have that figured out, you’ll know before I do) (whoever you are). Inevitably, the half-life of mash-ups kicked in as it would for any other form, not least because mash-ups are a trick with immediately understood and self-limiting parameters, like meme-hacking (e.g. substituting “Cocaine” for “Coca-Cola” in the latter’s typeface and logo). But while The Gray Album is a less scintillating alternate version of The Black Album (I don’t care if you think Hova was overripe by then; he’s Marvin Gaye to me), CCC’s Revolved project illuminated something else for me when I heard it – a simultaneously aesthetic and legal issue, which almost never happens. Really witty mash-ups differ fundamentally from sampling in its typical forms. In hip-hop, for example, whether you can identify the source recordings sampled is incidental aesthetically (if not legally), even when it’s a frankly derivative work with a vocal introduced onto a pre-existing song sampled or recreated largely whole (Diddy’s oeuvre, for instance). In that sense, The Gray Album was actually more a set of unlicensed remixes than a mash-up. In contrast, it is impossible for a mash-up like Revolved to work aesthetically unless the identity of every appropriated fragment is completely obvious. You have to hear every theft. And theft is what it has to be – impecunious solo guerrilla laptoppers snatching music too famous and expensive to license, or even to profitably mount a fair use argument over. Otherwise, it wouldn’t seem so clever. But it also wouldn’t be so effective if the digital audio content had not become so vulnerable to being so appropriated. I can think of no other phenomenon in music more emblematic of that critical shift.