YouTube finally got around to recommending Bill McClintock’s mashups to me. A lot of the enjoyment comes from bringing out the strong melodies underlying bombastic metal performances by pairing them with disco/pop/R&B songs; unfortunately, I’m not familiar with most of the Judas Priest/Slayer/Megadeath headbangers forming one half of the mashup.
Surely for the average pop fan “You Make September Fun” by Fleetwood Fire is his magnum opus, absolutely incredible. The way the songs blend is perfect; hearing Maurice White’s (RIP) perfectly-timed “Never a cloudy day, yow!” leading into the chorus feels like it must have been recorded in the same studio.
Commenters often claim “It’s better than the originals!” It’s intriguing that someone gluing two songs together can engender such appreciation. It sounds so good because you bring your familiarity with both originals to the combination. The absence of the expected, replaced by the unexpected but familiar, maxes out the predictable-unpredictable audio pleasure circuits in your brain.
But I guarantee someone unfamiliar with both originals would prefer them to this sensational mashup. Where’s the incredible brass from “September“? Where’s the soaring “belie-ee-ee-ee-eeve” chorus that Christine McVie (RIP) sings on her own song “You Make Loving Fun“? The towering originals put them in your brain, and they accompany the mashup even in their absence.
Have the AI do it, but lazily be filthy
With AI music generators you can imagine a mashup and an AI will fabricate it for you. A guilty juvenile pleasure was Obscurest Vinyl‘s combination of early 1960s pop/R&B styles with filthy lyrics, summed up by their singular “I Glued My Balls To My Butthole Again” by the Sticky Sweethearts.
It’s a decent song, elevated by the delicious word “again.” I commented (roughly, since Mr. Vinyl removed all YouTube comments, which were mostly of the form “This was playing at the high school dance and inspired my grandparents to conceive my mom”)
George Santayana wrote “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to distend their sphincter, again and again.”
Another sickly strong song is Now I Gotta Set a Titty on Fire.’ I not only transcribed the lyrics on Genius as my small contribution to organizing all the world’s knowledge for posterity, I also applied my scholarship-winning Oxford-educated powers of literary analysis to some of the lyrics; click the shaded lyrics to admire my exegesis.
As you can tell, Obscurest Vinyl seems really angry! I hope writing “You Look Like You Could Use a F**kin’ Lamp” and even worse are cathartic for him/her/them. They’re unlike the essentially good-natured YouTube channel There I Ruined It which I think uses AI to assist in its mashups. Its greatest achievement is Elvis Presley singing the “I like big butts and I cannot lie” lyrics of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” to the tune of “Don’t Be Cruel”, but it has been cruelly removed from YouTube “due to a copyright claim by a [humorless] third party.”
Update: for now here’s an copy of There I Ruined It’s Elvis cover, and you can still watch a mashup of the mashup in which you can hear Elvis singing “Deep in the jeans she’s wearing / I looked and I can’t stop staring.”
Old wine in new packaging
Before easy mashups, musicians would actually have to record new versions of songs. There have been easy-listening versions of rock songs for a long time, and everyone in every genre recorded Beatles songs in the 1970s. Ted Templeton (who apparently isn’t the fantastic producer Ted Templeman), recorded Trill it Like it Was by The Templeton Twins with Teddy Turner’s Bunsen Burners, an album of rock songs played by a 1920s tea dance band and double-tracked crooner. It’s amusing for a few songs.
The excellent post-punk singer-songwriter Joe Jackson mashes up his own biggest hit “Is She Really Going out with Him?” I’ve seen him play it in concert as a capella doo-wop, brass band, and a bossa nova swing tune.
