The Not-Pop Jukebox

If anyone can give Sean Kingston some flavor, can prove that the man would sound the same in front of a frenetic set of fiddles as he does a drum machine, it’s Fissunix. That’s precisely what the DJ has done with this Mashup of the Month: taken the R&B idol and backed him with the country-fried electro madness of Rednex and their take on Cotton-Eyed Joe.

If anyone happens to have a picture of Mr. Kingston sporting a beat-up cowboy hat and a pair of boots, I’d love to have it. This song practically demands one, particularly if it somehow gives the impression of his being at a hoedown.

As always, you can download the Mashup of the Month for free, this time from the official Fissunix web site. Here you can see a mockup of the picture I'm picturing, if that isn't too redundant. I think all of this Rednex is shrinking my vocat...uh, vocan...er, vocaz...my words. I'm off to read a dictionary. Let me know what you think!

With a hearty thanks to +Hadrian Micciche for introducing me to Schlachthofbronx, I bring you a bangin', clappin', chantin' good time. I'm not altogether clear on the point of Songstar, though the lyrics are relatively easy to understand. Given the title of the song (and the mention of bouncers) I'm guessing it's about an obsessed fan.

Here's my suggestion: put on your headphones, crank up the bass, and have a listen. Then you tell me what you think the song is about. You'll probably want to listen again while you do, like I am right now.

The whole purpose of mashups is to bend genres, to blend decades into wholly new music that a wide audience can appreciate…in the form of getting down to songs that all but demand you dance. Forme has taken this to a new level by combining a nonsense song that personifies the 60s surf scene and mashing it with Skrillex.

Now, everybody’s heard about the bird if they’re over the age of 25 or so but I’d bet a good portion of those folks who know the word are unfamiliar with the Bangarang. Here we have a mashup to bring generations together, a real wedding-dance winner guaranteed to fill the floor. Okay, it does in my living room, where the kids and I pretty much take up the available dancing space.

Give it a shot yourself and see if it doesn’t get you moving. Whether you come to is as a fan of The Trashman or of Skrillex, Surfin’ Bird Bangarang gives you a lot to enjoy. Naturally, you can download this Mashup of the Month for free via the link on Forme's SoundCloud upload.

I can't help it, I love MIA. Technically she's not a chart-topper, at least here in the US, but this video does have well over 8 million views. It's over four years, but still that's pretty popular. That plus a SuperBowl performance with Madonna pretty much makes her pop music.

I don't care. I listen to a song like Buckly Done Gun and three beats in I've forgotten all about music snobbery and self-imposed rules. I'm too busy dancing. For a full-on Friday, add a little MIA. If you can take another after this one, have a listen to Galang or Bad Girls.

As I was jamming all over the living room I was thinking about her sound and thought, "What if MIA did a song with Die Antwoord?" Then my head exploded so I had to stop thinking about it. You go right ahead, though, and tell me if this is an idea for which the musical world is not ready or if it's another of my psychotic collaboration ideas that would never work.

Y'all have gone nearly a year without lynching me for not sharing more Robotic Pirate Monkey and I thought I'd let you know how much I appreciate that by bringing you--perhaps predictably by this point in the sentence--more Robotic Pirate Monkey. As it's dinner time and the song made me get down while cooking up (a storm, that is), it seemed appropriate to share Shake n' Bake.

I don't know if you remember that culinary oddity (and I don't know if they still make it) but it seems to me this song would be perfect for flapping a bag of pre-seasoned bread crumbs and raw chicken about the kitchen. I also suspect, given some of the other titles and sound clips, that baking chicken isn't exactly the sort of thing they had in mind.

Whatever the reason, have some down-and-dirty, fuzzed-out electronica. If you've got a box of Shake n' Bake in your cupboard maybe this will give you the inspiration to finally get it out and make some non-fried chicken!

Some days you need a massive mash to make your day. Today is one of those days. Conveniently for you, my darlings, I have here a 24-song mash-stravaganza from JT & C (that would be John Twig & Crowfield) guaranteed to get your bootie rockin'.

Save Them Mashups takes a pile of hits from the past decade or two in a few different languages and makes a big mess of awesome. There's Etta James, Skrillex, Daft Punk, Gorillaz, Lady Gaga, and Duck Sauce, to name but a few.

You can find the download link on the SoundCloud page linked above and below. JT & C are new to me so I'll be listening more. If Save Them Mashups is any indication, I'll be sharing more in the near future. In the meantime, have a listen and let me know if you love this one as much as I do.

From time to time it amuses me to realize that there are pop songs out there that I know thought I’ve never heard the original. When I think of Adele, for instance, I think of her as re-imagined by Marc Johnce (with all sorts of pop music) and DJs from Mars (with Robin S). I’ve heard her over thrash metal and slowed down to a lady Barry White. I have no idea how the song is “supposed” to sound.

Daft Beatles mashed Rolling in the Deep with Sweet Dreams. DJ Maya Jakobson added some classical and some Britney Spears to make ‘Til the Swan Lose Deep Control. Dan Mei chose to lay Adele over Fire and Flames to give her that 200-bpm, flame-broiled bite. ShyBoy slowed her and rolled her with Underworld to make Born in the Deep (Rolling Slippy).

Then there's Ryan Nellis, who rolled Adele through the Eye of the Tiger and the one that slew me, the piece de resistance, Wick-it the Instigator's Rolling in the Fire, which takes Rolling in the Deep and gives it some deep funk.

Naturally, you can download all of these for free. Just click the links above. I've got a set at SoundCloud so that you can hear them but Dan Mei's track isn't there so you get that one on a separate player. Have a listen and let me know which you like best, or if you're true to the original.

What's more high-energy than disco funk? An All Hazards remix thereof, of course. I can't imagine a song more likely to get me out on the floor than Party Down. It takes serious boogie and cranks it up to eleven, which is pretty much what All Hazards does to everything.

Party Down is one of those songs that I've been enjoying for ages and thought I'd long posted for you all. Luckily for you I think to check, from time to time, and realize when I've deprived you of yet another San Francisco treat. The duo has a lot of dancing just waiting for you. Head on over to SoundCloud for lots more.

I bumped into Claude VonStroke yesterday and spent a fair chunk of time giving his music a listen. While I like a lot of what he does (and am fairly worn out from dancing), it was Beat That Bird that I knew you had to hear.

Distasteful as I find the song around which it's based, I can't resist the bizarre flavor of it. And, of course, it put me in mind of Nuclear Rabbit's Sweet Nothings. Naturally, that means you get both, my dears.

I've decided not to make this a You Pick the Winner post because Sweet Nothings is so short, though it can definitely stand up in the "freaky" category. Have a listen to the pair and let me know if you don't think they go together like...bats and chickens.

Of late, no one seems to know the difference between "jive" and "jibe". For those of you who want to know how to use jive properly in a sentence, I have eight songs, from across a few decades and at least six genres, to help explain it. Also, I'm fond of making theme posts like this, much like my Big Shuffle list.

Have a listen to The Four Charms and then Grammatik remixing the same song (though the Nat King Cole version). Don your roller skates and jive with the Bee Gees and then take them off again for some 80s goodness from Men at Work. Swing between Guns n' Roses and Mojo Nixon, with a little Screamin' Jay Hawkins thrown in the mix. And if you just can't get enough, pop over to my playlist of Java Jive for a steaming pile of coffee-flavored jive talkin'.

I'm feeling old-school tonight so I'm reaching way back to 1985 for Slick Rick (then known as MC Ricky D) and Doug E. Fresh. La Di Da Di came out on the B side of The Show but, despite the "six minutes" ear worm the latter engendered, I think it's a more fun song.

La Di Da Di has been sampled and referenced by everyone from Beyonce and PSY to Sublime and Mos Def. It's also been covered by Snoop Dogg and Korn. If you're looking for a building block to basic 80s hip hop knowledge, you can't beat Slick Rick and Doug E Fresh.

The best part of the song, however, is the silly story it tells of a day in the life of Slick Rick. If you want more early hip hop (and who doesn't?) I've got 29 more songs that'll take you back to the days when you could understand every word and the backbeats were simple. In the meantime, have a listen to La Di Da Di and tell me if you think this was a true story.

If you could make Rick James even funkier, would you? DJ Zebra would. In fact, he did, by mixing him with LCD Soundsystem. I know, I didn't think it was possible, either, but here it is.

You can't get just Superfreak Is Playing at My House, but you can download a whole album's worth containing DJ Zebra's best of 2005 from his site. Naturally the Mashup of the Month is included.

The Very Best get turned into goats after drinking Kondaine. Okay, they don't really, but a goat really was sacrificed in the making of this video. Be careful what you drink this weekend or you might find yourself at the end of a leash in a tiny African village. I think that's the lesson, here.

You don't hear a lot of songs these days about how to do various dances. Happily I bumped into Azonto, which teaches you how to do a dance that I hadn't even known was apparently sweeping large portions of the world. As far as I can tell, it's pretty much doing whatever you want, which means I can do it as well as anyone. That's my kind of dance.

At any rate, this is Fuse ODG and Itz Tiffany sharing their versions of the Azonto dance. I recommend a fair amount of volume and enough room to really boogie if you're going to give it a listen. At least don't chair dance too close to the windows. And if you need visual instructions, too, check the video for it. Otherwise, get ready to Azonto!

I don't know how many of you remember Safri Duo, the Danish drumming wonders who hit the scene big and then more or less disappeared. I do know that you'd likely never peg them as the movers behind Ritmo de la Noche. You'll be happy to know that I've brought you this Latin-flavored happy song for your jamming pleasure, today, just to fill that little gap in your musical knowledge...and you make you dance. So get to it.

I've been listening to Harder Better Faster Quasar for a week, now, and jamming to point of breaking my chair every time. Sadly, I cannot point you to a free download because it has since been removed from SoundCloud and I cannot find a web site for this Hardwell character.

The point of this post, however, is not to bemoan the fact that you can't have the song. It's to show you three things: that mashups can be more than the sum of their parts, that Hard Rock Sofa can do some seriously massive stuff when they set their minds to it, and that a technically unrelated song can stick something like the theme from Knight Rider straight into your head for days.

I've listened to so many mashes of Daft Punk's Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger that I'd rather forgotten what the original sounded like. In truth, it needed a little heavy added to the background. Then along comes Hardwell with Quasar in hand, cranks up the bass, and voila! We get something better than either of the two originals.

However, Hard Rock Sofa either sampled the Knight Rider theme when they made Quasar or they were inspired by it because that's all I can think of when I hear either the original or Harder Better Faster Quasar. For today I've brought all four of the songs together for your musical edification, my darlings. Do let me know if you agree with any of that blather or if I'm daft and should just go back to my sofa.

Once upon a time, Nelly Furtado was pop. Thankfully, that day has passed so that I can post Parking Lot, a song that it stuns me didn't top charts the world over. Of course, it stuns me that an awful lot of what I post didn't chart anywhere at all.

In this case, it's a song that's fluffy enough, with a massive beat behind it, that it ought to be played in clubs for people to enjoy. Since apparently that hasn't happened, I want to bring it to your attention, my dears. I haven't even listened to the rest of "The Spirit Indestructible" yet (though it's on my plate for today). The song was brought to my attention via the antics of David Gaider and the Dragon Age writers.

Have a listen and let me know, my dears, if you can fathom why the former Number One Nelly Furtado has disappeared from the pop charts. For the life of my I can't understand.

Die Antwoord has held me in appalled fascination for months. Every time I decide they're a spoof, an exaggeration so over the top the can't possibly be serious, I listen to something that sounds so very, very self-important that it could be an American pop-rap star swaggering about with a 1989 Casio keyboard and Windows 3.1 for making beats. And yet those beats are a lot fatter than you expect.

Whatever. You can tell by that train wreck of a paragraph that I just don't know what to think of them. Super Evil, for instance, is clearly a parody and one that I quite like. And there are things like I Fink U Freaky which is actually a pretty funky song, if a bit heavy on the cursing, and $copie, a song so wrongly right I can't get it out of my head.

And so it's on that side of Die Antwoord, the side that I'm almost sure is part social commentary on South Africa and part mockery of self-congratulatory American rappers. The idea that anyone finds Ninja sexy besides his wife (that's be the tiny-voiced Yolandi) seems far-fetched. I mean, he does kind of look like Vanilla Ice, aged appropriately. Have a listen while I suppress that though ruthlessly.

It's Halloween, my dears, and what better to celebrate the holiday than an instrumental with a loosely related title? Thus I bring you Zombie Dance from Action Man. In as much as zombies are capable of dancing, I suppose this one might get them moving to something resembling the beat.

If nothing else, the heavy-duty fuzz and quick-change sound ought to scare some of the your trick or treat guests this evening. Have a listen to Zombie Dance and let me know if it was frightening or fun.

I’ve posted sets of mashes before, notably the ever-popular smelly Nirvana hit and the perpetually geeky music of Star Wars, but I can’t resist building a little pile of such combinations. It tickles me to find different takes on the same song from various mashup artists.

It seems most of them have taken a swing at House of Pain’s Jump Around. For today I’m offering eight mashups, from such luminaries as FAROFF (three times), DJ Schmolli (twice), Party Ben, MashMike, and The Bootleague. As usual, those links take you to their respective sites where you can download each mashup for free.

Apparently House of Pain brings out the creative in DJs. We’ve got a klezmer band, AC/DC, Beethoven’s Fifth, Queen, Kriss Kross, Mick Jaggar, and Cee-Lo Green’s cover of Kung Fu Fighting. FAROFF even combined Jump Around with Cab Calloway. And then there are the massive Mash Together with Joan Jett, Cypress Hill, Rage Against the Machine, and The Beatles, as well as Super Bowl Anthem, which pits them against Tag Team, Madonna, LFMAO, Queen (again), the White Stripes, and Metallica. I was only able to find seven on Grooveshark so you'll have to have Jump on the Fifth via Soundcloud.

Note: In my infinite attention to detail, I missed Mashup of the Month day this month. The mega-post is my apology.