Asshole vs. Douchebag

There's a disturbing new trend in music.

As if Ashlee Simpson, Good Charlotte, Maroon 5 et al weren't bad enough, there's something even more nefarious proliferating over the airwaves and the world wide interweb...the mash-up.

I guess it started with Dangermouse's "the Grey Album," an album that mixed music from Jay Z's "The Black Album" with music from The Beatles "The White Album." The result, which I thought was 90% unlistenable blasphemy and 10% clever novelty, was widely (and inexplicably) heralded by music mags and hipster blogs as brilliant and revolutionary, and for a period of 2003 (or was it 2004?) it was ubiquitous in the dives of the east village of NYC. The success of the Grey Album pushed Dangermouse, then an unknown fellow UGA grad, to fame and fortune and now he's become one of the Gorillaz. (With Damon Fucking Albarn!)

And, more to the point, it spawned a really annoying new genre of music, the mash-up. A mash-up is a song created on some DJ's mac using Garage Band, and is basically a mixture of two songs. The typical mash-up uses music from an 80s classic (the more ironic, the better) with lyrics from a current hipster anthem. Perfect example - there was one called "Somebody Told Me Sunglasses at Night" by The Killers vs. Corey Hart. (Surely you can figure out what that means.) Another example: Veruca Salt vs. Yaz - "Don't Seether."

Now I'm not trying to be a hater. But the result is just irritating drivel. Five minutes that ruin both songs, assuming either was any good in the first place.

Case in point -- today I was driving home from work and happened to turn on Indie 103.1, which I have made a point to avoid since destroying it in the comments of this recent Aquarium Drunkard post. As it so happens, they have A WHOLE FUCKING SHOW devoted to mash-ups. (I was so right about that horrible station. It's dead to me.) But it's not even full mash-ups...it's like 20 minute chunks (does the use of word "chunks" here bring to mind vomit? I hope so) of music consisting of about 30 seconds each of various mash-ups. It's a schizophrenic, unlistenable, thoroughly unpleasant way to exit the work week. During the three minutes that I was tuned in today, I heard Britney Spears mixed up with the Pixies' "Monkey Gone to Heaven."

Now that's enough to destroy your weekend.