In my personal overview of song mashups, I have this template in my head of a YouTube video where some soul somewhere has taken two or more songs and weaved several of their threads together to try to get a sonically pleasing result. Occasionally, this process is also used for expository purposes, such as exhibiting formulaic tendencies in a sub-genre or repeated melodies between songs. Outside of these informative examples though, I tended to be apathetic towards any given musical mashup on YouTube. I had found that overall most of the mashups I have come across are at best one-time novelties and at worst a digital memento of misplaced earnestness from their creator in bringing together two worlds that have no business with each other.
On the other hand, I regard sampling as one of my favorite parts of hip-hop and electronic music. So much so that it surprised me to hear people in class talk about sampling and mashups as if they were interchangeable and that sampling could at all be thought of negatively. I wanted to take a moment to draw my line in the sand. “Listen, samples are not mashups. Two totally different things; mashups are mixes; samples are a strategic and often creative reworking of a melodic bit.” I was nearly offended at the idea that sampling could be hurtful through how it would wear down the legacy of the original. I regularly find out about music through looking up samples and just this week, I was introduced to the world of 60’s French pop music for the first time by finding out that the primary sample in a Dr. Dre song comes from here. I may have very well never come across this era of sound if it were not for my respect for the craft of sampling.
After class, I came to inflict a binary thought process on myself. Samples are almost always at the peak of artistry, deserving of praise, while mashups are almost always just simplistic cutting and pasting jobs, deserving of apathy. Then the above image came to mind. It is the cover for DJ Shadow’s highly acclaimed 1996 album Endtroducing….., one of my favorite albums ever. It also holds the distinction from Guinness World Records as being the first album ever to be created entirely from samples. I realized that this album that I hold so near and dear to me could be potentially framed as “a mashup of samples” and soon followed another realization that I was being too intense in my judgement.
As I sit here writing this, I am thinking back on all of the great music mashups that have eaten up hours of my life. And its almost startling to me now that I held such a disdain for the umbrella term of mashups to begin with. I assume that my finding too many bad apples turned me away from the whole batch. There is nothing inherent in being a mashup that is discrediting. There are good mashups, bad mashups, kind-of-good but bad mashups, and kind-of-bad but good mashups. Just as is the case with many things in life.
(Incidentally, my TimeHop for today was a Facebook post from 5 years ago with this video and the caption “two of my favorite things had a baby”)