4 Reasons Why Mash-Ups are the Worst Thing Ever

A mash-up is what happens when two or more songs artlessly collide to make a new song that has none of the charm of the original. They kinda sound like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82D5Itvom4M Okay, they sound exactly like that. And now that I’ve subjected you to it, let me explain why it was the worst thing ever.   They’re like covers, but evil It’s easier for me to respect a dance remix that it is a mash-up. A dance remix is just a repurposing of a song for a club or dance setting, and there are changes made to song structure and instrumentation (lots of synths), but for it to be a good remix the initial song needs to remain recognizable. A mash-up might have an easy beat to dance to, but the original songs become jumbled, their initial mood, vibe, even message becomes lost when mashed together. To use an unnecessary analogy, an original song is like a human being, a unique snowflake with personal style, beliefs and motivations. A dance remix is that person on drugs; a little faster and more sporadic, but still motivated by the same things and essentially the same person. A mash up ends up more like two guys sharing one body, which leads to a series of unfunny sitcom scenarios. They can last a hundred hours and are usually formless My parents live in Alaska, and I go up every summer to visit and see old friends from school. Let me tell you something about Alaskans: they love mash-ups. They love them so much. And for me, that means I hear a lot of mash-ups while I’m being driven around. And a lot of them are multiple hours long, and that is not an exaggeration. I’ve literally spent an hour waiting for one to end. But beyond the ridiculous length, the songs are just formless blobs that aimlessly slosh around until they just stop. Here, check this out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bMM7tGV9MI Notice how it just wanders from mash to mash until it just sort of… ends. If you’re in the club, I guess that might be okay (again, I don’t know how clubs work, I assume the music is not that important) but casually listening from home, I like my songs to have a beginning, middle and end. Like every single one involves Daft Punk Every mash-up must be legally obligated to include Daft Punk at least once. Seriously, it’s getting ridiculous. I know Daft Punk are the best DJ duo ever, but you guys need to diversify. There are hundreds of other electronic musicians out there who would be proud to be mashed up, and I’m pretty sure everyone is tired of hearing every song mashed with Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. They’re getting super popular I know, it sounds really pretentious to argue that something popular has to be terrible because it’s “lowest common denominator”, but you know what? Sometimes popular things are just absolutely terrible. In fact, you know what’s popular and terrible? Glee. And Glee has started performing mash-ups: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0lbnkM1t8M And now that Glee’s done it with their horrible pop-choir robots, you know it’s going to be everywhere. “Cool” grandmothers and tween girls are going to demand mash-ups of their favorite songs. They’re going to rain in torrential. And it’s going to be awful.   So please, do your part and help prevent the mash-ocalypse: demand an end to mash-ups. Demand original music, demand dance remixes if you have to, demand anything else.