ipodshuffle

Gettin Wiggly with it

Thus far it's been relatively easy for our family to resist the Evil Cultural Force that is The Wiggles.  We played a few songs on sampler CD's when The Lad was littler, and he might have watched the show a few times on premium cable at his Grands', but he's remained largely unmoved by the group's relentlessly upbeat wackiness.

That said, a couple of cultural artifacts have come this way which deserve note.  One is a bizarre and in some ways incredible Wiggly cover of "Walk on the Wild Side," which according to the Copy, Right? blog is taken from a (promo-only?) covers collection put together by an Australian DJ.

The Wiggles: Walk On The Wild Side mp3

And in order to avoid having to do two separate posts about the Wiggles, I might as well also put up a pretty hilarious mash-up which made the rounds a bit last fall - of the W's with "Blitzkrieg Bop" and "I Wanna Be Sedated."

King Rocker: 2 Ramones Wiggle in a Room mp3

Slicker than your average mash-up

To way oversimplify: most mash-ups are constructed on the premise of 'let's try vocal a over instrumental b' -  not that there's anything wrong with that...  But Lenlow's 'Sweet Child o Ravi' takes the deconstruction a lot further.  He grabs drum part a, and plays with riffs b, c, and d to see how they overlap, with a generous amount of pitch-fucking, to create something original and cool.  The song is vibing along trippily, when 90 seconds in, the "Sweet Child of Mine" riff shows up - the effect is like running into your rowdy friend from high school ten years later at chillout bar, and marveling at how much he's changed.  Or, you know, something like that...

Lenlow - Sweet Child o Ravi

More Lenlow blogging and mashing

Mash-ups ate my brain

So that Strokes song came up on the iPod, the original one that was used for "A Stroke of Genius" - and when what's-his-name started singing I was actually a little surprised, since subconsciously I was waiting for Xtina to come in with "I feel like I've been locked up tight for a century..." - and I realized there's actually a lot of songs I know better in the mash-up version than the original...

Kind of like, as a kid growing up pretty far from New York, and not seeing a lot of TV or movies - there was a lot about pop culture that I really only knew about because of the parody versions in MAD Magazine...

Tune in for all the mashy goodness

Mark Vidler, aka the ever-vital Mash-up source Go Home Productions, is doing a live interview / discussion / spin this Thursday 1/27 on WNYC's Brian Lehrer show between 10am- Noon.  If for some reason you're not in New York you can listen live here.

update: The GHP homepage has a downloadable mp3 of the show posted.

Which came first, the mash-up or the Missy Elliott record?

So Missy Elliott's 'Lick Shots,' came up on the player, and it took me a couple of minutes to realize that it was the Two Many DJ's mash-up version, and not the original. The track featured the distinctive guitar riff from Elastica's 'Connection' (which is actually the distinctive guitar riff of Wire's "Three Girl Rhumba" - my iPod was good enough to point that out by playing the original track a few songs later). But anyway, it didn't sound particularly out of context to hear the riff underpinning 'Lick Shots' - because Missy's best tracks might as well be mash-ups already. You never know what she and producer Timbaland might throw into the mix, from the genius bhangra sample in 'Get Your Freak On' to the demented Double Dutch interlude in "Gossip Folks."