A long time ago in a galaxy far far away…no actually this blog, we featured Kirby Ferguson’s Everything Is A Remix series. And now, for 2021 he’s back with a totally new upgraded remix!
Love the parts about Kanye and Led Zep (and I sort of knew that Sister Nancy’s Bam Bam used a riddim, but not where that riddim came from!). And I knew Odetta was a MVP but this is more proof of that. She rocked. literally and figuratively.
The only kvetch I have is the Internet part – featuring medley masher Girl Talk as the breakout star of mashups is a little like featuring Gene Pitney as an original rock and roll star and ignoring Little Richard?
He arrived years after the first mashup boom (in fact really came to note for me after originator Luke Dsico started putting out his mixes on Spasticated).
This video skips past 2001’s Freelance Hellraiser‘s Stroke of Genie-us which recently had a 20 year anniversary at the end of August. Phil n’ Dog‘s 2005 Doctor Pressure Mylo vs MSM, Loo & Placido‘s (or was it TDPz?) Horny as a Dandy from 2004 or 2005, GHP’s Rapture Riders which got an official remix release in 2005. Soulwax’s radio shows going back to 1999 (their Vol 2 beat Avalanches by years and I’d argue was actually more influential on early mashup/bootleg culture if not exactly in the charts).
Boomselection – ditto I think 99/00. And Richard X‘s 2002 #1 hit with mashup up Freak Like Me vs Gary Numan – when Gregg’s first album wasn’t even released by then I suspect?
So to feature Gregg Gillis as the only ‘internet mashup’ artist is a very strange and very wrong Pitchfork-only and US-biased reading of mashup/remix history. (interestingly I bemoaned that very same bias in when I posted the first series 9 years ago! Nothing changes) And GT is not as influential as all those long op-ed broadsheet articles would suggest, not to those actively in the culture at the time (like myself). It was too little, too late…
A bit like Neil Cicierega it did bring in a lot of copycats and new blood – I think White Panda is the bastard child of that ‘stand on a table in a white coat’ attention-seeking. Not necessarily a good thing, for the community or our history, but hey weirdly we don’t get to write our history, outsiders do and they frequently get it wrong.
(video via Lewis Wake)
EDIT: Those who watched Social Dilemma would be interested in this….
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