Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Bangers and Mash-ups

A year ago I read about DJ Dangermouse's mashup project, The Grey Album, which was involved in an internet protest against EMI and in a larger sense, a protest for creativity. For those of you who missed it - "mashups" are like remixes of songs that mix genres to new, unexpected and vital effect. The Grey Album took the acapella tracks from Jay-Z's Black Album and chopped and cut backing tracks from songs from the Beatles White Album together to create an album that can be listened to on it's own merit, as well as for the novelty of it's punning title. The copyright owners of the Beatles material, EMI, attempted to ban the Grey Album and were met with derision and a 24 hour period were mutiple internet sites were offering downloads of the work. In more popular press, Jay-Z released a "legal" album of mashups with alt-rock band Linkin Park, which spawned the hit Numb/Encore.

I went a bit nuts on Limewire over the last couple of weeks trying to find more mashups, as I'm both a sucker for novelty and a sucker for finding new permutations on old material. Some choice cuts I found were -

Beyonce and Led Zeppelin - Crazy in love
Christina Aguilera and the Strokes - Genie in a bottle
Destiny's child and the Cardigans - Say my name
Usher and Axel F - Yeah (it's the cheesiest, catchiest damn thing I've heard in ages)

Anyway. This got me all excited to make my own - so for your consideration, click here to download the Studiogypsy remixes of Destiny's child - Say my name (In the end piano remix) and Survivor (Used to love u remix feat Jay-Z and Mos Def).

Feel free to leave comments - and for those of you who've wanted to but were put off by not holding a blogger account - it's free, you don't have to actually blog yourself and having that extra security helps keep spam off my boards.

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