DJ Earworm's "United State of Pop 2009" on CNN.com ... and Bootie gets name-dropped!

Hopefully by now, you're already familiar with DJ Earworm's utterly epic United State of Pop 2009 (Blame It On The Pop), his year-end masterpiece that mashes together the top 25 songs of 2009 (as ranked by Billboard magazine) into one insanely brilliant, 4-1/2-minute pop creation. This is now Earworm's third year in a row doing this, and it's by far his best yet.

For one thing, he doesn't simply mash up unrelated bits and pieces of songs together into a big sonic stew. Instead he has taken individual words and phrases from the lyrics and has intricately crafted entirely new verses and choruses. In effect, he has created a NEW SONG, one that carries a message of hope and perseverance in tough times -- "No need to worry, just pick back up when you’re tumbling down, down, down (down, " It's uplifting and beautiful, and we'd be lying if we didn't say that we actually get a little choked up sometimes when we hear it!

Earworm recently posted a color-coded lyric sheet, so you can see just how cut up and manipulated his work really is. It's seriously Type-A!

The video he posted to YouTube went viral within a few days -- which probably explains the extensive FAQ in the "more info" section of the video's page -- and right now it's fast approaching 10 million views. He's been written up by major media outlets the world over, and two days ago, CNN.com ran a major interview with him.  

Check out the DJ Earworm interview here -- and notice that Adrian from Bootie gets name-dropped in the fourth paragraph, answering the "how did you get started" question! Thanks, Jordan! :-) We vividly remember meeting him for the first time at Bootie, back in April 2004 when we were just a monthly Wednesday at the tiny Cherry Bar in San Francisco. We became fast friends and introduced him to the wider world of mashup culture on the internet ... and the rest, as they say, is history!

Needless to say, we are incredibly proud of Earworm, and his newfound wider popularity is much deserved and long overdue! And yes, he'll be playing feature sets at Bootie SF and Bootie LA very soon!

"NirGaga" forced to be removed from Best of Bootie 2009 CD

Bootie just received its first "cease-and-desist" letter, for DJ Lobsterdust's "NirGaga" (Nirvana vs. Lady Gaga) track on the Best of Bootie 2009 CD:

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To Whom It May Concern:
EMI Entertainment World, Inc. ('EMI") is the owner and/or administrator of certain copyrighted content which is currently being reproduced, displayed, transmitted and distributed without authorization on www.bootiemashup.com (the "Site"), including, without limitation, a sample and download of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana (the "Copyrighted Work"). The unauthorized reproduction, display, transmission and distribution via the Internet of the Copyrighted Work without our express permission constitutes copyright infringement in violation of Title 17 U.S. Code, Section 106(a) of the Copyright Act of 1976, and other international copyright laws.
http://www.bootiemashup.com/bestofbootie2009/
This e-mail shall serve as EMI's good faith notice to you that you are to immediately remove the Copyrighted Work, “Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana as well as any other unauthorized EMI material. Once the Copyrighted Work, has been removed from the Site, please send us written confirmation of the same.
This notice is written without prejudice to the rights and remedies of EMI and its songwriters at law or at equity, all of which we hereby expressly reserve. Thank you.

Infringement Compliance Unit │ EMI Music Publishing
a: 75 Ninth Avenue │ 4th Floor │ New York, NY 10011
www.emimusicpub.com
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We find it interesting that while "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is probably one of the most mashed-up songs out there, it took someone using Kurt Cobain's vocals and lyrics rather than the iconic instrumentation to bring about a "Copyright Infringement Notice."

We have complied with the request and have since replaced the track with one of the bonus tracks, DJ Moule's "Hey, C La Vie," which just narrowly missed the original cut of the album.

This now means that the original version of the Best of Bootie 2009 CD is now a collector's item!

This also allowed us to add DJ Schmolli's "The Trooper Believer" (Iron Maiden vs. The Monkees) as an additional bonus track.

To read or post comments, click here.

Party & Bullshit (In The USA) on FuckAdvocacy.com

Hathbanger - Party & Bullshit (In The USA) (Notorious B.I.G. vs. Miley Cyrus

So many people get it wrong, that it's awesome when someone gets it right.

Below is a copy of a blog post from Cyle Gage at FuckAdvocacy.com, wherein he explains eloquently not just why mashups are awesome, but why Hathbanger's Bootie hit, Party & Bullshit (In The USA) is particularly awesome.

What’s Wrong, And How To Do It Right
by Cyle Cage

Listen to the motherfucking awesome song. Party & Bullshit (In the USA) (Notorious B.I.G. vs Miley Cyrus) For those fools who are unfamiliar, this is from Best of Bootie 2009, an annual album comprised entirely of amazing bootleg mashups. Why is it especially awesome? Because through their music, they transform culture. Really, they take normally earsplitting mainstream shit, smash it together like they do in the goddamn LHC, and transmute it into danceable, art-worthy brilliance.

But I’m singling out “Party & Bullshit (In the USA)” for a reason. The reason is simple and fairly obvious, but I want to explain it for those who don’t pick up on it immediately. This song is taking something that’s doing it wrong and making it right. I like to complain about what’s wrong, but some things deserve a break to be commended. Especially if it’s transformative. So what’s wrong? Miley Fucking Cyrus, that’s what. Honestly, I had never listened (or known that I was listening) to a Miley Cyrus song before this one, mostly because I figured she’d sound just like those other girls. I was wrong. She’s worse.

What I love about this mashup is the contrast, and it’s that satire which makes the music work so well. The song opens with big’s amazingly harsh, thick rap, which I love for its rough honesty. But there’s a nice, light dance beat (like most bootie songs). Talking about smoking blunts at 13 and getting shot at. Then from nowhere, some autotuned 12-year-old’s grating high-pitched voice slices the song up with some bullshit about a Jay-Z song? Putting your hands up? Butterflies? Moving your hips? Aren’t you illegal in most countries, little girl? Party in the USA? This is fucking bullshit, I can’t think of worse lyrics. (And I lived through Staind, Nickleback, and Evanescence.)

And then more of big’s fucking killer lyrics. You read this shit? Compared to modern music, this is Hemingway. NWA might as well be Longfellow, Thoreau, and Emerson. I’m not the biggest fan of rap in the world, but I have a lot of respect for a guy who can stick to a rhyming scheme like it’s nothing. (Yes, biggie rhymes “out” with itself, but Dylan Thomas did that too sometimes.) I have a great deal more respect for motherfuckers like Snoop and Ice-T who rhyme about killing people than anybody who writes a pop love ballad. Poetic conventions in such violent situations? Brilliant. Scare kids into thinking poetry is cool, it works.

The killer, and my favorite part of the song, is big’s swaying jive in the background of Miley’s chorus. Turn it up and listen to it. Party… and bullshit. Party… and bullshit. Fuck Miley Cyrus and her fucking voice. She is what’s wrong. But biggie, even though he’s fucking dead, is making it right.

Vindication?

We've gotta admit, we're starting to feel vindicated!

Seven years ago, everyone thought our little mashup hobby was just a silly underground fad. But in the past week, our little "hobby" has popped up on MTV, Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Huffington Post, CNN, and more.

Is the "Best of Bootie 2009" CD a harbinger of where music is going in the new decade?

As tireless torch-bearers of the mashup scene, 2009 was certainly an interesting year for us to watch, what with mashups popping up as a major plot point on the television show Glee, becoming every playable track on the DJ Hero videogame, CNN's Campbell Brown talking about "the mash-up" every night, etc.

Have mashups gone from buzzworthy to simply part of the cultural fabric yet? We'd like to think so. And it will become even moreso as time goes on -- the mashup will go from "guilty pleasure" to simply "pleasure". The "trend" element will be long gone, and hopefully what we'll be left with is just another style of remix for producers and music listeners to choose from.

The song that defines the decade ... is a mashup!

As we laze around on the first day of the new decade, nursing our hangovers from our epic Bootie New Years Eve party the night before, we find ourselves getting a little reflective. Looking back on not only the past year, but the past decade, we think about where we've been, where we are now, and how we got here. And in regards to Bootie, much of our trajectory can be traced back to one brilliant flashpoint of a mashup.

That mashup is called "A Stroke of Genius," and it was created in 2001 by a bootlegger who went by the name of Freelance Hellraiser. It was one of the first mashups we ever heard, and its importance was paid homage to last night as Bootie SF house band Smash-Up Derby covered it just before midnight, calling it "the mashup of the decade."

But we're not the only ones who have called out this landmark track. Bootie LA's DJ Paul V. said the same thing in his weekly "Mashup of the Week" blog on PopBytes.

But perhaps, most importantly, the UK's influential Guardian newspaper called "A Stroke of Genius" "the song that defines the decade." Although the article's viewpoint is obviously written from an extremely trendy UK perspective – "A Stroke of Genius" never got the kind of massive attention and radio airplay here in the States that it did in the U.K., and as a consequence, the bootleg scene in that country exploded and burnt itself out rather quickly – hence, the writer's erroneous comment that "the musical mashup has waned," which is not only patently not true, but from our experience is quite the opposite! Still, the writer is pretty insightful on many points, which you can read in its entirety here:

Photograph: Marco Dos Santos/Hector Mata/Rex Features/AFP/EPA

When Christina met the Strokes: the song that defines the decade

Looking back at the noughties, Dorian Lynskey examines how a bootleg song, A Stroke of Genius, that never got a legitimate release prefigured all the significant pop trends of the decade

by Dorian Lynskey
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 November 2009 21.45 GMT

When you're sifting through the ashes of a decade in pop, it's very tempting to search for the Important Statement, the song that best sums up The Way We Live Now. (Here's a drinking game for anyone reading end-of-the-00s round-ups: take a shot every time a record is tenuously related to 9/11.) But the most important records are often the ones that don't know they're important. They flare like Roman candles and burn out quickly and, in that brief window of incandescence, they vividly illuminate a moment in time. So the song that seems to tell me most about the decade just ending is not something off Kid A or Yankee Hotel Foxtrot but the Freelancer Hellraiser's A Stroke of Genius.

In the autumn of 2001 (wait, don't take that shot), a British producer called Roy Kerr, aka the Freelance Hellraiser, spliced together the music from the Strokes' Hard to Explain with the vocal from Christina Aguilera's Genie in a Bottle and named it A Stroke of Genius – even the title seemed magically serendipitous. In the 1980s and 90s, art-minded mashups by the likes of John Oswald and the Evolution Control Committee tended to highlight the smash-and-grab nature of combining well-known songs, producing satire and subversion from the mismatch. They brokered shotgun marriages; Kerr, however, was more of a benign matchmaker, showing two disparate artists how much they really had in common.

Fittingly, the record plays out like a seduction. In her original song, Aguilera is coquettish and controlled, keeping her sexuality on a tight leash until the right guy comes along, and the music reinforces her restraint by maintaining a slow simmer. "My body's saying let's go," she breathes. "But my heart is saying no." In Julian Casablancas's vocal on Hard to Explain there's another inner battle ("I say the right thing/ But act the wrong way") but, stripped of their singer's hesitancy, the band's itchy sexual energy becomes a "let's go" too strong to resist and Aguilera sounds like she's being swept towards a rendezvous that's both dangerous and delicious.

It's as if the Strokes had heard her line about "hormones racing at the speed of light" and written the music around it. Just before the chorus, her "oh-oh-oh"s swoon into the oncoming embrace of the rising guitars, and the pampered pop princess hooks up with the scruffy hipster from the wrong side of the tracks (never mind that Casablancas was definitely born on the right side: this is pop fantasy, not reality). The combination is so perfect that both original songs, excellent in their own right, suddenly sound incomplete, like two works in progress needing someone to complete them: two genies in different bottles waiting to be rubbed the right way. "Come, come, come and let me out."

As three minutes and 36 seconds of endlessly listenable and danceable pop brilliance, A Stroke of Genius is up there with OutKast's Hey Ya! in the 00s hall of fame (in fact, the two songs can be mixed together with ease) but it also says a lot about what has happened to pop over the past decade. First, there's the means of distribution. A few hundred one-sided seven-inches of Stroke of Genius were independently released, which was enough to provoke a cease-and-desist order from RCA, home to both Aguilera and the Strokes, but almost everyone who heard and acquired the song did so online. Ten years earlier, Kerr's creation would have been a samizdat artefact and you'd probably only have heard it via a tape of a tape of a tape, like copyright-flaunting records by Steinski or the JAMMs, but in 2001 it coincided with an explosion in MP3 blogs and filesharing software. Kerr got a career out of A Stroke of Genius, becoming Paul McCartney's tour DJ and remixer for, among others, Aguilera, but after that initial vinyl run, it didn't directly earn him a penny. Its gratis nature was part of its charm. It showed that illegal downloading could be an outlet for creativity and not just a means of taking for free music that already existed.

Mark Vidier, who made some of the very best mashups under the name Go Home Productions, told the New Yorker: "You don't need a distributor, because your distribution is the internet. You don't need a record label, because it's your bedroom, and you don't need a recording studio, because that's your computer. You do it all yourself." During the early 00s mashup boom, fostered by Eddy Temple-Morris's Xfm show The Remix and blogs such as Boomselection, there were thousands of examples, some so bad they made you doubt the creator's sense of hearing, others so good they were stepping stones to fruitful legitimate careers.

Danger Mouse made his name with 2004's Jay-Z/Beatles soundclash The Grey Album before working with Gorillaz, Gnarls Barkley and Beck. Minor Belgian indie band Soulwax earned themselves a second act via the thrilling mashups they played as their alter ego, 2 Many DJs. And there were dozens of wondrous one-offs. All you needed was one good idea, some freely available software and a basic understanding of how music works and 15 minutes of mashup glory could be yours.

A Stroke of Genius also spoke to a new breed of listener: the voracious hyper-consumer, with MP3s of every song ever recorded at his or her fingertips, whose loyalty is not to a particular scene or style but to the endless quest for the next hit of pleasure, from whatever source. Twenty years ago, there was always one friend who, when asked what he was into, said "a little bit of everything". Now, at least if you're under 35, that friend is you and everyone you know. If the old model of music consumption was the categorised-by-genre record collection, the new one is the iPod shuffle, where old and new, hip and cheesy, rub along just fine.

A Stroke of Genius came out when many indie fans still believed that manufactured pop stank of evil and death, and the idea of Christina Aguilera and the Strokes in perfect harmony was strange. These days there's no contradiction between loving Arcade Fire and loving Britney. In fact, mainstream hits like the Sugababes' About You Now and Kelly Clarkson's Since U Be Gone, blurred the margins,in the style of A Stroke of Genius, by marrying an R&B-trained vocal to a Strokesian metronomic chug.

While Sean Rowley's Guilty Pleasures night was busy rescuing Wings and ELO from years of ignominy, a similar process was taking place on a massive scale with new releases. "Do I like this?" superseded "Should I like this?" as the music fan's automatic response to new music. As Jody Rosen wrote in Slate, "Maybe the real guilty pleasure in [the 00s] is gluttony." This utopia of open-minded listening comes at a price – the old tribal tug-of-war that once made the top 40 a gripping battleground of rival factions with occasional guerrilla forays from leftfield; the sense that liking a certain kind of music was crucial to your cultural identity – but most of us now inhabit it, for good or ill.

The third crucial thing that A Stroke of Genius and its ilk did was to forge musical alliances so blatantly. Mashup pioneer John Oswald insisted 20 years ago that "the plundering has to be blatant." His foe was copyright, which he considered a cage around creativity, but the mashup producers applied the same principle to apolitical ends. As pop's history becomes more overwhelming (and, thanks to the internet and reunion tours, ever-present), originality gets harder with every passing year. So instead of copying old bands and hoping the audience either doesn't know or doesn't care who's being imitated, the mashup producers played games with pop's back catalogue, often with more wit and ingenuity: you could argue that Richard X's mashup of Gary Numan and Adina Howard, released legitimately as the Sugababes' 2002 hit Freak Like Me, made more imaginative use of early 80s synth-pop than anything on La Roux's album.

The form reached its manic apex, or perhaps reductio ad absurdum, with the work of Pennsylvanian DJ Gregg Gillis, aka Girl Talk, whose albums suggest the view from a bullet-train window as it speeds past countless pop landmarks. Much of the listener's pleasure derives from recognising the source material and seeing pop as a fluid continuum, teeming with potential connections. Even though the musical mashup has waned, the YouTube equivalent thrives (just ask Oliver Hirschbiegel, the director of Downfall), and recently produced its own answer to Girl Talk with Rev Diva Schematic's The Golden Age of Video, which cuts up famous movie dialogue to form a rhyming lyric.

But, as with Girl Talk, it's both a remarkable achievement and a dead end. Both projects rely on a set of shared reference points, largely from an era when certain cultural artefacts were unifyingly successful, and consume them like a reckless oil driller bleeding a well dry. Pop, and pop culture, can only eat itself for so long before all you're left with is bones.

Little, if any, of this was going through Roy Kerr's head when he thought it would be a cool idea to match up two songs he liked but, in retrospect, they are all threads waiting to be unpicked. A Stroke of Genius is an accidental prophecy, a signpost pointing in an unforeseen direction. It came out during the first throes of enormous changes in the way music is heard and consumed, not all of them entirely welcome or boding well for the future, which makes it all the sweeter that the song is about velocity, ambivalence and the potential danger of surrendering to pleasure. Looking back, it feels like digital music was the genie in the bottle and, now that it's been let out, nobody can put it back in.