Last year, I searched for “mashup” on google and got zip. Now you search and you get tons. Gotta love that. Recently stumbled onto DJ Earworm and I’ve got to admit, we’re at a brand new stage of artistic development.

I’ve long believed that we will develop a new level of language once we can communicate using emotions. First we used crude hand signals, body language and grunts - the rudiments which has gone from cuneiform and kanji and evolved into txtmsgs and L33tsP34K. Thirty+ years ago, we starting samples and scratching. Earlier, I pointed out about WiiJaying.

Sound, especially popular music, convey an emotional role, almost engram of emotion that when you hear the music, the emotions come with it. Mashups allow those emotions to overdub on each other, weaving a complex structure.

First we had a songwriter who took an original folk tune and made a new song of it. For instance how Hank Williams music pulls from early tavern & bluegrass music.

Then we had remakes of those songs. All through the 40s, 50s, and 60s, it was incredibly popular to make entire albums with no original songs.

Then we had an incredible rise of original music - very rarely now we have remakes, but soon people began to sample other works, evoking the original emotions.

Now we’re to the point where full musical structure are woven full cloth of other emotional impacts - so emotionally, there’s an entire landscape of musical combinations.

Now, if we could only learn to communicate in these complex glyphs to convey complex emotional information without having spend time to remix them all. For example, I come home from work late one night and the wife glyphs at me that “she’s angry, why I didn’t call, and she had her heart set on our anniversary tonite being special” and I glyph back that “two employees are in the hospital, the car has a flat and I’m sorry” all at once.

One of the necessary steps of communication is the ability to get the “other” to empathize with you, and more importantly make it seem you’re empathizing with them - removing the “other” in the communication. If we were able to just give our emotions to others and receive - without the definitions of “otherness” (male-female, black-white, my body space-your body space, etc), we could immediately know where the other stands and recognize a common path.

DJ Earworm’s mashups take this to a truly new masterful level, overlaying all of the emotions to make some increble stuff - I highly recommend his “What’s my Name?” and “Stairway to Bootleg Heaven”.

Other sites, please recommend yours -

Smashup Derby’s Smells Like Billy Jean (watch out, more than slightly adult content here) Please note that the crowd loves to sing along on these, indicating that the emotion is common to all of the people in the audience. What is it about Smells like a Teen Spirit and White Stripes?

Strangely, I’m reminded of Simon and Garfunkel’s cover of Scarborough Fair with Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme with the 6 o’clock news.

Took the rest of us long enough to catch up, hell, that’s 40 years old now.