The Mashup is About to Begin
I am typically not one for “mashups”. That is, the word itself. It has that reek of too-clever technological fashion, of self-styled “geeks” living in their own cuddly world of retro computers and anime-on-demand, competing in the same popularity contests that true geeks were said to have once abhorred, long ago. To become one who mashes up, one must affect the sort of tiresome giddiness about every bit of new technology whether it’s useful or not, a booster not for good technology or bad but plain ol’ technology. Podcasting! Warchalking! Mosplogging! It’s new and I love it! That kind of thing. So when you read Boing Boing and ingest precious turns of phrase like “remixing the shantytown” and “salad bar hacking” and about “grokking” various things, just remember that it’s a fashion show, and that you’re buying the same handbags as everybody else, and that most of them will end up in the bottom of your closet.
So, no, I don’t like that “mashups”, not one bit.
Mashups themselves, though? I’m all for ‘em. I’ve drunk deeply of Jay-Z and the Beatles, Notorious B.I.G. and Frank Sinatra, The Flaming Lips and Public Enemy, Franz Ferdinand and David Byrne, and I say give me more. Enough mashups have crossed my purview for me to conclude that this one experiment worked out well. Mashups are hereby permitted to stay.
The concept is nothing new. As a young gangsta, I myself used to dream up remixes of my favourite rap songs, splicing Craig Mack into Lord Finesse and KRS-ONE while I walked home from school. But the technology always seemed out of reach. I never bought records, and could never afford a drum machine or a mixer; even if I could, what the hell would I do with it? That barrier to entry no longer exists. Really, mashups are just remixes, like they’ve always been, but this is a case where the technology has spurred a do-it-yourself renaissance of the form. With a few choice pieces of software and MP3s of one’s favourite band to provide sample fodder, anyone can be Pete Rock for a day.
These mashups nowadays sure are well done. I have to admit that I wasn’t a big fan of Kanye West’s “The College Dropout” when I first heard it. The beats never grabbed me, there was a lot of filler, and it was a bit clubby for my tastes. But the Lush Life makeover using samples from Beach Boys tunes completely turns the record on its head. Listen to the improved “The New Workout Plan” and note its metamorphosis into something upbeat and listenable. There’s almost nothing left of the original, and they’ve found a complete melodic match between the singing parts, the old beat, and the new beat. This remix could only work with the perfect sample, taken from “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”. The transformation is astonishing.
Another example, DJ Food’s Raiding the 20th Century, shows the medium at its most complex, reaching across genres to pull together a rapid-fire assault of every irritating song from the last fifteen years. I could only listen to this MP3 once but I’m glad I did.
The Kleptones are also doing great work, and have lots of their stuff available for download on their web site. Most mashups are free. That makes me feel good about stealing.
I wonder how long it will last, and whether the form will improve or die off. The process of de-expertization—that is, the process by which some skill previously thought as a dark art suddenly becomes easy for the masses by way of a technological innovation—has its growing pains. We all remember what early personal sites were like when the Web was catching on. And the highway is littered with the remains of “revolutionary” tech fads that limped off and died. In a sense, seeing technology applied to popular culture has either opened up new vistas for creativity, or reduced it to a triviality, depending on your perspective. I’ve often wondered how much creativity is enough, and whether our march towards everyone inhabiting little micro-ghettoes of culture is something we all want. Culture does not need to be everywhere, and not everything born from creativity is culture.
People can still express themselves with pen and paper just like they always have, so all this solemn and serious talk by techno-pundits about saving our cultural institutions with high tech rings a bit hollow. With our society now waging a technological arms race in the domain of our collective consciousness, we are going to smack into the pop-cultural plateau with diminishing rate of returns. Bootylicious will be remixed infinitely until the end of time, and it will continue teach us nothing. Every movie ever made will be available in 32×32 animated GIF format, and we still won’t know how to love another person. In short, I don’t think pop culture scales well. It will always exist in some form, but by removing the limitations from pop culture it ceases to be a form with a centre, a custom, and a lexicon. There will never be a Mashup Guild where secrets of the craft are passed down between generations, nor will child prodigies in the field of making Super Mario Brothers theme art out of Post-It notes be put in special schools to hone their craft.
But that’s okay, because it’s all in fun, and as long as we aren’t pretending otherwise, let the mashing-up begin. And it has.
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Administrative Note
Please take notice: I am drowning in comment spam so I have turned on registrations for a little while. I don’t know how this will work but I’m willing to try. Clearly the spammers have a good thing going, and I thought it would be prudent to try to capitalize by harvesting all of your email addresses and selling them to titty sites. Please pave my road to the good life by commenting within.
Update: registration isn’t working so good. I’ve turned comments off altogether. Hopefully they’ll be back once the storm passes.
Update 2: thanks to a tip from Tariq, the spam situation is under control. I had to upgrade Wordpress though, so there may be general site weirdness. If you see any, comment within.
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Cash Rules Everything Around Me
Mr No-Post is back!
I have to admit that I’ve just gone through one of those periods of intense self-reflection and analysis. In that time, no event or transaction, no matter how minute, has escaped scrutiny as it relates to my life and my destiny. Noting that my grocery store now sells fresh mussels sets off a thousand different threads in my head pertaining to my existence in a world saturated by choices, and how I choose to navigate that world. Each mussel, as I imagine it swimming in a white wine sauce, represents one single unit of luxury for which I should feel grateful. Imagine the cascade of human activity, some of it exploitative, some just plain capitalistic, used to bring those mussels to their resting place inside cellophane packaging amidst other seafood; and here you are buying them with money you made at some cushy job that allows you the time to have a weblog you never post to, and the energy to go cycling every morning, and imported beer in the evenings. And is that a pork tenderloin over there? Time to consider and give thanks for your ascent into the world of the post-college diet. You used to eat Kraft Dinner and now you’re in the big-time baby. Seafood. Pan-seared ahi tuna is a long way from $0.99 tins of Sunkist. Hey, that looks like horse meat over there….
It’s the real world, baby. Such as it is, I have found myself increasingly focused on money. Not on making it but on not spending it. I blame the news. It is tough work to ignore the possibility of a major energy crisis, a catastrophic Act of God, nuclear armageddon, a pandemic, mass hysteria and rioting, deep flooding, a stock market collapse, political instability, killer bees, mutant armies rising from the sewage system, missiles, subway bombings, severe climate change, mass herpes, the popping of the real estate bubble, or “excessive consumer spending”. How can you (me) be buying iPods and hardcover books when we are standing at the Gates of Hell and a distraught hunchback with crooked teeth (humanity) is in control of the latch! Save that money for the end times! You know, these sorts of thoughts, which are healthy in a way because it means I pack my lunch more often.
The thought once hit me that I’d been working for almost two years and had nothing to show for it. There were precious little savings, a few possessions, some fun times, but the lack of some kind of tangible progress got to me. My job paid well enough; where was it all going? I wasn’t extravagant; far from it. I sat on my balcony for a long time after work one summer day, when the house was empty, and thought about it. As far as I could tell I had three extraneous expenses: car, concert tickets, and booze. I got rid of the car, and my main concert buddy is still back in TO, so that leaves the booze and other assorted vices. Beer and liquor have always managed to squeeze themselves into even the most mundane social occasions, I noticed. At times it seems like university never ends and nobody wants it to. And it’s not like it’s expensive; even in that ol’ Eldorado we call Toronto, a Molson’s is a Molson’s, and the LCBO gives good miles to the gallon. And the other vices were cheap and plentiful. Some of the best ones were free. So there had to be something else draining my savings account.
Well, yes. There was that vacation Kevin and I took to one of Europe’s more expensive spots. Oh, and the Powerbook. And the new Fender and amp. And hey, wasn’t I still eating my lunches at nearby restaurants rather than packing a brown bag? Yes I most certainly was. So I sat at my expensive new computer and figured out a few things. The first was exactly how much I needed to spend in order to stay alive. That is, rent, food, and essential work-related costs. A second thing I figured out, in front of that fancy computer which felt like a good buy, was how much I was actually spending. It was a rough estimate, but it included all the aforementioned items, plus a few more. I looked at the result and it was disgusting, like people who dress up their dogs in people’s clothes, or cheap Hallowe’en candy that sticks to the wrapper. For a guy to spend that much without the aid of high-priced hookers and the finest Columbian blow is a great tragedy.
Money is a constant worry for nearly everyone. The poor scratch and scrimp to get by. The rich devise elaborate political machinery in order to protect their riches. The middle class, well, we piss it away on huge houses and electronics, and then wonder where it all goes. Most of us equate money with lifeblood or perhaps with a video-game energy meter. When it’s empty we die. Or, worse, we throw ourselves at the mercy of our parents. Sensing this possibility, I resolved to make a bit of an effort. I’m good with numbers, aren’t I? With a little push in the right direction I could get this brush fire under control, and resume a life of hookers and blow with a little left over at the end of the month for saving. So first thing was to begin recording my spending right down to the last penny. Anyone would look at me and say, what are you, crazy. How can you, in this zany and unpredictable world, keep track of every penny! is what they would say, and I agreed at first, but this activity of tracking expenses represents perhaps the widest gulf between perceived and actual difficulty I’ve ever seen. It is so dead, stupid easy. You get yourself a piece of software designed for this task (of which there are plenty) and then whenever you get home from your day of spending recklessly, you enter the amounts into the program of choice, categorize it, and then throw out the receipts. Don’t let the small stuff slip by, like coin laundry and change for the homeless guy. Get it all in there and be sure to categorize well.
After a modest amount of set-up time to get things the way you like it, the process takes thirty seconds a day. Honestly never more than that. Enter the shit in and close the window, and it’s done. If you need to, write the amounts down after you spend, or hoard receipts. It’s so easy that you should feel ashamed for not doing it. Patterns begin to coalesce after a few months, and you begin to notice an unconscious shift away from frivolous spending even if you’re not trying to induce one. You become more aware of watching money leave your hand, knowing you’ll have to record that amount later. There emerges a built-in premonition on every cent you spend. Paying attention to the flash of the digits on the cash register display is enough, somehow.
I’ve been doing this for a few months now. I don’t know what I’ll do with the results, and it is unclear whether I’m saving more than I was before, but I have a sense of control that I once lacked, and that’s a start. Do this and thank me later and we’ll celebrate with a $.79 no-name mineral water, some discount hookers, and the finest blow imported straight from Longeuil.
Required reading: Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, which succeeds in making you lament, regret, and agonize over your financial past, and how much is slipping through your fingers every single day on God knows what. This book does a great job of laying it bare for you, and provides an ingenious program filled with elaborate steps such as the one I’ve talked about above, in which the end result is an early retirement. One of the authors managed to do it at age thirty on a salary not much higher than ordinary. Some of the suggestions for money-saving are a bit hokey (”Sell your house and live in a motor home”), as is expected from the self-help field, but the advice is generally solid, and the program itself is conceptually simple without seeming burdensome to implement. You simply watch your purchases, evaluate the importance of each purchase at a later date, and try in various ways to get the “expenses” line below the “income” line, a crossover point representing financial independence. My favourite insight is the “true cost of your job” calculation. In order to maintain your 9-to-5, there are plenty of hidden costs, some of them financial and some lifestyle-related. Commuting, work attire, meals and snacks and their preparation, daily decompression, escape entertainment, vacations, and so on — all work-related expenses, in a way, costing both money and time. In fact these two figures (hours and expenses) can be quantified and divided into your perceived hourly wage to produce your real hourly wage: the amount you earn minus the amount you spend on your job, per hour. It also tells you how many hours are really devoted to your job. It may be that you’re working a 78-hour week at $5 an hour, but you’ll never know unless you calculate it, will you?
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