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Looks like David Bowie is cashing in on another trend, this time with "Mash Ups". If you haven't followed, mash-ups are a little interesting.

You take two or more separate pieces of music and overlay them, bringing out different parts of the tracks for something that is often distinct and more than the sum of its parts.

Mash-ups often get their holy-shit from using totally divergent sources, like the infamous "Grey Album" by Dj Danger Mouse that blended The Beatles "White Album" with Jay-Z's "Black Album" and sparked a pseudo net-protest dubbed "Grey Tuesday" that some acquaintances took part in. This is probably the work that threw mash-ups into the mainstream, and if you're curious about their possibilities I'd highly recommend you check it out.

This obviously infringes upon the artists copyrights like nobody's business, and you're not going to find "They Grey Album" in stores. But it's mostly been an underground club thing and it's only recently that the labels have been going after these guys left and right.

I'm kind of excited by the contest, just a little disappointed at the details:

"The contest requires entrants to blend any song from the singer's latest album Reality with any other Bowie song... ...The winning song will be released as an MP3 and its creator will win a car."

While I'm sure this will be very, very cool, it'd be that much cooler if Bowie indemnified the winning artist from being sued for infringement for their track, instead of having it be two Bowie tracks. Sure you'd prolly end up paying hundreds of thousands or more since it was "willful" but the publicity and even the quality of the track itself would be vastly increased.

Bowie gets a lot of flack for "capitalizing on trends", as evidenced in one of my favorite Bongwater tracks, "David Bowie Wants Ideas". It's very much the same type of flack Paul Simon got when he went to Africa, then came back and started incorporating African percussion sounds into all of his music and generating huge sales.

I admit to being a Bowie fan. No, not everything, but by and large and it's hard for me to get down on Bowie for that, just because he's so blunt about it (often calling himself a hybrid artist) and he does often bring his own ideas and flair to whatever new thing he's "incorporating".

And I've never really understood the idea that an artist should stay in what they've gotten known for. Artists have to evolve and incorporate new medias and ideas, like a shark has to keep swimming, or they're gone, or turn into something worse.

Either way, this is the sort of thing GarageBand will excel at, and what the hell else are you going to use it for?

Go nuts.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    May 05, 2004, at 06:14 PM