Mix & Mash-Up

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The New York Sun

Ever since the pioneering Lollapalooza lineups of the early 1990s – Ice T with Jane’s Addiction, Butthole Surfers, and Nine Inch Nails in 1991; Ice Cube with Red Hot Chili Peppers and Pearl Jam in 1992 – summer festivals have been an occasion for musical cross-pollination and the smashing of genre boundaries. But AmsterJam, a one-day show coming to Randall’s Island on August 20, takes things a step further by promising actual collaboration between performers.


AmsterJam is being curated and hosted by former Parliament/Funkadelic bassist Bootsy Collins – a perfect avatar for the fusionist impulse that motivates the event. The main stage pairings include: Snoop Dogg and Red Hot Chili Peppers, Wyclef Jean with Garbage and 311, and Fat Joe with reggaeton star Hector El Bambino. A second stage will play host to other assorted musical pioneers and genre crashers: Grandmaster Flash, Gogol Bordello, Fishbone, Antibalas, the Giraffes, and Yerba Buena.


But more than a celebration of adventurous musicianship, the concert is a celebration of the peculiar form of fan-art known as mash-ups. Mashups emerged in the last four years as a natural extension of deejaying, as beat-matching and fading one song into another evolved into melding them together. At its most basic, the practice involves playing the vocal track of one tune over the instrumental track of another, but inventive fans have developed far more elaborate ways to interweave two or more songs together.


As the popularity of mash-ups has grown – fueled by rampant file-sharing and the availability of cheap home-studio software – the practice has charted a course toward the mainstream. “The Gray Album,” DJ Danger Mouse’s ingenious 2004 album which blended the vocals from Jay-Z’s “Black Album” with beats derived from the Beatles “White Album,” was an Internet sensation – and a blatant infringement of copyright. Although the album was never formally released due to threatened litigation, it registered millions of downloads, thus demonstrating the mainstream appeal of such projects.


Other efforts have fared better. When Beck heard a DJ Reset mash-up that seamlessly combined his song “Debra” with a Neptunes beat and Jay-Z verse, he liked it so much he had it officially released through his label, Interscope. “Frontin’ on Debra,” the mash-up, is available for purchase today on iTunes.


Seeing so much of his work used in mash-ups, Jay-Z decided to try his own hand at it with last year’s album “Collision Course,” a live collaboration with multi-platinum rock-rappers Linkin Park. It approaches the material with the eye of a mash-up DJ, placing Jay-Z vocals over Linkin Park music and vice versa. But the actual involvement of the artists opens up new possibilities as well: On some songs, members of Linkin Park deliver Jay-Z’s lyrics for him; on others, Jay-Z adapts his flow to accommodate the Linkin Park beats that run beneath. It’s a level of control the mashup DJs can only dream about.


AmsterJam is the most ambitious mash-up-inspired undertaking to date, but there’s some question whether it salutes mash-up culture or bastardizes it. Among early practitioners, the goal was to create the strangest bedfellows possible. Thus, some of the earliest and most popular mash-ups combined songs by the Strokes and Christina Aguilera, the Stooges and Salt-N-Pepa, Nirvana and Destiny’s Child, Missy Elliot and Metallica, and Eminem and Hall and Oates. The more unlikely the pairing the better.


AmsterJam fails to meet this standard. The funk-infused punk of the Red Hot Chili Peppers is actually pretty well-suited to Snoop Dogg’s GFunk sound. In fact, the two appeared together for an uninspired performance of “Scar Tissue” at the 1999 Billboard Music Awards.


The others scheduled match-ups are just as practical. Former Fugee Wyclef Jean, who will be playing with both Garbage and rap-rock pioneers 311, is so versatile that he’s hard to pin to a single style anyway. During his recent performance at the Lincoln Center Festival, he rapped in English, Spanish, French, and Japanese, and covered songs by Elvis, Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, and Sam Cooke. You might say mash-ups are his native form.


Coupling Fat Joe and Hector El Bambino is so obvious that it almost can’t be called a mash-up at all. Fat Joe is hip-hop’s most famous Nuyurican and the organizer behind next month’s Libertad Music Festival, a showcase of reggaeton and Latin hiphop at which Hector will perform. It’s a fair bet their joint set will serve double duty.


But even if AmsterJam fails satisfy mash-up purists, it should make for a fascinating day of music for the rest of us. And hard-liners always have one option of recourse available to them: Whatever desired combinations they don’t hear at Randall’s Island they can always mash up for themselves.


At Randall’s Island on August 20 (800-288-7710).


The New York Sun

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