Couple of exciting memetic hybrids circulating around the web right now. First, here’s a techno track using samples of Pixar’s Up, which is one of the best and saddest movies ever. Thanks Mike for alerting me to the remix’s existence. Remixing songs is all well and good, but remixing movies, that’s where it’s at.
DJ Earworm does a yearly mashup combining the entire Billboard Top 25 songs of that year. Here’s his, and America’s, offering for 2009. I like it.
Full sampling/remixing post in the works. (Update: here it is.) Until then, meditating on these. Kevin Kelly says in a New York Times article about video mashups:
[T]he habits of the mashup are borrowed from textual literacy. You cut and paste words on a page. You quote verbatim from an expert. You paraphrase a lovely expression. You add a layer of detail found elsewhere. You borrow the structure from one work to use as your own. You move frames around as if they were phrases.
I find this to be equally true of music-making, not just of the electronic kind, but of any kind.