Music Mondays: Some Bands Are Just Ahead of the Times

Some music sounds like a throwback to the past. Other jams sound eerily apt for the moment. Then, there is the stuff that sounds straight-up from the future in some fashion. Bands that are ahead of their time, experimenting sonically in some wild fashion. Perhaps it is a new technique with technology that nobody else has attempted--think of the KLF and how they were doing sample-heavy mash-ups before, "Mash-Ups," were even a trend. The Pet Shop Boys feel like they were beamed straight from the future to our eardrums with the epic and space-age sound. OutKast took Hip-Hop places few could have expected with their blending of genres from space funk ("ATLiens,") to sounding a bit like a live rock band ("Aquemini,") to essentially transcending rap as a form and just doing damn good music that refused to fit into an exact genre ("Speakerboxx/The Love Below"). Hell, some people argue that Blondie and their New Wave tunes invented techno as we know it today--which, okay, but give Kraftwerk some credit!

Sometimes a group that is ahead of its time isn't recognized properly until later on (The Velvet Underground) or dismissed at first as a gimmick, even though, if you dig a little, you'll find a surprising amount of substance (Devo). It is wild to think you can sometimes play someone's music from decades ago, and you recognize that other groups have finally caught up with what the OGs were doing all those years earlier. Some bands are just ahead of the times, and I thank them all for being forward-thinking and supplying us with a glimpse of just where music could possibly be going before it even knows it wants to metaphorically get there.

Music Mondays: Flowers on the Grave for the Mashup--Or Not Yet?

We are here today to lay flowers upon the grave of the mashup. It existed quietly for decades, was insanely popular for a bit, then found itself mostly forgotten and ignored. Is it too early to truly declare the mashup, "Dead," however? Hell, what even truly is a mashup? Let's discuss.

A mashup is hard to define. You can make a song by sampling something else, but it isn't necessarily a mashup. They aren't illegal or truly covered by fair use as something new made from other items (like how some parody artwork combining two different IPs is protected). They aren't gone, exactly. Mashups still get made, but they are not nearly as big in popular culture. A mashup is just something you know when you hear it. It could be the epic hour-long mixes full of songs Girl Talk made, those ones that looked at the hottest songs in a year and condense them down by folks such as DJEarworm and Daniel Kim with his Danthology, or--Hell--how Glee would take two songs and combine them in a clever way the faux-teens sang. Danger Mouse with his combination of Jay-Z and the Beatles to make, "The Gray Album," is a cornerstone of the legacy of the Mash-Up. Hell, The KLF was making mash-ups in the 1980's by splicing tape together. As a new and quite large article by Casey Epstein-Gross for the AV Club covers, the mashup is a bit of a lost art.

"Feed the Animals," by Girl Talk cover art.

As someone who was a teenager in the 2000's, I am quite familiar with mashups. They were just a big thing. With the rise of various technology programs/websites/etc. it became easier for regular folks to fiddle with the tech to make a mash-up. I had fun using an old version of a program that still exists called ACID Pro to alter songs and make my own mashup of, "Ms. Jackson," by OutKast with, "I Just Don't Give a Fuck," by Eminem. I worked on it long enough that it was decent, and the .wav file for it is buried somewhere in my folks' computer back home. Mashups were ubiqutious with the early 2000s, and then by the time we hit 2020, they had mostly vanished as a big part of culture, at least.

As the above article discusses, a mix of lawsuits, computers identifying things as copyright violations that technically weren't, and how music just changed all impacted the mashup and made it fade away. We don't have as many songs everyone agrees are a hit to feature, we have many mini-hits, after all. Mashups still get created, but society at large cares very little about them now compared to how they were everywhere a good decade and change ago. Plus, there is an elephant in the room, AI.

DJ Earworm still makes mixes but gets less press than in years past.

AI makes, "Art," but it is soulless junk. This applies to music as well because you can have an AI mash-up songs for you, but it puts aside any artistry, skill, or, "Flavor," and is just cold and calculated slop. When the DJ isn't even mixing songs anymore or putting forth any effort into their mashup...they aren't a DJ, they're just a shoddy programmer telling a PC to make them a, "Good," mashup of hit songs. I want technology to make it easier for people to create things, and if an AI can assist you in your goal that is great, but when a person just prompts an AI to take some songs and mash them together however the computer sees fit...yeesh.

The mashup may not be truly dead and in need of flowers on its grave. People still make them and share them on a smaller-scale to avoid copyright/legal issues or such. There aren't the big-name mashup makers anymore, but the format persists. That said, if it becomes only something fiddled with by AI, then that will be a fate worse than death. Time will tell.