In the mashup album, in Algorithms, that responsibility belongs elsewhere, and I get to just be along for the ride.
Sometimes I don’t want to pick my own songs, I’m sick of my playlists, my limited taste. But so much of public life involves being forced to hear songs at random-someone’s headphones playing too loud on public transit, a restaurant’s theme-appropriate playlist, a drug store’s light rock station. Too many times! And if you were choosing, you wouldn’t choose these songs. I know, I know-you’ve heard all these songs before. You hope, as you walk into a party or a club, that the DJ knows what they’re doing. There are plenty of the fratty college staples like Mickey Avalon’s “My Dick,” Three 6 Mafia’s “I’d Rather,” but the scales tip in favor of eyes-closed, hands-up late aughts classics like Muse’s “Starlight” and Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up.” Like any pop album, it starts big, brassy. In its opening track “Sky High,” the combination of Ceelo Green’s “Fuck You” and Twista’s “Overnight Celebrity,” is a cold splash of water to the face, a reckoning of time and music, as it spins into “Ice Ice Baby” and “Under Pressure” later on. When I listen to Algorithms now, my reaction still feels live in an inexplicable way. But it’s not devoid of personality, or a sensitivity to the feel of a room-or the idea of a room. It’s anything but algorithmic, despite the craft requiring a merging of similar algorithmic tendencies between songs.
Best mashup songs trial#
Mashup albums are a product of trial and error, some of this happening in a room and some of it happening live during a show. But Algorithms, the final mashup album, “hits different,” as they say.įor listeners of mashup albums, the anticipation was never so much a question of “what songs will be put over other songs?” but about the emotional reaction triggered by a combination, by a transition. These first two albums are solid party mixes, no doubt, each with particular standouts, striving to merge together the types of songs that would get a rousing cheer if played in a house party basement. Among the singular Girl Talk (whose last album All Day came out in 2010), there was the tongue-in-cheek Super Mash Bros., the hour-long mixes by The White Panda, and a mashup album I’ve referred to in semi-recent pits of mania and despair, joy and sentimentality: Milkman’s 2011 mashup album Algorithms.Īlgorithms was Milkman’s third album it followed 2008’s Lactose & THC and 2009’s Circle Of Fifths. Nostalgia for the mashup era is still rampant, in my own house especially.
Go to any YouTube page for a mashup and you will inevitably find a string of comments that range from “tight” or “this still goes hard” from anywhere between a day and a few months and a year or two ago. Let’s not forget that Chic’s Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards wound up suing Sugar Hill Records. By the early 2010s, so long ago now it might as well be a century, licensing-related lawsuits and the rise of electronic dance music in pop saw the end of mashups. (His first album, Secret Diary, begins with a glitched-up version of “Get Ready For This” mashed up with a number of brief snippets, including “Who Let The Dogs Out?” Almost 20 years later, glitch music is certainly having a moment, with ever-increasing popularity of artists like 100 gecs.) In the late aughts, electronic music had yet to permeate the dominant pop music sound, but mashups were in abundance. Girl Talk’s Night Ripper was the artist’s breakthrough-a dorm room essential, to borrow a phrase-but the 2006 album was the artist’s third. It wasn't until the early to mid-1990s that mashups-music dedicated solely to the artistry of sampling-started to appear, reaching the apex of their popularity in the mid-aughts. By the late 1970s and early 80s, sampling was commonplace in funk and hip hop-Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,” for example, sampled Chic’s “Good Times.” Musique concrète served as the foundation of electronic music, which eventually made its way into everything from film scores (1956’s Forbidden Planet) to popular music. The movement, led by Pierre Schaeffer, was initially known as musique concrète and was built upon by other mid-20th century composers like Pierre Henry, John Cage, and Daphne Oram.
As gramophones and radios cemented their place as household staples, composers began to wonder whether they could start to create work using pre-recorded music. Sampling as we know it (taking part of an existing piece of music and looping it beneath a different piece of music) originated in the 1940s. In fact, it doesn’t even belong to my generation.
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