[Rumori] mash smarter not harder

Mon May 5 11:36:00 PDT 2008

--- On Mon, 5/5/08, Steev Hise <steev at detritus.net> wrote:
> But yeah, it was just another musical fad, although
> it's interesting  
> how the idea got incorporated into culture in various ways,
> often  
> mutating as it went.  i just saw on the Dilbert.com site
> how you can  
> "mashup" dilbert strips - but all that means for
> them, apparently, is  
> dropping in your own punchline instead of the original 

i read an article last year that by someone who thought that mashups on youtube "typically feature a person lip syncing to a popular song."  this wasn't some small-town newspaper or something; this was cnet:
http://www.news.com/YouTube-conundrum-for-vintage-acts/2100-1027_3-6208130.html?tag=nefd.lede

> What it got me thinking is that you're basically
> redefining what  
> mashup means.  To me the definition of "mashup",
> at least in the  
> beginning (if we mark the beginning as the start of the
> stylistic  
> craze, leaving out early proto-mashers like the ECC's
> Alpert/PE  
> track), was "playing 2 or more records (or, slightly
> later, songs)  
> that have the same tempo at the same time."  Later it
> expanded  
> slightly to include more complex manipulations, but it was
> always  
> about *concurrency* of disparate material.  Now you're
> expanding it  
> to include *concatenation* as well.  Is a mashup just any
> multi- 
> sourced sample-based composition with a consistent (and
> danceable?)  
> tempo (or that includes only gradual tempo shifts)? 
> I'd never  
> thought of the category as being so broad. 

well, yes and no.  three of my favorite artists that came up from the "bootleg" scene were osymyso, cassetteboy, and the glitch remix work of dsico (later poj masta and others).  of these, only dsico did anything that  fit the traditional A+B format, and osymyso only did a couple tracks that would really fit your description, yet they were all accepted by the scene and referred to as bootleg/mashup artists.  so there was confusion even at the beginning about what these terms meant.

that said, while i use the term "mashup" to give people an idea of what they're in for, i always try to emphasize that this is a "new style" or "different" so people don't think i'm just trying to copy freelance hellraiser. 

> Maybe we need a
> new term  
> for this new thing you're doing.  maybe
> "mashon?" but given the even  
> broader use of the term mashup like I mentioned above (in  
> advertising, film/video, and more), this is sort of all
> moot...

people have been throwing around the term "post-mashup" for years.  i kind of like it, though i'm not a big fan of the "post-" prefix, which can come off as a bit pretentious.  i've been having fun coming up with silly genre names like "bootstep" and "futuremixing" but haven't come up with anything better than post-mashup.  in the long run, posterity will decide what terms people use to discuss this stuff (if they discuss it at all).

---
download mash smarter not harder: http://badtaste4life.com/mp3/bt31/
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