Encounterculture

Here's another cool thing about mashups, gleaned from the in-progress Frenchbloke & Son Superchunk set (thusfar not exactly the greatest thing ever committed to ones and ohs, but fuggit): mashups may be the first musical phenomenon that I've run across in real-life-time where the aesthetic being pushed calls the medium itself into question. The opening few minutes of this set, as has been the case with most mashup sets, is pretty much just a sonic collage of vocal snippets and tiny snatches of songs; unlike most mashup sets, this particular intro was engineered to sound as much like technology fucking up as songs skipped like the CD was scratched, bass kept cutting out in a most stressful fashion, and such. My timid panic on behalf of my consumer electronics is the kind of thing that leads me to declare this movement a runaway success, since asking if the worst possible thing that can happen in a medium can be art is essentially the precise question asked by the once-infamous "talentlessness" of the Sex Pistols. It also makes you want to slash the throats of the seven thousand people who inevitably come over and bother you with work while you're caught in the throes of figuring out if your CD player or your headphones are in the moment of death, which again only makes it a Win Win Win.