Here Come the Year-End Mashups!
It really is the most wonderful time of the year: Christmas season in full-swing, and an onslaught of awesome mashups are released into the wild. This month the music industry is looking back and rounding up the year’s best, but gone are the days where we looked solely to VH1, MTV, TRL, Billboard magazine, and your local Clear Channel monopoly to reminisce about the artists who ruled the charts. In the emerging social music experience developing online through YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and apps like Spotify and Turntable.fm, the most exciting byproduct has been the explosion of the mashup genre.
Take a look at Mashup-Germany’s latest - an incredible mashup featuring 29 of this year’s hottest songs - just released. Many others will follow suit this month. But if you’re looking for the best, look no further than reigning mad scientist DJ Earworm. His annual “United State of Pop” usually drops right around Christmas and crushes his peers, putting everyone’s seemingly remarkable attempts to shame.
USPOP is not simply a mashup. Anyone with a good ear for music can pick up on the recurring chord progressions common in many pop songs. With some skill, ingenuity and a good muse, many will create beautiful symphonies out of multiple club beats and synthesizers. What makes Earworm’s annual monstrosity so unique is that he really creates an entirely new song: impressively fluid lyrics and instrumentation that connect the year’s songs with a common theme for the grand purpose of pure pop mayhem (see video after the jump):
Earworm is up against one hell of a cocktail to mix this year: his self-imposed rule restricts the mashup to the Top 25 Billboard Hits of 2011 according to the just-released Year-End Hot 100 chart. That means chart-topper Adele will croon, SkyBlu & Redfoo will shuffle, and the shenanigans of Cee-Lo, Nicki Minaj, and Pitbull will battle with the empowerment anthems of Gaga, P!nk, and Katy for a go at the background beat. With all the potential, I can only imagine what this year’s rising stars 3LAU and Kap Slap could cook up if they throw their hats into the ring and give the year-end treatment a go too.
My two favorite Top 40 songs of the year just missed the cut on Billboard, so Earworm will have to make due without Till The World Ends (#27) and The Edge of Glory (#29), which I thought were shoe-ins that would be heavily featured. Check out my earlier predictions, which ended up being pretty close!
