Thursday, September 02, 2004

Mash Up

Spent some time this morning looking for some "Mash Up" tracks. Mash-ups have been around for awhile, and are composites of songs, layered together. The best of them create something completely new from the mix/splice/mash. The first mash I remember hearing found Gary Numan under Adina Howard lyrics, sung by the girlgroup Sugarbabes. It all worked, much to the chagrin--except no one was smiling (except the listeners)--of the artists in the layers.
Our friend the copyright. Oh my. Well, I will not go into P2P, RIAA, and the whole ridiculous mess. I have been a Numan fan since the Tubeway Army days. I owned most of his records up to Warrior and have replaced them all with the CD versions, at retail.
I have read that Numan hates file sharing, bootlegs and all of that--which would also include this superb track. Well, I have read my share of Philip K Dick and William Burroughs, and seen Numan lyrics ripped and mashed from those pages. You connect the dots.
Originally I was going to put up some links, but due to the bootleg nature of these tracks--disposable art--they would be dead in a week. Look around, use the marvelous search engines before "e-commerce" destroys search engines by making the first 3 pages of hits links to retailers instead of information. There is a true perversion, the "meta-tag".
The Wild-West that is the internet is fast being fenced and taxed and squeezed until the life is wrung from it.
Oh wait...gotta download some songs from Wal-Mart <---just shoot me now

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