00:00Time for me to speak my truth. Song mashups are a legit music genre and they deserve way more
00:05respect than they get. The most basic definition of a song mashup is when you take the vocals of
00:10one song and you smash them together with the instrumentals of another song. A basic mashup
00:14would be Toxic Pony, the toxic lyrics, Britney Spears, with the instrumentals of Genuine's Pony.
00:19While the mashup era has come and gone, it has found a bit of a resurgence on TikTok. It rules.
00:31Let's go back to the early 2000s. YouTube is happening. Mashups are kind of bubbling up to
00:36the surface of mainstream. You might be sent one or someone might show you one and be like,
00:40have you heard this? And there was this kind of peak popularity of mashup music right around the
00:44time that I was undergrad in college and also a college DJ. An artist named Girl Talk changed my
00:49life forever. He was cranking out full-length albums of mashups. One reason people didn't like it is
00:54because they found this music obnoxious and unlistenable. That's fair. One Girl Talk song
00:58could have like a hundred samples, five seconds at a time. Back then, I had a friend whose older
01:02brother said he could not enjoy Girl Talk because it sounded like cheerleading mega mixes.
01:08Obviously, mashups were not the first kind of music that would repurpose another artist's music.
01:12That goes back to music sampling, one of the greatest innovations in music. One Swalice example is
01:17Hung Up by Badana, which samples ABBA. Gimme, gimme, gimme. Some say it's just a novelty,
01:22like, I don't know, mashing up Justin Bieber with Slipknot. And a real music lover might argue
01:26that mashups are bad because they just cherry-pick tiny parts of songs and they neglect the body of
01:31work, the full value of a song. Mashups kind of fell out of popularity, but it's coming back up with
01:36TikTok and, in my opinion, best iteration ever. Reason one, mashups were brain rot before that term
01:42existed. For a genre of music that is essentially made up of five to ten second snippets smashed
01:46together. What better platform for that music to flourish than TikTok where 15-second, 60-second
01:51videos reign? Reason number two, the humor that comes from an unexpected mashup works really well
01:57on TikTok. You will be caught off guard and have almost a euphoric feeling hearing something like
02:02this. I'm personally glad that mashups found their home on TikTok. They're some of the most creative
02:13and twisted minds. You get to do things like mashup Nickelback and Rihanna. Don't take it from me,
02:18I saw Girl Talk four times live. A very long time ago.
02:21I saw Girl Talk four times live. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago. A very long time ago.
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