I Love The 80's!

I apologize if it seems like that already I'm favoring the type of mashup which uses the vocals from a rap song and combines it with a pop or rock song, especially one from the 80's. It's just that many mashup DJ's like this trend also, and more often than not I dig this. No offense to the original rap producers who put the original song together, but if it's combined with an 80's classic, then rock on!

This tune I'm spotlighting today also falls under the trend, although it does it a little differently. The song is from DJ Lobsterdust and he uses the vocals to the Ludacris tune Stand Up and the beginning, first verse, and finale is set to the Scorpions hit Rock You Like A Hurricane, the second verse is Warrant's Cherry Pie, and the final verse is Winger's Seventeen. Simple, yet effective. It's cheesy fun.

A direct download to the song can be found here, and if you want all the songs from his 80's EP then go here.

I'll be back New Years Eve with another tune.

Give It To Me, Baby

As the few Christmas mashups I've heard have not been all that great, instead I'll post another tune where you have two songs combined and their lyrics match each other.

In this case the two songs almost have the same title. DJ Lenlow combined the song Give It To Me by the J. Geils Band with the song Give It To Me Baby by Rick James. Bitch! Sorry, I couldn't help myself.

Back in October on my other music page I posted the J. Geils Band song and wrote about it. It can be found here, although the download doesn't work anymore. By now we should all know about Rick James and how he was and is famous and infamous even now, a few years after he passed away. To me, the story of how he used to play with NEIL YOUNG is the best.

Anyway, the song, where both Peter Wolf and Rick sing over the J. Geils Band song, is pretty rad. The female vocals from the James song were taken out, thus making what Rick's singing less creepy and threatening than in the original, and with Wolf's vocals, it sounds like a touching song where they sing about their desire to "get with" their woman.

Before you ask, the mashup has no elements of the other popular song with the title, from Timbland and company. although that mashup would be rather interesting.

The song can be downloaded here; it is located in the middle of the page.

I'll be back in about a week's time to post a new mashup.

Support Single Moms... Go To Strip Clubs

It is uncommon for a mashup song to have lyrics or a theme from 2 or more songs that go along perfectly with each other. When it does happen, though, it is usually a great thing.

What may be the best one is a song I found from The Beat Worx. The song can be found on their page under the name "I'm In Love With All Strippers-T-Pain"; it's actually a mashup despite what its title may suggest.

Now, obviously the tune improves upon the original song I'm N Luv Wit A Stripper, by T-Pain… not that it takes a whole lot to improve upon the original! Besides the befuddling (to me) fascination that many people within certain segments of the population have with strippers
(to me, many strippers are just skanky guttertrash!), the song itself is boring and just not that good; so of course it became a huge hit last year. The mashup greatly improved things and made it way more than tolerable.

This was done by combining the tune with an earlier famous song about strippers. What I'm talking about here, of course, is Motley Crue's Girls Girls Girls. The mashup is a kick-ass beat with most of the lyrics from the T-Pain song and much of the music from the Crue song. It works beautifully, with the two songs working together perfectly, both in terms of lyrics/contents, and the music itself.

I'll be back Friday afternoon, kids.

I Love Disco And I Hear It's Making A Comeback

Here is the type of mashup that combines more than two songs into a whole; combining two songs into one is difficult enough, I imagine, but multiple songs must be quite the effort. Yet, if done right then it can be especially well-done.

The example I'm putting up now is a track from a guy known as RIAA. No, not the douchepilots known as the Recording Industry Association of America. Rather, it's a mashup artist known as Recording Industries Are Archaic (which I think is true sometimes), and he uses bits and samples of songs or recordings that are far stranger than any other mashup artist I know of. Maybe because of that, I think RIAA is more "miss" than "hit" for me, although if nothing else some songs I download from the site are put on my mashup CD's, even if it's at the very end of a CD, i.e. a song I usually don't listen to on the CD.

This song, though, known as I Love Disco And I Hear It's Making A Comeback, is a big hit with me. The artists used to put together this track were rather eclectic, though. Taken from the page where you can find the song:

Herbie Hancock "Bring Down The Birds,"
Petra Hayden (sic) "I Can See For Miles,"
Deee-Lite "Groove Is In The Heart,"
Vijay Benedict "I Am A Disco Dancer,"
media clips

I know, what a bizarre sounding mashup of different artists, but note that the Hancock song was sampled by Deee-Lite for their one hit wonder song.

Like with most RIAA songs I've heard there's some sloppiness involved, although here it doesn't really have an effect on how good the song turned out. It's a very catchy tune that is one of a kind and yet it's not so strange that you can only listen to it once in awhile. It's not really a "disco" song per se but has different elements of it, in case any of you are scared to download something that sounds like a Bee-Gees or Donna Summer ditty!

Again, the song, I Love Disco And I Hear It's Making A Comeback, can be downloaded here. Track 5 on that page is really good also, and even odder than The Cardigans' version of Iron Man.

I'll be back Monday afternoon with a new mashup, and one less exotic than this one.

Whoops!

In case you didn't notice, in my first post on this blog, where I talked about DJ's Adrian & The Mysterious D, none other than Adrian himself managed to find this very blog and left a comment. It read:

I'm not a transsexual! Although, admittedly, I'm quite androgynous! Hey, I AM a mashup! Anyway, thanks for the props ... glad you're enjoying "We Got The Soulja Boy." We wish you luck on your new blog!

While it looks like that he wasn't offended by my dopey error, I still feel bad for making the mistake. So, I will mention two CD's the duo put together that spotlighted the best mashups of the past two years.

First, the mashup CD known as Best of Bootie 2005. It contains 20 tracks, mixed together with no gaps between songs. Sure, you could always download a single track on the page, but you really should download the .zip file and burn all the songs in order on one CD. You can't go wrong with any of the tracks; put together, it's an awesome collection that spotlights some of the best mashups that year.

Then, there is the Best of Bootie 2006 CD. This has an opening 30 second bit and then 20 tracks, mixed together in the same format. I'd say that 2005 is slightly better, but it's still a great way of spotlighting some of the best mashups in 2006. The bonus tracks they have on the page are also worth downloading. The Easy Maneater is cheesy fun. I mean, it combines the Nelly Furtado song Maneater with the Phillip Bailey/Phil Collins song Easy Lover! I'm not ashamed to admit that I really dig both songs on their own, but the mashup of the two turned out to be pretty bad-ass, as odd as it may sound to some.

Anyway, download the CD's and those bonus songs. You won't be disappointed.

Thursday night, I will spotlight an individual song again, and this time it will be one of those efforts where multiple tracks are put together into a sonic whole.

Rapture Riders

In this upload, I will mention one of the few mashups that ended up later appearing on a legit album from one of the artists involved.

In this case it is a combination from one of the most respected and most popular mashup artists, Go Home Productions, who unfortunately is now retired from making that genre of music. He combined Riders on the Storm by The Doors and Rapture by Blondie for a song called, appropriately enough, Rapture Riders.

What happened was that Chris Stein, the guitarist from Blondie, heard the mashup and liked it so much that the arrangements between both bands were made to have it included on their greatest hits album Blondie Greatest Hits: Sound & Vision, which is quite the achievement. Hell, to tell you how popular GHP's song became, I once heard it during the day when I was walking through Pleasure Island at Walt Disney World in order to get from the Marketplace to the Westside area! There was even a music video made. So, you could say legitimately that this is the most popular mashup ever, at least in terms of numbers of people who have heard a particular tune.

Here is an upload of the song.

Go Home Productions-Rapture Riders (7.74 MB, 192Kbits/second)

http://www.zshare.net/audio/5403088415f774/

I'll be back on Monday night with a new mashup, but in a few hours I should post a new song on my other blog.

Welkshake

Finally, up now is the second song. It's one of the first mashups I ever downloaded (back in the middle of 2004) and I don't know if I'd say it's one of the best, but it is one of the most unique given the two artists that were combined.

Back in that era, the Kelis song Milkshake was quite over, and much to my consternation, as I thought it was a terrible song. Suddenly, on a messageboard I found a mashup of it done by a guy who I only found out a few days ago was a dude named Dizzy Bull, and he's not even a mashup artist.

What he did was take the vocals from the Kelis song and set it to a random tune from… Lawrence Welk? Yes, the artist who had on a TV show for years that your parents/grandparents watched and whose music is in essence the antithesis of hip-hop/rap. Anyway, the song is called, simply enough, Welkshake, and here's a direct download:

Dizzy Bull-Welkshake

http://home.pacbell.net/glrouth/welkshake.mp3

I'll be back on Wednesday night-this time it WILL be up at that time-with a new song.

The Introduction

Welcome everyone to the opening of this mashups blog, where I post tunes in the field known as mashups. The links that I have up, especially the Wiki one, do a great job of explaining the history of the genre and spotlights the best people in the field.

Me, I first found out about the genre way back in 2004, when the controversy over The Grey Album broke. In case you don't know nor remember, it was an album done by Danger Mouse where he combined The White Album with The Black Album; at the time it caused a huge shitstorm of controversy, but it got me interested in hearing the album and finding out more about the genre. Oddly enough, I thought The Grey Album wasn't all that great; you can find much better mashups out there, although Danger Mouse hasn't done badly after the controversy, what with Gnarls Barkley and all…

Anyway, I've downloaded more than 40 CD's worth of mashup tunes since then… and that's been on an off and on basis, and I still have many songs on my computer that I haven't burned to disc yet. So, as you can see I have a huge collection of tunes that I can put up; I'll try to do my best to pick out the ones that I think are the best.

I'll make things simple in this first post on here by posting a tune that comes from a duo that is one of the best mashup groups out there. They are DJ's Adrian & The Mysterious D; one of them happens to be a transsexual! I only mention that as an odd bit of trivia, but most of their tunes are top notch. The one I'm going to spotlight now combines what may be THE song of 2007 (at least in terms of being popular rather than judging by quality) with a popular tune from the 80's.

The 2007 I'm talking about is one that is still wildly popular, which is Soulja Boy's Crank That (Soulja Boy), a tune that you either love or hate, but combined with mashups the results usually prove to be a sucess. In this case, they combined the vocals from that tune with We Got The Beat, by The Go-Go's! It sounds odd, yes, but mashups are awesome in that they combine what seems like the least compatible tunes together and in the hands of people who know what they are doing, the results are amazing. In this case, they made a song that many people are probably tired of and they not only make it sound fresh, but it sounds f'ing great also.

The song, known as We Got The Soulja Boy, can be easily found in the download section of their website.

The next ditty I will spotlight will probably be the oddest combo of artists and songs you'll ever see put together, but you should like the results.