Sampling — the practice of using a recorded part or melody from one song in another — has been a force in popular music, especially in hip-hop beats, for decades, and it has always been controversial. Countless artists have waged lawsuits against others whose songs are partly made from theirs, and costs for clearing samples frequently get expensive. So perhaps it’s inviting trouble to create music made entirely from other people’s music. But that’s exactly what makers of song mashups do, and they do it without anyone’s permission but their own.
A mashup consists of instrumental or vocal tracks from two or more songs played over each other, combining to make one piece of music. At their simplest, they’re just the vocals of one song against the instrumental of another, but mashups often get complex, becoming unrecognizable from the songs they sample.
One artist who strikes a balance between recognizability of sample and creating something new is Gregg Gillis, who makes mashups under the name Girl Talk. During the 2000s, he released five mashup albums with similar labor-intensive approaches: They have fluid transitions between dozens of short, verse-and-chorus-long movements mashing two songs together, and they rack up countless sample attributions. This ethos found its peak with the last of these records, the 2010 masterpiece All Day. Made of samples of 372 different songs, All Day is technically split into twelve tracks, but only for navigation; it’s best listened to as one 71-minute piece of music.
All Day plays like a delicious fifty-course meal from an insane chef. You can’t believe that the dozens of combinations you’re hearing work, but they do, and they all sound inspired. Crunk duo Ying Yang Twins are right at home paired with the shock rock of White Zombie, and Pitbull and Depeche Mode sound like they’re having a blast mashing “Hotel Room Service” with “Just Can’t Get Enough.”
Meanwhile, Rihanna singing her hit “Rude Boy” over “Waiting Room” by Fugazi — a band ideologically opposed to having a hit — should sound way less cohesive, but the time they share presents a what-if scenario that successfully sells Rihanna as a punk singer. All Day, in its audacious pairings of some of history’s best and most moving pop and rock songs with inane rapping about butts, feels like a complete, if thoroughly misleading, picture of the entire history of pop music. But it’s also a technically marvelous headbanging party mix unlike any other.
Girl Talk is one of a kind: nobody has been able to match the painstaking and refined effort his style of mashup requires. But mashups in general have a prank-like effect — making you think you’re hearing one song before playing you another — and that quality carried over well to the artist who would prove significantly more influential on today’s mashup scene: one Neil Cicierega. Cicierega makes original music under the name Lemon Demon, but he’s made four mashup albums under his own name: Mouth Sounds (2014), Mouth Silence (2014), Mouth Moods (2017), and Mouth Dreams (2020). These present mashups as individual tracks, more consolidated ideas that explore two or more songs conjoined for just a few minutes.
“Fredhammer” from Mouth Dreams, his greatest prank, makes you think you’re about to hear Peter Gabriel’s classic “Sledgehammer” before Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst ruins the track by rapping “Nookie” over it. “Closerflies,” a few tracks later, takes the normally maudlin vocals of Owl City’s “Fireflies” and impossibly makes them menacing by pairing them with Nine Inch Nails’ kinky industrial banger “Closer.”
Mouth Silence’s “Furries” is a song only someone on the internet could’ve made: Over Hanson’s “MMMBop” instrumental, Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady” and “Purple Haze” vocals are altered to make him sing about how he wants to kiss a fox — and then he feels like he is a fox. “Wow Wow” from Mouth Moods is more remix than mashup, because it features only one preexisting song: Will Smith’s soundtrack theme “Wild Wild West,” the vocals of which are rearranged into hilarious nonsense. The instrumental is catchy, rubbery, synthy, and made by Cicierega himself.
Girl Talk’s mashup style is hard to reproduce, but Cicierega’s, much simpler, has inspired countless artists to make their own mashups, and to post them on YouTube, SoundCloud, and Bandcamp. It’s inspiring how many quality mashup artists are active, because it’s hard to create a great mashup. It takes genuine editing talent and skill to refine the instrumental and vocal audio stems into seamlessness, or to clip parts of songs so they fit better. Perhaps that’s why an artist who had years to refine her editing talent took extremely well to mashup-making.
Ellie Spectacular runs the YouTube channel DaThings. For fifteen years, she has been posting humorous edits of videos (commonly referred to as YouTube Poops, or YTPs), rearranging footage and audio from sources including films, television shows, advertisements, and more. In 2019, she started making full-length mashup albums.
Some of her mashups, inspired by her YTP work, take one song and rework its lyrics into absurdity. “All I Want To Beer” remixes Sheryl Crow’s “All I Wanna Do” into a drunkenly incoherent story about her buddy Billy, and Shrek, and drinking Bud Lite. “The Type 2 (Beetus Bit)” takes Wilford Brimley’s oft-memed diabetes PSA and makes him rap about the disease over the instrumental of the Black Eyed Peas’ unlistenable EDM hit “The Time (Dirty Bit).” It’s a wild ride that ends truly touchingly, when Spectacular closes the mashup with a variety of life-affirming statements, ending with Brimley edited to say “You are valid and perfect, all of you,” and achieving the impossible — making “The Time (Dirty Bit)” funny, moving, and worth listening to.
Most of her songs, however, fall into the Cicierega-style mold of song-length experiments. Her longest mashup, the six-minute “Micriosoft OneNote Song,” is one of her best — mashing the thrillingly cocky new wave instrumental of Duran Duran’s “Rio” with Bob Seger singing “Turn The Page,” a depressing look at touring. The lyrics give the instrumental some depth and pathos, but the instrumental gives the lyrics some hope, some determination in Seger’s voice. A unique strength of mashups is that revisionism they bring to music as a whole, and “Micriosoft OneNote Song” aims for more than just comedy: it reframes what the songs mean by pairing them.
More often than not, though, mashups aim for the low bar of tonal-whiplash comedy that comes from placing, say, Smash Mouth’s “All Star” over any more serious tune. “All Star” has been a favorite song of the scene since its repeated use in Mouth Sounds, and as overused as the joke is, it remains funny. Mashups often land harder the more shameless they get, and that trolling shamelessness commands respect.
Indeed, the uncommercial and comedic nature of mashups places them outside the main musical landscape. But by existing outside of pop music and blending it together, mashups provide a bird’s-eye-view that makes pop music accessible, yet intense and provocative, instead of watered-down like industry algorithms encourage.
In a time when pop music has become more reliant on lazy samples than ever — looking at you, “I’m Good (Blue)” and “First Class” — funneling music income to the private equity firms owning old catalogs, mashups are the ideological opposite of song-factory nostalgia-baiting. The talented artists who spend hours of effort mashing songs can’t make money from them because of copyright law; they can only be available for free. Mashups are done without hope of financial gain, without reverence, and without mercy. They strike a compelling balance between laughing at the idea of songs being immaculate works above having any jokes cracked at them, and between a genuine love for music and for the songs they combine.
Because, after all, what better way to express love for music than making something that slaps?
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