A Little Mashed

Mashups. Bastard Pop. SuperSampling. Some things are quite cool when changed, yet do not detract from the original.

Certain mashup efforts have been passable up until this point. DJ Dangermouse did wonderful things with his Grey Album effort, but the Sgt Petsounds Lonely Hearts Club Band effort showed how random mashups could turn out if done poorly. Mashup songs are numerous, with many good, but even more fraught with just echoes of such. Mashup albums, while ambitious, prove to be difficult, due to the nature of the overall nature of the project. To encompass a whole album, one must add and flow, not wildly differ, from production value in each mashup. Otherwise, one produces a random mess of good and bad, detracting from the overall effort. A superlative effort takes time to create a truly great work.

Dean Gray's American Edit is such an album that defines both great work, superlative effort, and marks of genius.

Released in 2005, American Edit was a mashup tribute to Green Day's American Idiot. In the classic veins of Rock Opera, Idiot followed the storybook structure, but in an updated rebellious nature congruent with the times. In Edit, Dean Gray (actually a group of individuals, Party Ben and team9) loosely kept the same themes, but interspersed different sounds and styles within the backdrop of Green Day's story. Such is evident in the Edit mashup Whatshername (modeled after the Idiot song Whatshername), where the Green Day tune is mashed with the lyrics of the Bangles' Manic Monday.

The song today, however, is one of the more popular ones off of American Edit: Boulevard of Broken Dreams. In Boulevard, Green Day is deftly mixed with Oasis' Wonderwall, with bits of Travis' Writing to Reach You, and even a smattering of Aerosmith thrown into the mix. On their own, all of these songs are great. Mixing them was a chance well taken, with a result well done.

Hey, if Billie Joe Armstrong liked it after listening to the mashup of his own song, it can't be all bad.



Bloody well rock on.
-om