Mashups

Some discussion in comments re mashups and me being amazed that a Sony sort I'd met had just heard about mashups a day or two before. She had a seventeen-year-old kid for pete's sake! Then turns out our Paula didn't know mashups. A couple teenagers she asked didn't know mashups.

Is it this city I live in? It's not like I'm into the clubbing scene with its DJs and mashups nor do I hang out at avant garde theaters or art galleries. Mashups are just part of the scene and have been for years now.

Oh, forgot to come back, sorry. I asked two 13 year olds. They'd never heard of it. My daughter said it sounded like a gang bang, while her friend thought it had something to do with drugs. There ya go!

Wow. No kidding.

Mashups are the raging copyright infringement issue hereabouts. Music mashup creators take two or more pieces of music and mix and mash 'em together to create something entirely distinct. Some are pretty clever, others are lame. Other mashup creators have moved into video mashups, expropriating images and clips. Recontextualizing, they call it.

e.g. music mashups:

Check this one out: A mashup with Jay Z, Beyonce and Britney. Yow! Yikes!

People Like Us' Swinglargo

DJ John's Chariots of Fire vs Kalifornia vs Music vs It's My Life

e.g. video mashups:

Faithless Hexstatic Mashup

Added: The Passion of Benny Hill (linker thingie lifted from Sour Grapes)

Fun stuff. Very annoying to some of the folks whose music/video/pictures are used. But I think being "very annoying" is part and parcel of the reason mashups exist.

The Bargain Barn, a cheap wine/liquor/stuff chain, has some marked down mashup Christmas CDs with old time favorites like Sinatra and Como paired with rappers and such like -- for sale for 99 cents.

And, in honor of the season, a mashup which some people think is genius, but which I think is not hardly as good as they think it is: Santa Benz. Would I buy an album for this song? No.

Added #2: Over dinner at Perbacco his nibs pointed out to me (yes, we do discuss blog posts over dinner ... how weird is that?) that mashups aren't just music and video. There are a gazillion Google Maps mashups including mashups with Craigslist and Google Maps -- HousingMaps f'rex -- and mashups with Google maps and Yahoo Traffic like this. Interested? Check out Alan Taylor's Mashup Resources.