DJ Earworm is the foremost practitioner of the art of the mashup. I don’t think there’s a more interesting musician in the world right now. I was on public radio with him once! His main claim to fame is the United State of Pop series, where he combines the top 25 US pop songs of a given year into a single, seamlessly coherent track. I’ve scattered several of them throughout this post. He has started doing more seasonal mashups as well; here’s one from this past summer:
It’s rare that an artist talks you through their production process in depth, so I was delighted to discover that DJ Earworm wrote an entire book about mashup production. He wrote it in 2007 and focused it on Sony Acid, so from a technical standpoint, it might not be super useful to you. But as with the KLF’s pop songwriting tutorial, the creative method he espouses transcends technology and time period, and it would be of value to any musician. Some choice passages follow.
Whether you’re interested in the nuts and bolts of mashups or not, they raise profound philosophical questions about the nature of artistic originality and authorship into question.
The taking of other people’s ideas and transforming them is the basis for all music, in fact the basis of all culture and civilization. Ideas are meant to be shared and transformed, but within the past century or two, and increasingly in the past few decades, ideas are being treated more and more like things.
But ideas are not things. The problem is that if you take a thing from someone, the person no long has it. When you take an idea, not only do both people have it, but the person who takes it probably thinks about it, processes it, perhaps improves upon it, re-transmits it, and the process starts all over again.
This free flow of ideas is now often stifled by idea ownership, where every idea has a dollar value attached to it and the free flow of ideas is seen as a financial loss even when no ideas have actually been lost. You could argue that mashups are some of the purest-intentioned forms of music out there today, since very few artists have any illusions that they’ll capitalize on their creations.
It has been argued that mashups are the new folk music. I agree
Every piece of music is composed of ideas from previous pieces of music. Mashups are just a bit more direct and honest about it. Originality is purely a matter of degree.
It is very difficult to draw a bright line between passive music listening and active music making in the digital realm.
If you press play on your mp3 player, are you making art? How about when you make a really cool playlist? What if you make a playlist, but fade the songs in and out early at points of your choice? How about if you play your songs at the same time? What if you play only rearranged portions of them at the same time? How about taking extremely short samples of them and programming an entirely new song? What if you just sample a piano note and assign it to an electronic keyboard and perform it live?
Chances are, you won’t think pressing play on an mp3 player is creating art, but performing an electronic keyboard is creating art. Mashups lie in that uncomfortably fuzzy area in between.
All music plays on your memories of other music, but no form does this more explicitly than the mashup. DJ Earworm calls them “a disorienting recombinant nostalgia trip.”
Mashups seem like a product of the age of the digital audio workstation, but in fact are nothing new. I was not expecting such in-depth music history from this book.
The thirteenth century saw the birth of the motet, which dominated church music for many centuries. Motets were also always built on a preexisting chant, but they combined multiple melodies over the top, each with its own text, sometimes even in different languages.
In the fourteenth century, church masses were written in an increasingly multilayered style, and would not only place new music over old chants, but sometimes weave the melodies through different voices, and even go as far as borrowing entire multilayered arrangements from other motets or chanson, which were motets’ rapidly developing secular counterpart. These masses would increasingly borrow from secular music, and even include the name of the song it borrowed from in the title of the mass. The practice of singing sacred music over secular melodies rubbed a lot of members of the church the wrong way, and might even be considered the first genre clash. In fact, the practice was banned, although it continued — only now with different titles that didn’t reference the source.
The Baroque period saw the introduction of the quodlibet, a usually lighthearted composition that combined the words and music of songs, both layered and in series. The songs were typically deconstructed into fragments, and then the fragments were rearranged. This very much reflects the modern spirit of the mashup, where multiple parts are borrowed and layered together. One of the more well-known examples is the last of Bach’s Goldberg variations, number 30, where the melodies and the words of the various components relate to each other and influence each others’ meanings.
So for about half a millennium, during the birth of modern Western music, the main compositional method was to directly lift from preexisting sources and layer them with new and different material. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the practice of basing new pieces on preexisting music started to lose favor and dominance. People had learned so much about polyphonic composition, and it began to seem disrespectful to set sacred texts to a melody written for another text. Through-composed music gained popularity, in which each new section of text would have entirely new music written for it. During this period, rampant borrowing still happened all the time. Handel, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven all regularly lifted passages from other composers. Another type of appropriation common during this era was a form of popular entertainment called the ballad opera, where plays would be presented that featured songs with new words written over popular melodies.
Quotation might be a well-established practice, but mashing up recordings brings something new to the table. Mashups don’t just combine “musical” content, the melodies and lyrics. They combine the sounds of the recordings, the spatial and timbral characteristics. You might not consciously attend to these aspects of recorded music, but they act on you quite strongly. You can identify a favorite song by hearing one note or drum hit from it. Mashups exploit that fact, creating a riot of different simultaneous associations.
The law doesn’t agree with me on this, but I believe that musicians have a right to reappropriate the artifacts of our culture for new expressive purposes. In fact, I think that if you want to be a truly creative artist right now, you have a positive obligation to do so. Modern city dwellers live in an ocean of overlapping and decontextualized music. The mashup evokes that experience and makes musical sense out of it. It helps us find order and meaning in the chaos of our cultural lives. The raw material of the mashup is all around you.
Listening to music in challenging environments can actually help by blocking out large portions of the sound. You might be in a crowded and noisy bar, mistakenly identify a song being playing over the sound system, and then realize the song’s true identity, giving you an idea for a mashup. Or you might be listening to a low-quality radio in the shower or overhear a neighbor’s stereo.
The most surprising fact of mashup creation is how similar the process is to writing “original” music. For me at least, the two experiences are far more similar than different. The process that Earworm describes for mashups might as well be taken verbatim from a book about songwriting in the digital studio.
Mashup arrangement happens on multiple levels simultaneously. First, the pieces of each song need to be identified and broken up into sections and loops. The loops need to be smooth and steady, and the sections need to be complete, either beginning or ending on an important beat or perhaps some other logical point.
Before delving into how to combine the various song elements, a discussion of how to find the parts of a song best suited for combining is in order. There are so many ways to cut up and rearrange a song. It’s useful to create a bunch of sections and loops in order to play around with them, combine them in layers, and order them sequentially. These sections may be full song sections such as an entire verse or the entire intro, or they may be one- or two-bar loops that sound really smooth. It’s useful to view your component songs as a collection of isolated sections at your disposal, rather than functioning as they are in the current context.
This is precisely what songwriting is! Mashup production is also an excellent way to learn arrangement and orchestration.
[T]he art of layering doesn’t just address the idea of how much. It’s also interested in the issue of how independent. If pitches or rhythms do not relate to each other at all, they will be per- ceived as clashing. In fact, very dense tracks can sound great if they relate to each other. Think about a symphony orchestra. You are listening to a hundred different musicians, each playing his or her own “track.” But somehow, because they are all using related rhythms and harmonies, it sounds like one piece of music.
The idea of layering different vocals simultaneously gives you insight into how backing vocals work.
[A]lthough the right brain takes great pleasure in hearing multiple notes simultaneously, the left brain hurts when given too much information. If you’ve ever had two people talking to you at the same time, you know the feeling.
A more common kind of background vocals is where the singers are not singing words or any- thing that will stimulate the left brain too much: “Aaaahhhh,” “Doo doo doo,” “sha la la la la” — that kind of thing. Because these vocals were probably originally meant to be background vocals, they may work well as the background to a different vocal.
One other kind of background vocal worth mentioning is the refrain. A refrain is a short, usu- ally one-phrase, repeated vocal line. If a vocal line is repeated often enough, the left brain stops gathering meaning from it. It’s kind of like if you say the word “chair,” you may think of a chair. But if you say the word “chair” a hundred times, you will start hearing it as a collection of sounds rather than the word it represents semantically. For this reason, if a vocal refrain is repeated enough, you probably can put a foreground vocal over it. The important thing to remember is that the refrain probably ought to be repeated by itself a few times first, so that when the layering occurs, the refrain is no longer imparting any meaning.
Mashup production also gives critical insight into song structure.
Even if you reject standard song structure, at least consider why it exists. There are only two or three sections that cycle, because the brain cannot digest much more than that. After a couple of cycles, the brain has probably digested the information and can handle more. Indeed, the brain may even hunger for more variety at this point. After having some time away from the cycles, it feels good to hear them again, like seeing an old friend. So if your form deviates significantly from traditional song structure, make sure to take into account how much repetition and novelty listeners can handle, and try to strike an appropriate balance.
One trick is to drop in a little snippet of material that will be more fully explored later in the chorus or the bridge. When the full material finally comes in, the ear is primed for it and there is already some familiarity.
My idealism about cultural appropriation is all well and good, but technically, mashing up copyrighted material without permission is quite illegal. This is true even if you don’t make any money from doing so. Earworm gives a thorough and cogent explanation of the legal issues that a mashup producer should be aware of, starting with the Fair Use doctrine.
Fortunately, section 107 outlines some exceptions that seem to be in the mashup producer’s favor. This section outlines something called fair use, which helps to define and defend certain forms of what might otherwise be considered copyright infringement. Fair use modifies the draconian prohibitions of section 106 and softens them up a bit. Instead of a blanket denial of rights to create derivative works and distribute them, section 107 basically seems to say that you need a good excuse. Although this provision may have been written primarily for libraries, schools, and corporations, it could benefit mashup producers as well. Interestingly, there has never been a fair use case involving borrowed sound material that has ever gone to court!
Although it is important to be aware of the legal implications, in practice the most trouble any mashup artists seem to have gotten in is a cease and desist letter, or C&D. This is a letter written by a representative of a copyright holder asking for an immediate stop of the distribution of disputed material. Usually a mashup producer’s web host will receive the C&D, and either remove the material themselves or send a warning to the producer to remove the material. Some great mashups have been removed from the web in this manner. Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album was a famous victim of a C&D, as was the innovative American Edit Green Day mashup album… Even Danger Mouse was never sued. He complied with the C&D letter, and was later hired by Sony and went on to co-produce the Gorillaz’s sophomore album.
I see enormous potential for the mashup’s role in music education. However, for that potential to be realized, we have some technical barriers to overcome. The biggest obstacle is tempo-matching. You need Ableton Live or some other similarly sophisticated (and expensive) audio editing software in order to line up multiple songs to be the same tempo. The process isn’t terribly difficult for current pop songs, which have strong beats and metronomic tempos. However, it becomes quite challenging when you’re working with older songs with less prominent drums and fluctuating tempos. And it’s very difficult with classical music or jazz. Matching keys is less of a technical challenge, but it requires sophisticated musicianship.
This past semester, I had some of my students remix each others’ tracks. A few of them tried for more ambitious mashup-level projects. I helped them with the tempo-syncing, since I can warp out a track pretty quickly at this point. I’d like to have students be able to handle the entire process from soup to nuts. It remains to be seen whether beginner digital musicians can handle Ableton, but I look forward to finding out.
Here are some of my own mashups:
https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/sets/mashups