The emergence and historical decay of the mash up

Abstract

The mash up has descended dramatically from the once dizzy heights of prominence it enjoyed at the turn of the 21st century. For a form that once attracted a great deal of attention from a fair number of music journalists and academics alike, its comparative lack of visibility is striking. However, I argue here that this decay is not due its decreasing relevance, but its absorption into an increasingly expansive, pervasive musical tradition, the tradition of sample‐based music. The purpose of this article is to show how the historical assessment of mash up remains too tightly tethered to an intellectual tradition that posits its rebellious subversion of the dominant regime of intellectual property in the music industry as its primary fount of meaning. Therefore, as the intensity surrounding issues of intellectual property and piracy have faded, so has the seeming relevance this musical form. However, I suggest that if we look at this form from within its tradition of musical practice, we can understand its particular band of relevance and influence on contemporary sample‐based music more completely.

The role of mashup music in creating Web 2.0’s democratic promise

“…In 2009, The Guardian's Dorian Lynskey named a mashup by producer Freelance Hellraiser as 'the song that defines the [past] decade', in an article which presented the song as an 'accidental prophecy' for the digitalization of music that followed (2009). In the 2010s, mashups lost some of their cultural pertinence (Fairchild, 2017;Winkie, 2018). 1 But mashups tend to feature even now in short lists of 'digital culture'; for example, the blurb of Vincent Miller's Understanding Digital Culture (2020) refers to mashups along with microblogging, online gaming and cybersex.…”