Mashup (music)

• 1. Introduction

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  A mashup takes two or more already-recorded songs and blends them into something new. It usually means stitching one track's vocals onto another track's instrumental groove, adjusting the tempo and key so the pieces line up. In 1967, singer Harry Nilsson released an album called Pandemonium Shadow Show. On it sat a track billed simply as a cover of the Beatles' "You Can't Do That." It wasn't a cover at all. Nilsson had strummed a single guitar chord and realized how many different Beatles songs fit over it. He built a track that wove his own vocal recreations of more than a dozen Beatles songs into that one recording. Some now call him the inventor of the mashup. Because a mashup recombines other people's recordings rather than simply copying them, it can be considered a transformative work. In the United States, that transformation can shield it from copyright claims under the fair use doctrine. Nilsson's studio experiment stayed a curiosity for decades. So how did overlaid vocals and a borrowed chord grow into a genre with its own scene? How did it end up on the charts, on tour stages, and in disputes over credit and payment?

• 2. Early Forerunners

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  Long before anyone used the word mashup, historians point to Buchanan and Goodman's 1956 single "The Flying Saucer" as one early example of the form. Marshall McLuhan's 1967 project The Medium Is the Massage and the John Benson Brooks Trio's 1968 album Avant Slant are cited among others. So are Grandmaster Flash's 1981 turntable piece "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel" and Paul McCartney's 1983 track "Tug of Peace." The list continues with the 1987 "Hip Hop Mix" of Climie Fisher's "Rise to the Occasion." Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers released their 1989 album Jive Bunny: The Album. Coldcut followed in 1995 with Journeys by DJ: 70 Minutes of Madness.

  Italian music project Club House released "Do It Again Medley with Billie Jean" in 1983. Despite the word medley in its title, it ranks among the earliest mashups ever put out commercially. The track combines "Do It Again," a 1973 top 10 hit in the US and Canada by Steely Dan, with Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean." Jackson's song had been a number one hit earlier that same year. The combination reached number 11 in the UK, and the top 10 in Belgium, Ireland and the Netherlands.

  The Tubes released their album Love Bomb in 1985, and its second side hid another early mashup. The track was called "Theme from a Wooly Place." One channel carried the tune "Wooly Bully," while the other played "Theme from A Summer Place" underneath it.

  John Zorn's 1990 album Naked City took Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman" and rebuilt it over a bass line borrowed from Roy Orbison's "Pretty Woman." None of these recordings called itself a mashup, and mainstream chart success for the technique was still years away.

• 3. The Bootleg Scene's Roots

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  In 1994, the experimental band Evolution Control Committee released what many consider the first modern mashup tracks, on a hand-made cassette album called Gunderphonic. Those "Whipped Cream Mixes" laid two different Public Enemy a cappella vocal tracks over instrumental beds built from Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. The songs first circulated on home-made cassettes in early 1994, and Eerie Materials later pressed them onto 7 inch vinyl in 1996. BBC Radio One DJ John Peel played the record in 1998, and Pickled Egg Records re-released the single in the UK the following year. That surge of UK airplay came just before the country's mashup scene took off in earnest.

  Neil Strauss wrote about this connection in The New York Times. As Strauss put it, "many musical observers trace the official beginnings of the British bootleg scene to The Evolution Control Committee, which in 1993 mixed a Public Enemy a cappella with music by Herb Alpert." The bootleg scene Strauss described was about to produce its first UK number one.

• 4. Mainstream Chart Success

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  Norman Cook topped the UK Singles Chart in 1990 with his act Beats International. The song, "Dub Be Good to Me," is described as the earliest mashup to break into the mainstream in a major way. It paired newly recorded vocals from the SOS Band's "Just Be Good to Me" with an instrumental drawn from the Clash's "The Guns of Brixton."

  Before the genre's 2000s boom even began, Germany's Fragma had already topped the UK charts and reached the top 10 across Australia and Europe. That song, "Toca's Miracle," fused their own "Toca Me" with Coco Star's 1996 track "I Need a Miracle." British DJ Vimto had first put that combination together in 1999.

  The mashup movement regained momentum in 2001, when Soulwax's Dewaele brothers released the 2 Many DJs album As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt. 2. The record combined 45 different tracks into a single continuous mix.

  That same year, Freelance Hellraiser released a remix of Christina Aguilera's "Genie in a Bottle" called "A Stroke of Genie-us." It paired Aguilera's vocals with the guitar track from "Hard to Explain" by New York band the Strokes. These hits proved a mashup could top the charts under someone else's name. A producer working under several aliases was about to test how far that idea could go.

• 5. Richard X And The Sugababes

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  English producer Richard X built a bootleg mashup in 2001 titled "We Don't Give a Damn About Our Friends." It combined Adina Howard's "Freak Like Me" with Tubeway Army's "Are Friends Electric," becoming an underground dance hit under his alias Girls on Top. Richard X could not get permission to use the original vocals commercially, so he asked English group Sugababes to re-record them. Released in April 2002 as "Freak Like Me," the track gave Sugababes their first number one on the UK charts. The hit also drew further recognition and mainstream acceptance for the mashup genre as a whole.

  Two further Richard X mashups also cracked the UK top 10. "Being Nobody" hit number 3, pairing pop group Liberty X with Chaka Khan and Rufus's "Ain't Nobody" layered over the Human League's "Being Boiled." "Finest Dreams" reached number 8. American singer Kelis performed the SOS Band's "The Finest" over an instrumental of the Human League's "The Things That Dreams Are Made Of." By 2002, mashing up someone else's biggest hit had become a fast route onto the singles chart. A pop star was about to bring that same trick onto a live awards-show stage.

• 6. Mashups On The Main Stage

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  Kylie Minogue performed a mash-up version of her hit "Can't Get You Out of My Head" at the 2002 Brit Awards. The ceremony was held on the 20th of February 2002. She combined it with New Order's "Blue Monday," under the title "Can't Get Blue Monday Out of My Head." It is described as one of the earliest times a major recording artist brought a mashup into a live show. It was ranked number 40 on The Guardian's 2011 list of 50 Key Events in the History of Dance Music. It later turned up as the B-side to "Love at First Sight" and again on Minogue's 2008 remix album Boombox.

  Madonna's 2006 Confessions Tour worked elements of the Trammps' "Disco Inferno" into a performance of her 2000 hit "Music." The blend helped the song fit the tour's disco theme. During her 2008 Sticky & Sweet Tour, she folded the instrumental of her newer single "4 Minutes" underneath her 1990 hit "Vogue." That pairing gave "Vogue" the same urban edge that defined her Hard Candy album. Not every mash-up moment aged as smoothly. One high-profile pairing that same decade would draw accusations of cashing in on the underground scene it borrowed from.

• 7. Commercial Crossover And Backlash

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  In August 2003, a remix combined Madonna's single "Hollywood" with her earlier song "Into the Groove." Missy Elliott joined on vocals for the result, titled "Into the Hollywood Groove." It was part of a promotional campaign for clothing retailer GAP, and it prompted criticism for exploiting the underground mash-up culture for commercial gain.

  San Francisco hosted Bootie's launch in 2003; no other regularly scheduled American club night had focused entirely on the bootleg mashup before it. By 2019, it hosted monthly parties in cities worldwide, including Los Angeles, Paris, Boston, Munich, and New York City. The party's slogan, "Music for the A.D.D. Generation," inspired the creation of "A.D.D," Israel's first mashup-dedicated party. Bootie's creators, known as A Plus D, have produced the Best of Bootie compilation series every December since 2005. Each yearly compilation reportedly draws enough downloads to burn through over 5,000 gigabytes of bandwidth.

  Despite Bootie's growth, mashups have mostly stayed underground, noticed by few outside exceptions such as DJ Cummerbund and Bill McClintock. Even so, artists' songs keep getting remixed by others who never asked permission first. Getting noticed has grown harder, caught between relative obscurity and a rise in automatic copyright detection through systems like Content ID. Cease and desist orders from original artists have added another obstacle to keeping mashups available online. Some producers found a workaround by building their mashups live instead of pressing them for sale.

• 8. From Turntables To Screens

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  DJs build live mashups by selectively mixing elements such as instruments, vocals, and drums pulled from multiple tracks during a performance. This works either with music already released in stem format or with tracks run through stem separation software. Rekordbox, Serato DJ, VirtualDJ, Djay, Traktor, and Engine DJ are among the DJ programs built with stem separation capability.

  DJ Hero arrived in 2009 as a rhythm video game from Activision, built with more than 90 pre-made mashups. Hitting the right notes on its turntable controller is how players rack up points. Harmonix followed in 2020 with Fuser, a game built around four instrument stems pulled from master recordings, letting players combine more than 100 songs. Fortnite added a mode called Fortnite Festival in December 2023. Its Jam Stage and Battle Royale modes let players combine more than 100 songs into new mashups. That hundred-song library gives Fortnite Festival room to keep growing, one new mashup at a time.