Music video: FAROFF "Orinoco is in the Heart" (Enya / Dee-Lite mashup)

Continuing the trend of posting mashups from unlikely artist combinations (previously: Celine Dion / Radiohead; Justin Bieber / Slipknot), we have "Orinoco is in the Heart."

Enya doesn't get mashed up very often: I'm not sure if this is because it's technically difficult or because nobody cares enough about Enya to try. But I have a huge soft spot for Dee-Lite, so I'll blog pretty much anything anybody does with them. (I should look again for the mashup that got me interested in mashups to begin with: it was the instrumental from Dee-Lite's "Groove is in the Heart" combined with the vocals from Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun," and it was awesome, but I've never been able to find a video.)

Anyway.

Music video: Isosine "Psychosocial Baby" (Justin Bieber / Ludacris / Slipknot mashup)

This was put on YouTube in March, but I'm only finding out about it now.

I don't know that I like it exactly.

Frankly, I'm not sure what the hell I think of it, but -- it's definitely the acme of whatever the fuck it is.

It's also a fairly good example, I'm pretty sure, of a mashup being significantly better than either of the component tracks (Slipknot: "Psychosocial;" Justin Bieber feat. Ludacris: "Baby"), though more research is needed before I can say for sure. And the research would likely destroy my brain, so we will probably never know.



In case you were wondering -- and why wouldn't you be wondering? -- Slipknot's lead vocalist and lyricist Corey Taylor has heard the mashup, and approves of it.



I couldn't find any evidence on YouTube that Justin Bieber knows about the mashup, but one supposes even if he did, he probably isn't free to comment. If he says he likes it, that's bad for his squeaky-clean non-threatening boy image, and if he says he hates it, he risks the wrath of a thousand rabid Slipknot fans.

Poor Justin Bieber.

Music Video: Rappy "The Power of Creep" (Celine Dion / Radiohead mashup)

Last January was mashup month here at PATSP. I'm not necessarily planning to do that again, but I've found a couple interesting mashups floating around, so we'll do a couple, at least.

Both are extremely unlikely combinations that nevertheless manage to work. (As strange as Celine Dion and Radiohead together might be, the next mashup is even more extreme, so you have that to look forward to.)

Also notable about this one: this is one of the rare cases where the video significantly improves the experience of the song. (Be patient: it doesn't really get going until about 2 minutes in.)



 

BONUS LATE ADDITION:

Just 'cause I get sick of everybody complaining every four years about how unfair it is that Iowa gets to go first in the Presidential Caucus / Primary system when we're all a bunch of dumb conservative religious hicks with less sense than our livestock:



Relevant YouTube comment:

Iowa also was the home to the nation's first mosque. [On a technicality; read the link. -Mr. S.] Iowa consistently ranks in the top three in average SAT scores by state. [Very probably because the SATs are written and scored by Iowans, though. -Mr. S.] It's the birthplace of Norman Borlaug, the only person to be awarded both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Oh, and Capt. James Tiberius Kirk is from there. For the uninitiated: The computer invention reference is to John Vincent Atanasoff. Oh, and Ames, Iowa has its own strain of anthrax named after it! Booyah!

(-isefire; links added by mr_subjunctive)

What's especially irritating about this is that generally the comments I see like that are coming from liberals. There was a time when progressives didn't sneer at people just for being rural. I mean, some Iowans sure as hell are dumb conservative religious hicks with less sense than livestock, but you can actually find those people in Florida / New York / California / etc. too: it's not an Iowan thing, or even a midwestern thing. Deal with your own idiots, and leave our idiots alone.

Music Video: "Chiron Beta Prime" (Jonathan Coulton, w/ ASL interpretation from Stephen Torrence)

Is today the solstice? I know it's around now, at least.

So hi. How are y'all doing? I'm okay. Sorry if I worried anybody. I really wasn't having a nervous breakdown, whatever rumors you've heard. There are much longer, whinier, more personal, and somewhat abstract (in places) explanations for the abrupt hiatus, but it really does basically condense down to, I was burned out on blogging and wanted to have time to play Sims, which I never had time to do previously. I am now seeing signs that I'm burned out on Sims, or at least approaching burn-out, so regular blogging will probably be resuming at some point in the next couple weeks. It may take me a while to work back up to daily posting, though. Like, don't expect posts in the next couple days, is what I'm saying. Among other things.

This is a video I had previously scheduled for this week, because it's holidayey without being one of the standard Christmas songs. I pretty much hate all the usual Christmas music, since 2005 or so, because of having been forced to listen to it during a retail job (and then again in 2006, in a similar but different retail job), and basically never want to hear any of those songs again in my entire life and I'm not even exaggerating. But nobody writes light jazz versions of "Chiron Beta Prime" for supermarkets, or uses it to sell toilet paper -- at least not yet -- so I approve of it.

Also I would be remiss if I neglected to mention the one semi-exception to the Christmas music hatred, this mashup of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" with The Police's "Roxanne." (And even it's not something I'd want to listen to very often.) I'm not sure the video actually improves the experience of hearing the mashup, but embedding a video is the easiest way I have of sharing music, so:



The next post will happen when it happens.

Music Video: Overdub "Five Step" (Radiohead / Dave Brubeck)

Found this when I went looking for music in 5/4 time. (Why was I looking for music in 5/4 time, you might ask? I don't remember.) It had somehow never occurred to me that "Fifteen Steps" (the Radiohead contribution) might feel odd and jerky because it was in an unusual time signature, or that "Take Five" might be so named because of its unusual time signature (also 5/4).



But then, there are lots of things I haven't gotten around to wondering about yet. I'm a busy guy, with limited wondering capabilities.

As a bonus musical selection -- and I realize many of you will have seen this already -- Alanis Morissette's cover of the Black Eyed Peas' "My Humps" is still a thing of beauty, four and a half years later:

Music Video: Wax Audio "I'm in Love With Judas Priest" (Lady Gaga / Judas Priest)

I'm on the verge of taking back everything nice I ever said about Lady Gaga -- I loved "Bad Romance" (and still do, pretty much), and I don't hate "Telephone" (but I don't love it either), but all the singles since then¹ have been . . . well, I sort of feel like she's both trying too hard and like she's not trying hard enough. Like, she's working very hard to be shocking without actually doing anything, y'know, shocking. I mean, this is 2011: it's not enough anymore to go onstage, feign masturbation with a crucifix and call it a day: you have to put in some effort.²

Also. "Judas" particularly annoyed me, because it was not only too long by half,³ it was sort of deliberately harsh-sounding, and it's constructed almost identically to "Bad Romance."⁴ Plus there's the usual hodgepodge of religious references that don't add up to anything coherent, as last seen in "Alejandro" and "Born This Way," which, again, Madonna got there first.

She can't really be out of ideas already, can she?⁵



Anyway. So I was sort of surprised that I like this mash-up, because Judas Priest has most of these same problems, but it actually kind of works for me, because it smooths over the lurchiness of "Judas" and makes "Painkiller" (the Judas Priest song) a little bit poppier. Plus I think the whole "I'm in love with Judas (PRIEST!), Judas" bit is a clever bit of editing. Doesn't really make me like either original song any more than I did, and I'm not saying this is the pinnacle of artistic achievement in our time, but this mashup sort of takes the piss out of both songs, so I approve of the combination. If that makes any sense.

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¹ ("Alejandro," "Born This Way," "Judas," "The Edge of Glory")
² To the best of my knowledge, Gaga hasn't even done that much: Madonna did, not quite twenty years ago. I will grant Gaga some shock points for the meat dress she wore to the MTV Video Music Awards, but that was last September.
³ It sort of sounds to me like she took the bridges from five or six different songs and threw them all together without even trying to make them flow naturally into one another.
⁴ The "oooh oooh oooh I'm in love with Judas" is an awful lot like the "whoa-oh-oh-oh-ooooooh, oh-oh-oh-oh, oh, oh, caught in a bad romance;" the "Judah, Judah-ah-ah" at the beginning is more or less interchangeable with "Rah rah, ah-ah-ah, Rama, rama-ma, Gaga, oh-la-la." I don't mind some nonsense syllables in my pop music, but Gaga could branch out, try some other vowels.
The actual melody of the chorus isn't the same as with "Bad Romance," but they're similar enough that when I get one song stuck in my head now, it flows back and forth to the other one -- it's like "I'm just a holy fool / Oh baby, he's so cruel / But I'm still in love with Judas, baby / whoa-oh-oh-oh-ooooooh, oh-oh-oh-oh, oh, oh, caught in a bad romance," lather rinse repeat.
⁵ (Feel free to use the comments to tell me how you never liked her in the first place, 'cause I know some of you must be dying to.)

Music Video: Titus Jones "College is Crazy" (Britney Spears / Beyonce / Jay-Z / Gnarls Barkley / Asher Roth)

I'm a little bit troubled by how much I like this one.

Titus Jones (of "I Wanna Bulletproof Dancer" and "Good Girls Burn Miami") has done a whole album, Culture Shock (available for download at his website), and of the two Culture Shock songs for which there are videos so far, this is my favorite. It's also one of my four favorite tracks on the album overall (the other three being "Oops I Shot Jolene's Mom," "Pokestar," and "We Love Hustling Drugs"). I cannot figure out why I like it, though; Asher Roth, around whom the rest of the mix seems to be constructed, strikes me as being sort of aggressively and pointedly douchey, the sort of person I would go out of my way to avoid, particularly in the bridge. And yet.¹



It might be that I'm liking the way the other songs (esp. the Gnarls Barkley) comment on and partly undercut the Asher Roth. I don't know.

Titus Jones, by the way, will do mixes for hire.² Were I to win the lottery or something, I think one of the first things I would do would be to contact Mr. Jones and buy a 4-5 minute mashup of the following songs:

"Baby" (Justin Bieber)
"Baby Baby" (Amy Grant)
"Baby Baby Baby" (TLC)
"Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby" (R. Kelly)
"Say Baby" (David Garza)³

Might be one of those things that would turn out more clever than good,⁴ but if anybody could spin that mostly-shitty straw into gold, it'd be Titus Jones.

Anyway. When there's a video for "Oops I Shot Jolene's Mom," I'll post about that, too. That'll probably be a shorter post, though.

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¹ There's also the issue of the word "crazy" being repeated over and over. Mental illness advocates, and some people with mental illness, don't like this kind of thing. The word "crazy," they say, is used to stigmatize, ignore, and demean those with mental illnesses, and using it to mean "more extreme than anticipated" or "uncharacteristic" is somehow likewise demeaning to the mentally ill. I can sort of almost see the point, but I think the logic is flawed: I think watering down a slur by giving it additional meanings is the best possible way to take away the sting. Insisting that people not use the word because it upsets you only gives people more power and incentive to upset you by using it, particularly if the word has become essentially meaningless. (Like for example "fucking:" a "fucking good party" is basically the same as a "crazy good party," and in both cases, the only purpose the words "fucking" and "crazy" serve is to intensify the description and convey an attitude. They're not interchangeable in all situations, though: "You're crazy" is obviously not the same thing as "You're fucking.")
No doubt some could make counterarguments, but that's not even really the point: my point is that although some people would be upset by how many times "crazy" is used in the mashup, I'm not one of those people. I have cut certain words from my vocabulary because of arguments like the above ("lame," "retarded," "bitchy" -- though "totally bitchin' Camaro" is still acceptable), but I'm keeping "crazy." I'm not trying to be an asshole, but it's crazy fucking useful.
² Though they're pricey: the cheapest option is a mashup of three songs to make a new song under two minutes long, and that costs $50.
³ A song which is not on YouTube (except in a really crappy live version) but worth looking for -- I like the whole album Overdub, actually -- and which is primarily about how in order to get played on the radio, one has to write songs that "don't forget to say baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby." I heard the song on the radio about nine years ago, so obviously it worked.
⁴ I haven't even heard the R. Kelly song: I'm only using it because it was the only song title I could find with more than three "Baby"s. (Oh. Wait. Now I've heard it. Well, maybe Jones could do something with it anyway.)

Music Video: DJ Fox "Come See About Down" (Supremes / Jay Sean)

I really like the way these go together musically and thematically.

Less fond of the video, but if I were to put together a mix tape of mash-ups I like, this would probably be on it.

Not that people still make mix tapes. But you know what I mean.

Music Video: Mighty Mike "Heart-Shaped Desires" (Nirvana / Muse mashup)

I found this one too late to include it in the January mashup-fest, but I really like it. It'd been a long time since I'd heard "Heart-Shaped Box" in any context, and I wasn't familiar with Muse at all. Without all the loud, grinding guitars, "Heart-Shaped Box" turns out to be kind of pretty. Kind of.

Music Video: DJ Earworm "No More Gas" (multi-artist mashup)

I don't think I'll do this again, at least not to this degree: even if the "extra" posts aren't huge, and don't take that long to write, any time I spend working on extra stuff is time I'm not spending on the bigger, more complicated posts like the plant profiles. Which is the excuse I'm going to use for why I didn't get the Persea americana profile done this month. (UPDATE: It's done.) I'm not saying we're completely done with mashups, just that I think it was maybe a bad idea to try to write about so many of them in so short of a time. It was fun, but I'm glad I don't have to do any for a while.

Having said all that, "No More Gas" is a personal favorite, and we may as well go out with a bang. The songs which were put together to make it:

"4 Minutes" (Madonna, Justin Timberlake, & Timbaland)
"American Boy" (Estelle & Kanye West)
"Bleeding Love" (Leona Lewis)
"Closer" (Ne-Yo)
"Damaged" (Danity Kane)
"Dangerous" (Kardinal Offishal & Akon)
"Disturbia" (Rihanna)
"Gimme More" (Britney Spears)
"Low" (Flo Rida & T-Pain)
"Superstar" (Lupe Fiasco & Matthew Santos)
"When I Grow Up" (Pussycat Dolls)

Music Video: DJ Lobsterdust "DeceptiShot" (Le Tigre / Pat Benatar mashup)

I've tried really hard to get into Le Tigre, but I can't. It's just . . . unpleasant. The mashup here works for me, though it's possible that Pat Benatar is doing all the heavy lifting. It's at least an interesting take on "Hit Me With Your Best Shot."

Music Video: Partyben "This Tightrope's Made for Walkin'" (Janelle Monae / Nancy Sinatra)

This mashup probably wouldn't be getting consideration if I didn't love "Tightrope" so much. I mean, not that this mashup is poorly done, but it's not a complicated, four- or five-song composition like "No-One Takes Your Freedom" or "I Wanna Bulletproof Dancer" or something. But I'm willing to use whatever excuses I have to in order to listen to Janelle Monae.

Incidentally -- we tried going to Best Buy to get the Janelle Monae CD, and . . . okay, I know that our corporate overlords have decreed that we're all to re-buy all our music on MP3s now, and businesses are phasing out the stocking of actual CDs and stuff, so I can understand not having the CD physically in stock, but -- they didn't even know who she was, or have her anywhere in their computer. I'd thought she was, you know, kind of a big deal?

So on the off chance that you don't know who she is either, watch the "Tightrope" video. It's worth it for the dancing alone.

Music Video: Mighty Mike "Imagine a Jump" (John Lennon / Van Halen mashup)

My first reaction on hearing this one was to be mildly offended. I got over it, but it's a really odd emotion for a mashup to evoke.

Music Video: DJ Earworm "No-One Takes Your Freedom" (Aretha Franklin / George Michael / Scissor Sisters / Paul McCartney mashup)

This has been one of my favorite mashups for a very long time, almost since the day I was first aware of the existence of mashups. DJ Earworm has become someone who takes hundreds of tiny snippets of songs and fits them together into a brand-new song, but his earlier stuff was more like this, taking large chunks of songs and playing them over top of one another. I don't have strong feelings either way which is better, though I suspect the mosaic-mural approach he's doing now is more time-consuming. Either way, this is still an amazing job of finding a set of four songs that work well together musically and thematically, and turning them into something entirely new, and I've listened to it some uncountably huge number of times over the past three years or so.

Music Video: Norwegian Recycling "Singularity" (Travis / Iyaz / Kelly Clarkson / Oasis / Christina Aguilera / No Doubt)

I'm not positive the embedding is going to work here; the first couple times I tried it, the video didn't show up in preview. (Here is the link to YouTube, if it doesn't work.)

This one is unusual because 1) A lot of people have heard it already (the video has 280,000 views), and 2) It's pretty. "Pretty" isn't a quality one normally finds in mashups (I can think of a few others; "Building an Enigma" comes to mind [UPDATE: Sorry, the link to "Building an Enigma" was broken shortly after I posted this. It's Sarah McLachlan / Enigma, if you want to try to search for it.], as does DJ Earworm's 2008 United State of Pop, at least in places), and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's harder to do?

Anyway. I got very excited about Norwegian Recycling when I heard this, hunted all over the internet for more of his stuff,¹ downloaded a shit-ton of it, and then was quietly disappointed. It's not that the other stuff is bad -- it may yet grow on me, actually, and I like "Miracles" (which also probably counts as "pretty") well enough² -- but it all sounds very much the same, somehow. Maybe I just haven't listened to them enough yet. I don't know. In any case, this is easily my favorite of the songs he's done.

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¹ Why is it always "his?" Where are the female mashup artists? I know there have to be some out there somewhere. 1000 PATSP points to anybody who can point me to one. (PATSP points are not redeemable for cash, goods or services.)
² Actually, more people seem to like "Miracles" than "Singularity;" "Miracles" has over a million hits. I think "Singularity" is the better composition, though. Some of that is because I get all itchy whenever I hear the word "miracle" that many times in a non-mayonnaise context.

Music Video: DJ Lobsterdust "Knock Out Eileen" (LL Cool J / Dexys Midnight Runners mashup)

I'm not sure what to say about this one. It's another mashup that's maybe not so much good as it is surprising. But hey. Maybe you're in the mood for surprising?

Music Video: Titus Jones "Good Girls Burn Miami" (Sean Kingston / Cobra Starship / Shakira / Lady Gaga / LMFAO mashup)

Another thumpy/throbby club-type mix, like "I Wanna Bulletproof Dancer." I like "Dancer" better, but "Good Girls" has going for it that it's sort of made me okay with Sean Kingston, who I took an extreme and irrational dislike to when "Beautiful Girls" was on the radio all the time. (It was lunge-at-the-dashboard-if-the-first-two-notes-came-on-the-car-radio kind of dislike. I still feel that way about that song, but at least the disgust no longer bleeds over to Kingston's entire repertoire and makes me want to scratch out his eyes with potato peelers and stuff.¹) The Shakira helps.

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¹ I don't knoooooooow. I don't! I just hated the song the first time I heard it, and ever after. At least some of this has to do with feeling like it was trivializing depression, but that makes it sound like I had reasons, which I really don't think I did. Maybe some long-repressed childhood trauma involving a similar-sounding song. I don't know. For obvious reasons, I've never listened carefully to "Beautiful Girls" to see whether I could figure out the problem.

Music Video: 10000 Spoons "Precious Bleeding Love" (Depeche Mode / Leona Lewis mashup)

As I sort of hinted at last Saturday, I think a lot of the reason I find mashups interesting and worth listening to is that a good one can make me like a song I previously hated.¹ There's one mash-up out there that actually sort of makes me feel warmly about Journey. (You're not going to find it at PATSP, though, because anything with that kind of destructive potential needs to be tightly restricted. Obviously.)

I didn't necessarily hate Leona Lewis, but the song sounded kinda dumb to me the first time I heard it. And it didn't help that I misheard "keep bleeding" as "keep breathing," the first time, which was just confusing.² Put her in front of a Depeche Mode song I already really liked, though, and suddenly I like the lyrics just fine. So I'm forced to conclude that I'm mostly interested in the particular palette of instruments playing behind the singer, not what he or she is saying, even though I'd always thought I mostly cared about the words. Better to find this out sooner rather than later, I suppose.

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¹ Or at least that's the right-brain reason: the left-brain reason is that I am continually amazed that pop music is so interchangeable, that so many songs change chords at the same moments, that so many have the same structure, that it's all so homogeneous. Even songs that sound like they have weird chord progressions, like Nirvana's "Lithium" or Beyonce's "Single Ladies," seem to fit right in with everything else. Somehow, this manages to surprise me every time.
² I also heard "Baby, this time I'll be bulletproof," in La Roux's "Bulletproof," as "Maybe this time I'll be bulletproof," which changing that one consonant sound makes it a very different, and much more depressing, song. In my defense, I don't think she's enunciating very well.
I also always mishear Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer," though: I always hear "It doesn't make a difference if we make it or not" as "It doesn't make a difference if we're naked or not." That's the only reason I like the song at all, and it makes no sense unless you know how I'm interpreting that line.

Music Video: Titus Jones "I Wanna Bulletproof Dancer" (Taylor Swift / Whitney Houston / Robyn / La Roux mashup)

This one's a bit clubbier than the others I've posted so far, so it's less weird, more throbby/thumpy, and about a minute longer than it needed to be, but I like it anyway. Robyn is like ketchup: put enough in and anything becomes palatable. Even Taylor Swift.¹

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¹ (No, I am not suggesting that anyone eat Taylor Swift. Or Robyn, for that matter. You knew what I meant.)

Music Video: G3rst "Bloom to Me" (Koop / Nirvana mashup)

Can I claim this as being in honor of tomorrow's Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day? Probably too much of a stretch. Anyway. Nirvana's "In Bloom," reinterpreted through a Swedish jazz duo I'd never heard of, which somehow produces a swing version of Nirvana. The video doesn't change, but the photoshopped image of Kurt Cobain is amusing, so. Enjoy. (?)



I don't know why Nirvana gets mashed up so much. I figure it's got to be either especially easy (could all the individual tracks have been released to the public at some point?) or especially rewarding (whether they want to or not, everybody is familiar with Nirvana to some degree, so playing with their music might get you more attention).