Recently while I was doing legitimate academic study on youtube and I became very interested in the idea of the ‘mash-up.’ In music, a mash-up is a song that is seamlessly made up from pieces of other songs. Traditionally the vocals of one song are placed over the instrumental of another. When successfully fused, the song can sound faultless and a whole new and funky media is created. One very famous mash-up is Dangermouse’s The Grey Album, a cd that was banned by EMI for copyright infringement. The Grey Album fused the Beatles White Album and Jay-Z’s Black Album. Initially I was interested in how mash-up’s applied to music. Many of the most current pop songs are remixed in such a way. Every media text can be used to create a mash up. Video mash-ups often combine two texts that are diametrically opposed in genre to create a sinister movie clip.
This is a clip made from the movies, Toy Story and Requiem for a Dream.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1qihwMN0JM
A cool song that combines Britney Spears with Gwen Stefani.
The mash-up is also a way that society can make sense and laugh at the serious political and social situations within the world. There are many mash-ups that poke fun at politicians, most notably George W Bush. Many of these clips take political speeches and create a message that is different from the original.
Bushwhacked is a video on youtube that has seamlessly changes a speech given by George w Bush and makes light of the Iraq war.
George Bush serenading Tony Blair.
As I explored, I theorised that many film and TV narratives are accessed in a mash-up kind of way. Narratives are made up of many media texts and have become the way that stories are told within society, driven by mass media. In many cases the way that the whole story or narrative is accessible is only through many forms of media. In 2002, the Fox network aired a series called Firefly, which after one season was cancelled. The narrative and back-story of characters were continued through the media of feature film, comic books, and soon an online role playing game.
The nature of media today allows us, the viewer, to gain our information from many different sources. The mash-up is a societies way of venting and making light of everyday pressures. It is also a unique art form.
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1 comment:
hey tom - finally got around to checking your blog.
mash ups totally rule. does anyone remember that sweet Snoop Dogg/The Cure mash-up? a damn good song to dance to. And the grey album is awesome, big-ups. You should check out MF Doom's "special ingredients" compilation, it's a series of instrumental hip hop he had been releasing for a few years under "Special herbs" but on special ingredients he's also added a capella verses from heaps of MCs. Also check out the track "White Rhino" by Trans Am on the album "Liberation", the have written an awesome track of electronica and added weather reports over the top, tweeked so that it matches the rhythm of the song through different frequency modulations. Another simular track "Univited Guest" has george w bush samples over the top, not quite a mash up BUT it is so easy to get the ingredients to make music like this now simply through the internet, there are all kinds of sound bytes and samples kicking around, plus the software capabilities to achieve these new ideas.
music is amazing.
those video mash-ups are awesome too.
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