Finding Meaning Beyond Nostalgia in a Twenty-Year-Old Summer Mashup Mixape
You can download a copy of this mixtape using the link on the bottom right of the player above.
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It was hot. Sweltering, really, in the tiny cubicle where I worked in our crumbling Harlem brownstone. Asako and I had nicknamed my workspace The Spider Hole in homage to the ignominious slit from which Saddam Hussein was extricated and executed in December 2003. Now here I was, eighteen months later, in my own Spider Hole with nothing to complain about except the heat, making my first mashup mixtape with a turntable, a computer, a keyboard, and a pile of records and hard drives.
Working in the recording studio is a sculptural process of trial end error. I listen, and find a path to follow. The spacial quality of one thing combined with the groove of another, dusted with a melodic idea from a third thing I heard yesterday in my head. Usually all of the basic elements are my own ideas and musical fragments, but in this case I wanted to take other people’s music as raw materials and create something different from my own previous work. I had recently finished several intense months of work as music supervisor on Season 3 of The Wire, which involved corralling a massive amount of contemporary Hip-hop, as well as dozens of other tracks in genres from Classical to Doo-wop to whatever genre you call The Pogues. So taking disparate musical ideas and combining them was a normal thing to do, but in this case I wanted to create a standalone piece of music that wasn’t part of a TV show.
Recent popular music technology developments had made it easier and more accessible to change the pitch and tempo of a song independently. Combined with new DJ tools and cheap Digital Audio Workstations, these trends had given birth to a burgeoning style of “mashup” mixes which combined multiple previously incompatible pop songs into a single track. I thought I’d try my hand. I put an acapella mix of Zion y Lennox’s Yo Voy over the instrumental section of In The Future by David Byrne, and the two things fit together almost perfectly. One track was in the relative minor key of the other, and the tempos were a fortuitous match. It worked. I pressed on, eventually combining pieces and fragments of twenty-four different tracks.
The final mix, which I called “Clash Up and Burn,” used all of these wildly disparate pieces of music:
- Dr Alimantado – Poison Flour
- David Byrne – In The Future
- Zion y Lennox (f. Daddy Yankee) – Yo Voy
- The Clash – Armagideon Time
- Ini Kamoze – World A Music
- Mashonda – Welcome To Harlem
- Damien Marley – Welcome To Jamrock
- Leslie Winer – Flove
- Erika Badu – On & On
- Faye Wong – No Staying
- Jay Z – Dirt Off Your Shoulder
- Brian Eno – Qu’ran
- Massive Attack – Napoli Trip
- Wong Kar Wai – Cause I’m Cool (First Killing)
- Mad Professor – Bumper Bali
- Angelique Kijdo – Summertime
- Gwen Stefani – Hollaback Girl
- Miles Davis – Summertime
- The Clash – The Magnificent Dance
- Usher – Burn
- MIA – Bucky Done Gone
- MIA – Galang
- Robert Fripp – 1988
In 2014 my friend Tom McDermott, the New Orleans pianist, played me his “Bookerized” version of I Want To Hold Your Hand. It was a Beatles song arranged for solo piano as if played by James Booker. Tom, who I’m pretty sure had no awareness of the idea of a “mashup,” had nevertheless created one. When you listen to one of Tom’s Bookerized Beatles songs, you are learning in real time exactly what Booker did – because of course you already know the song. This is the point of a mashup: re-contextualizing a familiar idea to underscore previously unseen cultural connections, or to approach unfamiliar music through a different lens. It’s also funny.
Often, the reason we prefer one kind of music over others is less about musical value and more about cultural allegiance. I’m a Punk. You’re a Jazz Bro. If you love Robert Fripp because of his insane craft and clever noodling, you might dismiss Reggaeton as mindless repetition. But maybe all of these genres have commonalities that can help us see the value in work we might have missed. One of the things I loved about The Wire was that it created a shared space for Baltimore gangsters and white NPR fans. We were approached several times by “Urban” record labels who wanted to release a Wire soundtrack that was a pure Hip-hop album. We declined those offers, because it was crucial that the soundtrack album represent all of the different genres of the show. All the pieces matter. The generous open minds at Nonesuch Records finally gave us carte blanche, and we released an album that included everything. More than once I received feedback from people who said things like “I never really liked Hip-hop before, but I love that song The Life, The Hood, The Streets.” Once again, combining disparate fragments of culture creates something new that can bridge a divide.
… maybe all of these genres have commonalities that can help us see the value in work we might have missed…
I have difficulty these days interpreting the passage of time. Living though the Covid lockdowns seems to have destroyed everyone’s innate connection to the rhythms of life we previously took for granted. Clash Up & Burn does not feel twenty years old to me, but it is, and it is a product of a specific historical moment. On March 22nd, 2005 MIA released Arular. In April, Pope John Paul II died and Benedict XVI was chosen by conclave. Charles and Camilla were married. On July 7th, fifty-two people were killed in London by suicide bombs. Usher’s Burn and Zion & Lennox’ Yo Voy had come out in 2004, but they were still heard constantly in my neighborhood’s public spaces. People were also playing Mashona’s Welcome to Harlem, a mashup of Ziggy Marley and Ini Kamoze. Mashups of mashups of mashups.
I finished Clash Up & Burn in mid-August 2005 and posted it to my music blog The Ten Thousand Things. It was the first time I used my new DJ name: The Earl of Edgecombe, which was a nod to my place as an Englishman living on Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem, but also the name of an heirloom tomato variety. A lot of people downloaded the mix, listened to it, danced to it, reposted it, and made new musical connections because of it. And then, on August 29th, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans. But that’s a whole other story.
