Track: Ellie Goulding ✕ Bon Iver - Lights ✕ Calgary
Video Samples Source: Chaalbaaz - Tera Beemaar Mera Dil
TL;DR version: I'm pretending to make music.
Somewhere in 2007-08, I got introduced to the idea of "internet mash-up artist" when a friend living in the US sent me a link to one of the first mash-up artists to go viral on the Internet, DJ ToToM. He mixed everything we were listening to then. It was fascinating to listen to something like Bob Dylan through the gaze of The Pixies. It's a different song, it's the same two songs but now it's different. It means something else now. Yeah, you can still be attached to each of the two (or more) songs that make the mashup as well. But it's just that they were made for each other also.
Since then, mashups have become a part of my library. Every now and then, I go looking for some new mashup artist who is utterly mindblowing when it comes to their matchmaking abilities. Others just make remixes, where they take an electronic sample beat and then speed up/slow down two tracks to match beat with that sample beat and play them on top of it. Or my nemesis: Bands who play two covers clearled stitched together one after the other.
Yes, I'm a mashup hipster. A mashup is all about sampling. If you're doing anything other than sampling then you're making music (it may even be amazing) but you're not making a mashup. A mashup is about an alternative reality's pop culture (as defined by all alternative reality references/imagined in popular culture).
2010 onwards, mashups became my way of celebrating New Year's Eve. Two of the biggest viral mashup hitmakers Dj Earworm and Daniel Kim would release their own year-end specials -- a mashup of the Billboard top 50 tracks of the ear -- titled United States of Pop and Pop Danthology. (In my head, it's like the mashup boxing match of the year. I'm sure neither of the two artists think that way.) Then I compare notes between the two mashups. Who made the smoothest, coolest mashup with songs put together in the least forced way possible. All of this is dependent on my own judgement of course, not some standardized guide or musical knowledge.
Every year, I've spent a couple of days on Audacity trying to see if I can mash songs together before realising I know shit about creating music and giving up. (I actually know nothing, I love listening to music though.) I tried reading hack guides and watching terrible videos about how to extract vocals from a song. (Hey, it never works for anything but the song they're demonstrating in the video.)
Somewhere in 2011, I discovered Girl Talk. He has taken ‘mashup artist’ to a whole new level. His mashup albums are a like a reflection in the entire genre that would be made of mashups and samples. In his discography, you'll find everything from banging dance numbers to just good soulful listens to sometimes even an exploration in noise. I'm not sure I'll ever go that deep into the art/craft of mashups. You must listen to at least one full Girl Talk album to know what I'm talking about.
Recently, I started following oneboredjeu on twitter, who I consider perhaps one of the finest mashup artists that lives on the Internet. I walked into her YouTube channel for the Gambino and Gorillaz mashups and stayed for everything else. Among her recent uploads, her Sia-Lorde and SZA-Ariana Grande mashups are to die for. Through her, I found Raheem D. His Lil Kim-Ariana Grande mashup is da bomb. That was when I also discovered there was a mashup artist scene and their own space on social media. Reading them discuss mashups, hearing their uploads, I learnt two key things which I used when I restarted my attempts at mashing songs on Audacity:
1. It's best if songs are on the same key and close to each other in BPM (beats per minute) count. Because I know shit about making music, I couldn't guess what key any given song was, and I could never count beats already.
2. You can't just cut vocals out of a song like it works with image editing (which I had learnt already). Mashup artists source their stems (different tracks that make a song: vocals, strings, percussion, or the complete instrumental backing track) from all over the Internet.
Finally, we're at how did I end up here. A few weeks ago, I was hanging out with a friend from Chile. Our usual scene was sitting on his couch, and having a YouTube party where we'd keep showing each other videos or music. That day, the moment I entered his house, he jumped up.
"Duude! Do you remember the Asereje song?" He was doing the step.
"The Tomatina girls or something?"
"Yes, yes! That one."
"We just called it the Ketchup song in India."
"That's not the point. Somebody finally figured out what the gibberish part of the song was!"
"There was a gibberish part?"
"The lines that come after Asereje are all gibberish!"
"They're not Spanish? They sound so much like Spanish!"
"Yes, they do but they're Spanish gibberish. If you understood Spanish, you'd know."
"So what's the meaning of Asereje?"
He then played a video from a Chilean news channel where they were reporting that a dude on Twitter had cracked the Asereje code. So in Spanish, the girls are singing the story of Diego. One night Diego is wrecked on alcohol and drugs and arrives at a club. The DJ starts playing a song, which happens to be Diego's favourite song. Y la baila (And he dances), y la goza (and he enjoys it) y la caaantaaa (and he siiings):
Aserejé, ja deje tejebe tude jebere
Sebiunouba majabi an de bugui an de buididipí
Sebiunouba majabi an de bugui an de buididipí
Sebiunouba majabi an de bugui an de buididipí
So Diego's favourite song iiiiis:
I said a hip hop, hippie to the hippie
The hip, hip a hop, and you don't stop, a rock it out
Bubba to the bang bang boogie, boobie to the boogie
To the rhythm of the boogie the beat
Rapper's Delight! Yes, that blew my mind and I can no longer take The Ketchup Song lightly. I have regrets for taking it lightly when I was in college and the song was a sensation.
So at this end of this long detour in my mashup story: I got home that night and tweeted, asking the Internet for a mashup of The Ketchup Song and Rapper's Delight. Someone from my twitter social life was equally mindblown and asked for the same. Something hit me then and I made this just ffs.
I'd successfully managed to get vocals only tracks of Rapper's Delight and The Ketchup Song, and an instrumental version of The Ketchup Song to put together that short clip -- in my head, it was more of a proof of concept that I can mashup AND that the guy from Chile was right, Asereje IS Rapper's Delight.
Last Monday, I got bored one evening and also was itching to see if I could get even close to making a mashup. So as usual, my mashup attempt of 2017 was underway. I googled to see if somebody had compiled a song keys database and ta-da: I found Audio Keychain. While just clicking through their database to see if any song strikes me in particular that I wanted to try using in a mashup. I found Katy B's 5AM, which I really like. A reverse search told me that Blue Oyster Cult's hit The Reaper had the same key and almost the same BPM. There it was decided, for my first attempt, I was going to mash these two songs together.
I found the Katy B stems on some filesharing platform after some searching. A decent instrumental (backing track) version of The Reaper on YouTube was found much easily and downloaded. I worked for a couple of hours and made an almost 2-minute draft. It was working but I hit a creative block there onwards. So I exported the 1:48 clip to mp3 from Audacity and sent it to the friend who first introduced me to ToToM and went to sleep.
The next day at office, I played the mashup over and over again to see if still made sense. I made a colleague listen to it because I was confident that I had no distance and it would sound amazing to me. He said, "I haven't heard either of these songs but I like this song I'm hearing." That was hella encouraging. Although, I was sure that it was a fluke that I managed to make that one. If I try once again, I'll fail miserably.
On Wednesday, I opened Audio Keychain and decided to try again. After some hits and misses, I finally ended up with Billy Idol's Dancing With Myself (backing track) and David Guetta/Nicki Minaj/Bebe Rexha's Hey Mama (vocal track). After the first draft, there were lots of empty spaces for which I didn't find any vocals that fit. So I added the chorus from Charli XCX's Boom Clap, which doesn't really fit as well as the first two songs with each other. But it was all sounding pleasant and I hadn't fucked up as miserably as the last seven years.
Thursday evening, I didn't even think twice. I got home, logged onto Audio Keychain and started looking for tracks to mashup. A lot of random and terrible experiments later, Ellie Goulding's Lights and Bon Iver's Calgary seemed like they had promise together. Unfortunately, just like the bad Charli XCX stem from the previous mashup, I found a below-par vocals only track for Lights. I didn't actually care because all I wanted to see was if I could make a decent mashup again. I really, really liked how the two tracks came together. Hence, this decision of publishing the mashup. I would've published on Thursday night itself but I think I was too happy about how these two tracks worked together. I felt this track needed a video. And in a vision due to a fuckton of sleeplessness, Sridevi and my favourite song from Chaalbaaz came to mind - Tera Beemaar Mera Dil. So then I downloaded the best available YouTube video for that song and started to work on it.
After quite a few drafts, a low-end machine, where every render takes 2 hours and the only way to see the video is to render it because otherwise everything starts malfunctioning due to the load, here's the final mashup video for a mashup track.
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