bastard pop

This all started because I went to this very handbag night called Buttoned Down Disco, and heard a cut of Britney Spears Toxic with the B52s Loveshack. I could tell that the DJ was no way cool enough to have something that weird on vinyl, so I searched the Interweb for it. Then I got sucked into it a little, and about 2 hours later I had about 30 pretty good mash ups, a.k.a. ‘bastard pop’. Some of them are brilliant, some are silly and obscure, but the most fun thing about bootlegs is the naming convention – you have to mash up the song titles to make something witty and meaningful.

My favourite track that I found was “Fire in the A-Bar” – Electric 6, Prodigy, and you’ll listen to it to find out what the ‘A’ in the title is about. I laughed for about 5 minutes when I found out.
Fire in the A-Bar mp3 file here (right click save target as)

Nicest title is still the original and best “Stroke of Genius” (Strokes vs. Christina Aguilera’s “Genie in a bottle”). It's a good track too.
Stroke of Genius mp3 file here (right click save target as)

More worthy titles are the inane “Rock it like it’s Lobster” (Snoop Dogg vs. B52s) and the too cute “Dip it Joe” (Christina Milian vs. Hendrix).
Dip it Joe mp3 file here (right click save target as)

I found a stack of these at Webjay – it’s a site where people post playlists which are all links to mp3 files – you can then just play the whole list by clicking the link. Quite useful in a “users who liked Rick Astley also liked…” kind of way.

But if you have a lot of time to kill, you can check www.gymo.org , which has people posting hundred of mash ups a day.

It's rewarding work though, like the old days when making a compilation tape took 2 hours - you feel much more emotionally attached to a collection of songs you've had to work to put together. And it's yet another example of things getting more user-controlled and fragmented. There's nothing like finding a mash up of two of your absolute favourite tracks from totally different genres. Have fun searching!