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Friday, January 14, 2005
Bastard Pop
I'm always behind the times, but I have discovered a music genre called the mash-up. (For those of you who are even more behind the times than me, a mash-up is what happens when you take two different songs with very similiar melodic or harmonic structures and syncronize them. If you want to hear an example, check out this combination of The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" and Madonna's "Ray of Light," called Eleanor Ciccone.)
So far, this is the coolest thing I've ever heard: a syncronized mix of over 40 songs, mostly Beatles tunes. Of course, the music industry hates these little gems, since no royalties are paid to the artists who created the music. (Note: no one worries about royalties being paid to the people who spend time creating the re-mixes, but I digress.) To that, I quote this article from The New Yorker: "See mashups as piracy if you insist, but it is more useful, viewing them through the lens of the market, to see them as an expression of consumer dissatisfaction. Armed with free time and the right software, people are rifling through the lesser songs of pop music and, in frustration, choosing to make some of them as good as the great ones." |
