Fan-made vid, or UGC (user generated content) cleverly editing Star Wars footage to an AC/DC classic
This is a common form of music vid which exists outside the music industry; there are lots of Bridget Jones equivalents, for example, cut to Westlife and the likes!
In film, hybridity is often a straightforwardly commercial decision: add comedy to romantic drama (rom-com) to help draw in a male aud.
Rap meets metal; the mashup was also racial, with rap's white aud small until this
In music, there is something of this - acts such as Madonna and Gaga are constantly striving to remain relevant to a young aud by taking on aspects of whatever is cutting edge in music at that time; Madonna in particular has an incredible track record of identifying musical trends and producers whilst still fairly underground and exploiting these to keep her own sound fresh. She has frequently used elements of whatever's big at the time in the gay club scene.
From the point that hiphop began emerging in the late 70s (broken big by Run DMC in the mid-80s, and really taken to stratospheric heights once white rappers emerged from Vanilla Ice to Eminem), the concept of genre in music has been problematic. Hiphop is a genre but one defined by its used of all other existing genres.
The concept of the mash-up emerged as a specific variant of this: literally blending two (or more) tracks which the mixer thinks work well together - perhaps the most famous example being Jay-Z's Black Album: remixed by Danger Mouse,weaving in Beatles tracks, to create The Grey Album.
A mashup or bootleg (also mesh, mash up, mash-up, blend and bastard pop/rock)
is a song or composition created by blending two or more pre-recorded
songs, usually by overlaying the vocal track of one song seamlessly over
the instrumental track of another. To the extent that such works are 'transformative' of original content, they may find protection from copyright claims under the "fair use" doctrine of copyright law [wiki]
The blurring of distinct categories is a hallmark of the postmodern aesthetic, and postmodernists argue that originality is impossible - all that can be done (as everything original already exists/has been thought of) is to mashup, remix existing ideas.
Nu-metal is an interesting example - bursting into the limelight in the mid-90s, and taking up the commercial status lost by grunge as it faded away following Cobain's death, it combined metal and hiphop. The pioneer bands (Korn, Deftones, Limp Bizkit) were controversial within the metal fanbase, the hybridity seeing many genre fans rejecting them as inauthentic; not actually metal.
Its time as a predominant musical force was quite brief ... but currently enjoying a resurgence as Limp Bizkit return. Moreover, Korn have just announced a dubstep-influenced album (with Skrillex): http://loudwire.com/korn-frontman-discusses-new-dubstep-album-current-state-of-rock/ The concept of metal is stretched to its limit here ... and this is hot on the heels of Metallica's album with Lou Reed (leading some to talk of Loutallica!)
But nu-metal is far from unique. Beatallica are a band who fuse Metallica-style singing and playing with Beatles tracks; Dread Zeppelin fuse reggae, Elvis and Led Zeppelin; Apocalyptica play orchestral, classical music renderings of thrash metal bands (I particularly enjoy their version of Slayer's South of Heaven; a brutal album whose power still comes through even when riffs are cello rather than guitar based!)
We've looked at the work of Andy Rehnfeldt (here's his website; YT channel; Facebook; MySpace; and a random hater!) Tape-swapping, using the post, was a key means of how emerging genres would evolve and grow back in the 80s; ventures such as this wouldn't have gotten anything like the near 27m views Rehfeldt's vids have enjoyed on YouTube by Nov 2011. His shtick is simple but delivered with real elan: using original video footage, re-present a track re-recorded in an anthitetical musical style - so we get Rebecca Black's Friday as death metal (big improvement there of course!) and some Katy Perry aural atrocity rendered listenable as death metal, but equally Slayer's crushingly heavy Angel of Death as Radio Disney, and Metallica's Enter Sandman as smooth jazz! Have a look and see if he's covered any bands within your genre...
Even Wonderful World gets the death metal treatment...
Actually mashing video, we have the VJ artist Kutiman, who's had 6.3m hits himself. He runs his own site as well as the YouTube channel; one example of his work follows below
Primal Scream in 1991 … 'Screamadelica joined the dots between types of music in a way that made bleary but beautiful sense.'
Primal Scream's Screamadelica is 20 this year, and celebrates with the inevitable doorstop reissue. It ought, perhaps, to be 21 – the album's moment was aptly sprawling and drawn out, from the release of the first single in February 1990 to its winning the inaugural Mercury prize more than two years later. Loaded heralded the high-tide of indie-dance – by the time Screamadelica emerged, that moment had gone. It's testimony to the record's strength that it is remembered as a blissful peak of genre-splicing despite turning up so late to its own party. What Screamadelica did – join the dots between types of music in a way that made bleary but beautiful sense – feels like a really 90s thing. Certainly the decade was full of music that was sold and praised on the basis that there's something inherently thrilling about genres swapping spit down at the indie disco. Beck finagled an entire career from it, Moby sold the notion to advertisers everywhere, the Prodigy played rave like it was rock, and rap-metal provided an appalling hangover to the whole polystylistic party. But of course genre-mixing was nothing new. What made rock music so strong during its 60s and 70s heyday wasn't its attitude so much as its adaptability – it constantly, omnivorously renewed itself, drawing from any genre it could. Blues, folk, country, soul, jazz, even classical – rock mated with them all. Purism has always been an exception, delighted borrowing the rule. But those were all musics that predated rock, and lent it authenticity. From the 80s onwards, it was having to accommodate the styles that succeeded it – such as disco, synth-pop, hip-hop and dance music. The results were awkward enough that successes got treated as breakthroughs. These days, genre-blending is again just part of the landscape. Eleven years ago, Radiohead's two-footed lunge into intelligent dance music on Kid A had critics gasping at their boldness. Now they cross-pollinate their sound with dubstep or Afrobeat and receive a polite nod or a muffled yawn. But that isn't to say critics want purity – far from it. From the xx through Janelle Monáe to Animal Collective, almost every acclaimed act works towards forging a sound by taking cues from a mass of other styles. Hybridisation is a basic tenet of art-pop, and purists lurk at the margins, vainly pointing out that perhaps you might want to listen to R&B rather than, say, the Dirty Projectors's etiolated, angular take on it. For many of these acts, the moment they perfect their blend is also the moment they break through to a wider critical – and sometimes public – consciousness. So music coverage often feels like a strange hothouse, full of exotic blooms that may never flower so fully again. Refine a sound and it risks becoming predictable; change it and you lose what makes you special. It's in this overheated context that two of my favourite records this year shine – both of them exercises in deliberate genre-shifts by performers who've been around a while. The artists could hardly be more different: Detroit garage punks the Dirtbombs, whose Party Store is a collection of classic techno covers, and Düsseldorf composer Hauschka, whose forthcoming Salon des Amateurs finds him trying to make a minimal dance record using contemporary classical piano music. Both these records could have been dreadful: both succeed wildly, as Hauschka and the Dirtbombs each seem enlivened by the challenges they've set themselves, adapting their sounds to the rhythms and structures of techno. On Party Store, rough-cut, spartan riffing turns out to be a great fit for the 25-year-old future dreamed up by Cybotron and Derrick May, bringing out the music's harsher qualities but preserving its drive. On Salon des Amateurs, meanwhile, Hauschka trades in his usual genteel, prepared piano miniatures for something surprisingly banging. Track titles such as "NoSleep", "TaxiTaxi" and "Girls" set the tone, and sharply plucked strings combine with double bass and piano fragments to create momentum. Like the Kompakt tracks that apparently inspired it, Hauschka's album is good at establishing hooks then subtly shifting their musical setting, letting peaks emerge from repetitive structures. Like the Dirtbombs – and like Screamadelica way back when, for that matter – the record is the sound of people using genre-mixing to stretch their identity, not just create it.
Moreover, Korn have just announced a dubstep-influenced album (with Skrillex): http://loudwire.com/korn-frontman-discusses-new-dubstep-album-current-state-of-rock/ The concept of metal is stretched to its limit here ... and this is hot on the heels of Metallica's album with Lou Reed (leading some to talk of Loutallica!)
Tape-swapping, using the post, was a key means of how emerging genres would evolve and grow back in the 80s; ventures such as this wouldn't have gotten anything like the near 27m views Rehfeldt's vids have enjoyed on YouTube by Nov 2011. His shtick is simple but delivered with real elan: using original video footage, re-present a track re-recorded in an anthitetical musical style - so we get Rebecca Black's Friday as death metal (big improvement there of course!) and some Katy Perry aural atrocity rendered listenable as death metal, but equally Slayer's crushingly heavy Angel of Death as Radio Disney, and Metallica's Enter Sandman as smooth jazz! Have a look and see if he's covered any bands within your genre...
