A mashup is a creative work, usually in a form of a song, created by blending two or more pre-recorded songs, usually by superimposing the vocal track of one song seamlessly over the instrumental track of another, increasing the tempo and pitch while adding or reducing gaps to make it flow. To the extent that such works are "transformative" of original content, in the United States they may find protection from copyright claims under the "fair use" doctrine of copyright law.
History
The 1990 John Zorn album Naked City features a version of Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman" set over the bassline of Roy Orbison's "Pretty Woman". In 1994, the experimental band Evolution Control Committee released the first modern mashup tracks on their hand-made cassette album, Gunderphonic. These "Whipped Cream Mixes" combined a pair of Public Enemya cappellas with instrumentals by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. First released on home-made cassettes in early 1992, it was later pressed on 7" vinyl, and distributed by Eerie Materials in the mid-1990s. The tracks gained some degree of notoriety on college radio stations in the United States. The name Pop Will Eat Itself was taken from an NME feature on the bandJamie Wednesday, written by David Quantick, which proposed the theory that because popular music simply recycles good ideas continuously, the perfect pop song could be written by combining the best of those ideas into one track. Hence, Pop Will Eat Itself. The mashup movement gained momentum again in 2001 with the release of the 2 Many DJs album As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt. 2 by Soulwax's Dewaele brothers, which combined 45 different tracks; the same year a remix of Christina Aguilera's "Genie in a Bottle" was also released by Freelance Hellraiser, which coupled Aguilera's vocals with the guitar track of "Hard To Explain" by New York'sthe Strokes, in a piece called "A Stroke of Genie-us". Launched in San Francisco in 2003, Bootie was the first club night in the United States dedicated solely to the burgeoning art form of the bootleg mashup, and now hosts monthly parties in several cities around the globe, including Los Angeles, Paris, Boston, Munich, and New York City. The party's slogan, "Music for the A.D.D. Generation" also inspired the creation of "A.D.D", Israel's first mash-up dedicated party. The Best of Bootie mashup compilation series is compiled and produced each year by A Plus D, creators of the international mashup club Bootie. The compilations have been released in December every year since 2005, and are annual Internet sensations, with each album garnering over 5000GB+ of downloads.
