Mash to the Music

Illustration by Jillian Tamaki.

Bastard pop — or mash-ups, to lean on the kids’ lingo — typically describes new music that is made by combining the vocals from one song with the instruments from another. In most cases, the source selections will be as disparate as possible, as with genre standouts Slim McShady (Eminem’s Without Me + Wings’ Silly Love Songs), This Naughty Love (Beyoncé’s Naughty Girl + Maroon 5’s This Love) and Work It Off (Missy Elliott’s Work It + Prince’s Get Off (Single Urge Edit)).

Early versions of the mash-up have kicked around for a few decades, but the movement didn’t begin in earnest until the turn of the millennium. Because mash-ups are easily made on computers, they have been spreading like a virus since then. (Ask Google.) The artform is open to anyone with sound-editing software and an internet connection: file-trading networks are fertile hunting grounds for a cappella and instrumental versions of Billboard's best-loved hits. Only a minority of mash-up makers bother to ensure that their creations’ vocals harmonize with the beat; most just smash songs together and hope for the best. That’s why it’s easier to find 100 bad bastards than 10 good ones: mash-ups, like mashed potatoes, are lousy when they’re lumpy. Many are novelties, silly ideas that sound fun on first listen but stupid the second time through.

Two winters ago, hip-hop producer Danger Mouse created the genre’s breakout hit. Working in his bedroom studio, Danger Mouse paired the vocals from Jay-Z’s chart-busting The Black Album with dramatically reworked excerpts from the Beatles’ White Album. His result, The Grey Album, delighted rap cats, Beatle-boomers and everyone between. Well, everyone but EMI, the music monolith that owns the rights to the White Album’s masters. The company quickly issued Danger Mouse a cease-and-desist letter arguing unlicensed use of the Beatles’ music: but later dropped its challenge in the wake of Grey Tuesday, a one-day internet protest that saw 170 websites post the album for free download.

Entertainment Weekly named The Grey Album its record of the year for 2004. No mash-up before or since has made such an impact on pop culture. Mind you, no one aside from Danger Mouse has attempted to combine the work of two music titans over the run of a full album. (Full-length mash-up projects of any kind are rare.) Well, at least no one until now.

"Y'all are invited back to my crib for Coke and Cheetos": Notorious B.I.G., winner of rap artist and rap single of the year at the Billboard Music Awards in 1995. AP Photo/Mark Lennihan.

This summer, little-known DJs Cappel and Smitty released Blue Eyes Meets Bed-Stuy, a 12-track mash-up that pairs the king of swing with the godfather of gangsta rap: Frank Sinatra and the Notorious B.I.G. (“Bed Stuy” is short for Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Brooklyn project where B.I.G. grew up.) Sinatra died of a heart attack in 1998; B.I.G. was murdered in 1997. Both are remembered with the utmost reverence by their legions of fans. They were gangster icons from different worlds, different eras — but they sound perfectly matched standing shoulder-to-shoulder on Blue Eyes. Both projected the same brand of menace, tough-talking ladies’ men who never strayed far from a bar or a bust-up.

Cappel and Smitty open their album with the distinct strains of Sinatra’s New York, New York. B.I.G. (born Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. Biggie Smalls) delivers a chopped-up version of the opening to his Sky’s the Limit, then booms a verse from Juicy, a stand-out selection from his 1994 debut, Ready to Die. New York’s horns swell in the background, a turntable scratches, the Chairman swoops in at full bore: “It’s up to you, New York, New York....” Awesome.

Next, a pitched-up Sinatra sings snatches of A Day In the Life of a Fool between verses of B.I.G.’s Everyday Struggle, a lament on the woes of late-century gangsterism: “I know how it feels to wake up  f---ed up / Pockets broke as hell, another rock to sell / People look at you like you’s the user / Selling drugs to all the losers.” A later track combines Come On (“Biggie Smalls, the millionaire, the mansion, the yacht”) with Sinatra’s My Way of Life (“Nothing in the world that I do means a thing without you / I’m just half alive in my struggle to survive without you”) to excellent effect. Sinatra never sang about slinging crack; Smalls never rapped about April in Paris. Somehow, though, they fit together like a hand in a glove.

"Did somebody mention Cheetos?": Frank. Getty Images/Photo Express.

Blue Eyes, available for purchase from Sandbox Automatic and other web retailers, is less technically accomplished than The Grey Album. Danger Mouse reinvented the White Album; Cappel and Smitty mostly settle for looping a few bars from Sinatra’s hits for their backbeats. Instead they win on vocals. B.I.G. was a ghetto poet with a tenor’s presence and a thug’s diction. He arguably remains the greatest MC to ever hold a microphone: better than Jay-Z, Eminem, old lions like Rakim or even nemesis Tupac Shakur. Biggie could flow over Barry Manilow and make it sound dangerous. And Sinatra? What’s left to say: he was The Voice. Big Frank was simply among the best we’ve ever had.

That said, Blue Eyes Meets Bed-Stuy is unlikely to capture the culture’s attention to the extent of The Grey Album. Much of the latter’s spread can be credited to EMI’s legal attack (and a later, similarly fruitless one from Sony, which owns the Beatles’ composition rights) and the internet’s unified stand against it. And while many Beatles fans went wild for Jay-Z, it’s tough to imagine Sinatra’s crowd climbing out of their rocking chairs to get jiggy with Biggie. But don’t cry for Blue Eyes. The album is getting airplay on New York’s Hot 97 FM, rap’s biggest radio beacon, and was a recent feature on MTV.com’s “Mixtape Monday” report. In the blaze of summer, it’s as good a record as any to blast through your speakers.

It's impossible to envision this project happening in an official way if Smalls and Sinatra were still alive. Thanks to Blue Eyes, though, it’s entirely easy to imagine — and hear — them as kindred spirits.

Matthew McKinnon writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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