Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Mash-ups may simply be seen as a logical extension of sampling, the next step in a culture where everything gets combined to less and less effect. Except that the irony I hear in mash-ups is not the irony of hip detachment. Mash-ups are not only the logical evolution of the mix tape, those intensely personal collages put together as love letters or journals or mementos of a time and place. They represent some of the best things pop music has to offer us right now. They're the place where real rock criticism is being done, the glorious return of format-free radio, the vindication of fandom and an affirmation of the egalitarian spirit of rock.
That's the spirit that I hear in the work of the Belgian brothers known as 2 Many DJs collected over the five volumes of "As Heard on Radio Soulwax" ("Pt. 2," the most popular, is also the best); of New York producer Steve Stein, who records as Steinski and whose "Nothing to Fear: A Rough Mix," is the closest to a masterpiece the genre has produced; and of the various mixers and producers collected on "The Best Bootlegs in the World Ever."
The democratizing impulse of these records is the same one that animated Pet Shop Boys' version of U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name." By putting a dance beat behind the insufferable inspirational grandiosity of U2's song, and then seguing into Frankie Valli's "Can't Take My Eyes off You," Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe were returning the number to pop, saying there was something more moving, more fun, in their version's trashy club beat, and something more fun in that trashy Frankie Valli song, than in all of U2's "vision."
Mash-ups are also related to the spirit that moved Puff Daddy to let Dave Grohl, Rob Zombie and others loose on the rock remix of "It's All About the Benjamins" (echoing the critic Dave Marsh's words that Jimi Hendrix's legendary performance at the Monterey Pop Festival was "fair equivalents of what your parents were afraid would happen if you hung out with blacks"), or to rap over Jimmy Page's guitar solo from "Kashmir" on the pompous and undeniable "Come With Me." (Recorded for the remake of "Godzilla," it was music made to stand up to a 5,000-ton, fire-breathing reptile monster and kick his scaly ass back into the ocean.)
Mash-ups are a party that takes place both in your head and in your speakers, a fantasy gathering where all sorts of artists kept segregated by radio formats, corporate blandness, snobbishness, the racial and social divides that keep some artists from reaching certain segments of the population -- and even death -- are brought together to fight it out and, eventually, find harmony. It's the rock 'n' roll heaven that wimpy Righteous Brothers song could not have dared dream of. The thrill of listening to Salt 'n' Pepa's lubricious rap "Push It" while the Stooges slam into "No Fun" and Iggy squeals "Uh cuhhhm-mmonn!" is knowing that there are fans of each group who'd want nothing to do with one another. (There was a great moment a few years ago on an MTV awards show where host Chris Rock introduced a performance by Marilyn Manson, and you could see him thinking, "White people are into some weird shit.")
Mash-ups don't so much trash the barriers of high and low that exist in the pop world as simply refuse their existence. What hip young Strokes' fan, steeped in Big Star and the Kinks and the Replacements, would be caught dead grooving to Christina Aguilera? But when you hear the fleet, chugging guitars of the Strokes' "Hard to Explain" backing Aguilera's vocal for "Genie in a Bottle," they're a match made in heaven. If you think of the refrain that Julian Casablancas sings in the Strokes' original -- "I don't see it that way" -- it begins to seem like a denial of the possibilities this new version opens up.
Somebody saw it a different way (the version, credited to Freelance Hellraiser, is fittingly called "A Stroke of Genius"), saw that indie hipness and teen pop could be entirely comfortable bedfellows. And you notice something else -- just how good Aguilera's vocal is. The lyric and the song's original backing may be just another piece of pop-factory product. Taken out of its original context, Aguilera's vocal reveals a commitment to emotion beyond anything the song deserves, along with a dramatic pull between erotic surrender and refusal.
The Strokes might be a bunch of guys mooching around the sidelines at a dance eyeing Aguilera, the hot girl who's just sashayed in. The guitar riff of "Hard to Explain" promises pleasure lurking just around the corner, if only this girl would venture out on the dance floor with one of them. She, on the other hand, is determined to keep herself in reserve, though the slight moan in her voice tells you she longs to give into what the music promises. The number could be the long-awaited marriage of the Shirelles' "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," with its heartbreakingly naive question, and Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam's "I Wonder If You Take Me Home," where the singer knows exactly what will happen if she gives herself to the boy who's working overtime to melt her defenses.
The implied criticism in "Stroke of Genius" is in the refusal to deny what gives us pleasure in the name of hipness. Sometimes, what's being criticized in mash-ups are the pretensions of the performers themselves. Evolution Control Committee matches the retro-assaultive Black Power sermons of Public Enemy with the peppy horns of Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass -- and the result is hilarious. Every time Chuck D. lights into some new target of his righteous rage you hear those horns saying, "Lighten the fuck up!" (The fact that the track segues into Tito Puente's cover of "It's Not Unusual" only compounds the joke).
For the most part, though, the elements of mash-ups work to complement each other, and never more so than in Freelance Hellraiser's "Smells Like Booty," a pairing of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" with "Bootylicious" by Destiny's Child. On the Destiny's Child album "Survivor," "Bootylicious" kicks off to the opening riff from Stevie Nicks' "Edge of Seventeen." That stuttering guitar is meant to impart tension, but the track never delivers the mounting excitement of denied release. Worse, the vocals sound rushed, nervous, competing with the beat instead of being buoyed by it. The twists and turns of the vocal get swallowed in the mix.
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