CO-OPTING COOL

Recently I was watching VH-1 when the video for this new Blondie/Doors mashup came on.

Before we go any further, I should do some explaining. I was bored and lonely, ok? I don’t normally watch VH-1, but when Julie’s out of town, things just happen. Once I took Julie to the airport for a business trip. When I got home, I blacked out. Next thing I know, it’s 9 hours later, I’m covered in empty Nestlé Crunch wrappers and E!’s “True Hollywood Story” is playing on my TV. I have no idea why.

My point is that is clearly not my fault I was watching VH-1, it was those Omega 3 thingies I’ve been taking. They’re making me very, very stupid.

So I’m watching this video for a song called “Rapture Riders,” which is a mashup of Blondie’s “Rapture” and The Doors “Riders on the Storm.”

I’m a big fan of the mashup genre. In 1994, my friend Sam came back from San Francisco with a record from something called The Evolution Control Committee. There was a picture of a cat on the cover and the words “The Whipped Cream Remixes.” What it contained was Herb Alpert music with Public Enemy vocals dropped over the top. I laughed so hard my shoes fell off (really).

As the years passed and this cool thing called “The Internet” grew up, I learned more about the bastard pop and mashup movements. (A neat history of sound manipulation and bastard pop can be heard here.) Music nerds with laptop software began doing what essentially amounted to their own, personal, bootleg remixes of popular songs. Some were pure novelty items, such as the pairing of Eminem’s “Slim Shady” with “Maple Leaf Rag.” But others produced combinations so brilliant that you almost forget the song’s original context, such as when Z-Trip put vocals from The Pharcyde’s “Passin’ Me By” over the music of Pat Benatar’s “Love is a Battlefield.”

Some artists such as 2 Many DJs and the aforementioned Z-Trip have produced sprawling hour-long mixes that place old popular music in a blender and serve up a new and unique artistic statement.

Beneath the surface of this music is a rather wicked sense of humor and just a little twinge of danger. Because most of the remixing is done by amateurs and some songs can draw from dozens of copyrighted sources, mashups tend to be highly illegal pieces of music. So when you listen to them, you can feel just a little edgy: “Yeah, this art is so good, The Man doesn’t want you to hear it.” And you can also feel just a bit superior as well: “This is about art, not your stupid copyright laws.”

However, I have always maintained that I have no trouble paying for good mashups, and I proved it by shelling out some serious dough for this thing… I have no idea how many lawyers it took to clear all the samples.

But now that I’m watching the “Rapture Riders” video on VH-1, I realize that I’m more than a little attracted to the illegal nature of mashups. Musically, there is nothing wrong with “Rapture Riders.” It’s a clever idea and it’s well executed. But it’s on VH-1.

I imagine the feeling I have watching this video was the same feeling a teen would have had in the 1970s if his parents had walked into his bedroom wearing leather jackets and declared, “I’ve just heard the album by those Sex Pistols! They rock! God Save the Queen, yeah! Come on, son, sing along! Anarchy in the UK! Yahoo!”

All of the sudden, it’s just not so cool.

I don’t know what to do about it, so I guess I’ll just turn off the VH-1 go back to working on my bootleg remix of Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

Epilogue:
There was really no place to put this in this post, but I just realized that I did not, in fact, hear my first mashup in 1994. It was in the mid 1980s… in a Mormon church. Back then, the church had just put out a new hymn book. It allowed the crazy old ladies who ran song practice after sacrament meeting to switch up the music and lyrics of certain hymns.

Back then, it wasn’t unusual to have Crazy Old Song Practice Lady (every congregation had one) announce, “We will now sing ‘How Great Thou Art’ to the tune of the primary song ‘Once There Was a Snowman.’” Later some of us Naughty Teen Mormons realized that you could sing the trippy “If You Could Hie to Kolob” to the theme tune of “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Needless to say, we didn’t win any reverence awards.