Bastard pop is a musical genre which, in its purest form, consists of the combination (usually by digital means) of the music from one song with the acapella from another. Typically, the music and vocals belong to completely different genres. At their best, bastard pop songs strive for musical epiphanies that add up to considerably more than the sum of their parts.

Synonyms

Bastard Pop is known by a number of different names, including:

• Bootlegs (AKA Boots or Booties)
• Mashups (or Mash-ups)
• Illegitimate Pop
• Blends
• Cutups (or Cut-ups)

In addition, more traditional terms such as "edits" or (unauthorised) "remixes" are favoured by many "bootleggers" (AKA 'leggers).

History

Though the term "Bastard Pop" first became popular in 2001, the practice of assembling new songs from purloined elements of other tracks stretches back at least to the '50s, and, if one extends the definition beyond the realm of pop, precursors can be found in Musique concrète, as well as the classical practice of (re-)arranging traditional folk material and the jazz tradition of reinterpreting standards.

Precursors

Classical

It is difficult to anatomize the practice of musical larceny without undertaking to write the entire history of both classical and popular music, but the appropriation of traditional songs, in particular folk music, has long been a popular pastime among classical composers. Well-known examples include Canteloube's orchestral arrangement of folk songs from the Auvergne region of France, Chants d'Auvergne, and Benjamin Britten's weaving of the ancient round "Sumer is Icumen In" into "Spring Symphony". "Variation" (as in "Variations on a theme by ... ") is one of the many names given to this classical form of "remixing", and a popular 20th century example of this is Andrew Lloyd Webber's reinterpretation of a theme by Paganini, Variations. Other modern classical analogues include Gavin Bryars' epic orchestral embellishment of a "found" impromptu hymn sung by a tramp, "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet", and Apocalyptica's chamber reinterpretations of the songs of Metallica. While these examples are not always strictly illegitimate, they capture the sense of genre collision (A v B) characteristic of Bastard Pop.

"The Flying Saucer"

In 1956, Bill Buchanan and Dickie Goodman caused a musical sensation by releasing the first mainstream Bastard Pop single (though they referred to it as a "break-in" song i.e. material from one song would "break-in" to another), "The Flying Saucer". The track, a reinterpretation of Orson Welles' celebrated "War of The Worlds" mock-emergency broadcast interspliced with musical snippets comically dramatizing the portentous patter of the announcer, spawned a raft of imitations and quickly became a craze, only to pass into oblivion within the space of a year.

Novelty Records

There have been a number of novelty records and one-off hits that have included uncleared samples. The song "Your Woman" by White Town features an uncredited sample from the Dennis Potter musical Pennies From Heaven. [1]

In the '80s, Dutch producer Jaap Eggermont produced a series of records which almost constitute the dictionary definition of "novelty" in the form of the Stars on 45 series. These records attempted to cram as many hits as possible into the space of a three and a half minute pop song, and are perhaps more accurately described as medleys. Though these singles have never received critical plaudits, the medley idea would later resurface in a more respectable form (for instance Coldcut's "Beats and Pieces"), and, moreover, the deliberately humorous tone of the "Stars on 45" singles has not entirely disappeared. Many Bastard Pop songs have been produced in jest, with the emphasis very firmly on satire, "irresistible" puns, or unadulterated throwaway fun.

John Oswald

John Oswald has been devising illegitimate compositions since the late '60s. His 1975 track "Power" married frenetic Led Zeppelin guitars to the impassioned exhortations of a Southern US evangelist at least 10 years before hip hop discovered the potency of the same (and related) ingredients. Similarly, his 1990 track "Vane", which pitted two different versions of the song "You're So Vain" (the Carly Simon original and a cover by Faster Pussycat) against each other, was a blueprint for the contemporary Bastard Pop subgenre, Glitch Pop. Oswald coined the term "plunderphonics" to describe his illegitimate craft. In 1993 Oswald released Plexure. Arguably his most ambitious composition to date, it attempted to microsample the history of CD music up to that point (1982 - 1992) in a 45 minute collage of bewildering complexity. The ambition of this piece would later be recalled by the British bootlegger Osymyso , whose "Intro-Introspection" captured the pop-junkie feel of Plexure, but with, arguably, a greater sense of fun, and a coherence that made it sound surprisingly organic, in contrast to Oswald's deliberate "alienation effects".

Negativland

Though Negativland are seldom acknowledged as musical antecedents of Bastard Pop, lacking perhaps the "smile factor" (i.e. sense of fun) many contemporary practitioners seek in their craft, their struggle against various forms of "censorship" (in their terms) and legal coercion (for instance, their single "U2" was one of the first pieces of music to be deemed "illegal" for its use of unauthorised samples) has made them poster children for some (often American) Bastard Pop commentators who approach the issue from a more critical perspective, and with an eye to the complicated cultural issues raised by both accidental and deliberate plundering within music and culture generally.

The JAMs and The KLF

In the wake of these somewhat academic explorations, two British pranksters, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, entered the arena in 1987 with an album of plunderphony which, while still serving as a critical reflection on the nature of pop music and the power and potential of the sampler, upped the ante by being (almost) music one could dance to as well as think about. Their debut album, released under the name The JAMs, 1987: What The Fuck Is Going On?, was banned (thanks to its raft of uncleared samples, most notably the bulk of ABBA's "Dancing Queen"), and a number of the songs have the same "laptop punk" "anyone can do it" attitude that characterizes Bastard Pop today. The JAMs morphed into The KLF in 1988 and continued to pursue the same art-prankster agenda, most notably with their number 1 hit (under the name The Timelords), "Doctorin' The Tardis".

Double Dee and Steinski

Though the JAMs grazed the charts and The KLF, for a while at least, practically dominated them, illegitimate pop had remained largely an underground affair since the original "break-in" craze swept the US in 1956.

Working under the name Steinski , New York copywriter, DJ and self-confessed record junkie Steve Stein began (in conjunction with engineer and fellow studio boffin Douglas "Double Dee" DiFranco) the next chapter in the evolution of illicit pop by producing a trio of underground 12" singles (entitled "Lesson 1" (1983), "Lesson 2" (1984) and "Lesson 3" (1985)) which exerted a powerful influence on an entire generation of "samplists" and continues to be cited to this day as a landmark in the history of "sampledelica". Indeed one can trace a line from Double Dee and Steinski through Coldcut's "Say Kids What Time Is It?" (which begat Bomb The Bass ' "Beat Dis", which, in turn, begat LA Mix's "Check This Out") to DJ Shadow (who paid his dues on a track entitled "Lesson 4") and The Avalanches - and (through M/A/R/R/S' "Pump Up The Volume") to Black Box, whose "Ride on Time" spread the gospel of uncleared sample wizardry far and wide, from the depths of the underground to the top of the charts.

Renaissance

One cannot mention the mash-up and not give credit to all the amazing remixers working for DJ Only subscription services that inundated DJ's crates in the mid 80's onward such as X-MiX, Hottracks, Razormaid, Wicked Mix, Mixx-It, Ultimixx, and the UK's famous DMC (Disco Mix Club), to name a very few. Starting with the very first DJ only remix service "Disconet" in the mid 70's.

Most of these services were actually granted permission to repress certain songs by the labels for distribution to DJ's working in nightclub across the country. Remixers working for these companies strived to make the original tracks better, or more fun, by layering in extra samples, beats, and even whole accapellas over the latest tracks. Most of these services were legit, but due to digital recording gaining momentum in the late 80's and early 90's, a few unlicenced remix companies started to appear in DJ shops for sale to the public. Mash-ups could now be easly played in nightclubs without the need to do it by the DJ live on the spot anymore with 2 or 3 turntables.

Many early mashups were actully done by these fairly famous remixers and released on their own under an alias on a fake "white label" record to avoid legal prosecution.

Evolution Control Committee

In 1996, the experimental band Evolution Control Committee produced what are widely credited as being the first modern bastard pop tracks. Their "Whipped Cream Mixes" combined a pair of Public Enemy acappellas with instrumentals by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.

Another notable early track, produced anonymously and distributed over the Internet, spliced the Nine Inch Nails' track "Closer" to The Spice Girls' hit "Wannabe".

The 1997 Eminem album The Slim Shady LP served as an early inspiration for the burgeoning bastard pop movement, as the acappella vocals from the track "My Name Is" were combined with the music of many other artists, including "Back in Black" by AC/DC and "Ice Ice Baby" by Vanilla Ice.

2 many dj's and "A Stroke of Genie-us"

The name Pop Will Eat Itself was shamelessly stolen from an NME feature on the band Jamie 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. [2]

The movement gained momentum again in 2001 with the release of two seminal landmarks: Soulwax's 2 many dj's album, which combined 45 different tracks in a frenzied vindication of the "pop will eat itself" prophesy, and a remix by Freelance Hellraiser of Christina Aguilera's "Genie in a Bottle" which coupled the (then) demure pop princess with the raucous guitars of New York's The Strokes in an infectious concoction entitled "A Stroke of Genie-us". This track became one of the most talked about underground hits of 2001, and was featured in many "best of" lists at the end of the year.

Soulwax, the "nom-de-turntable" of two Belgian brothers, spent two years clearing the samples for their album, so their landmark was not entirely illegitimate, though they continued to work in the shadowy interzone between legitimacy and copyright "felony".

The Freelance Hellraiser track, in contrast, was never officially released, and indeed most Bastard Pop songs are only made available (for free) online (i.e. not commercially) in a not-always-successful attempt to avoid "cease and desist" notices from the copyright holders.

Occasionally, however, a song gains so much underground momentum that a commercial release becomes inevitable. The earliest example of this was Richard X (working under the name Girls On Top), whose 2002 track "We Don't Give a Damn About Our Friends" grafted an old Adina Howard acappella onto the music of Tubeway Army's "Are 'Friends' Electric?". The song became so popular that it was released with re-recorded vocals by Sugababes (under the title "Freak Like Me"), though their version was, by design, almost indistinguishable from the "original". The single went straight to number one in the UK charts, making it the first Bastard Pop crossover hit. More recently, Go Home Productions has released "Ray of Gob", which splices together Madonna's "Ray of Light" and the Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant" and "God Save The Queen". The single, which was voted "Bootleg of the Year" in 2003, was cleared by the representatives of both parties and the track even earned the approbation of the Pistols' guitarist Steve Jones.

Elsewhere in 2001 DJ Z Trip released his own mashup project "Uneasy listening volume 1" that featured cobminations of several rock, hip hop, electro, and pop songs from the 60s to the early 90s. Replacing the lyrics on Metalica's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" with lyrics from The Midnight Oil's "Beds are Burning", Naked Eye's "Promises" lyrics with Public Enemy's "Bring tha Noize" lyrics, and an unforgetable mix Ac/Dc and DJ Red Alert

Napster and Audiogalaxy

In the wake of these developments, hundreds of bedroom DJs and songwriters were inspired to make their own "Bastard Pop" confections. The demise of Napster and Audiogalaxy, while initially making it harder for amateurs to acquire the precious raw materials (i.e. acappellas and instrumentals) cheaply (i.e. for free), quickly led to the birth and meteoric rise of alternative P2P networks such as Kazaa and more recently BitTorrent. Where once music aficionados could trade only MP3s, it now became possible to acquire not only music, but the technology to manipulate that music freely and easily.

ACID Pro

As a result of this, industry standard tools such as the digital audio workstation Cubase and the sound editors Wavelab , Soundforge and Cool Edit Pro quickly became ubiquitous. Moreover, new tools such as Ableton Live and, most popular of all, Sonic Foundry's (now Sony's) ACID Pro were tweaked to accommodate the needs of this new "scene". Most notably, such features as beat-mapping (a technique which simplifies the synchronization of samples of different tempos) and online previewing (allowing the composer to audition a sample, playing at the right pitch and tempo, alongside their existing composition) made it easy for many people with musical ability but little professional studio experience to knock together new combinations in a fraction of the time it would take with traditional tools, such as the magnetic tape John Oswald (and even Coldcut) slaved over in their early days.

Boomselection and Get Your Bootleg On

Every new scene must have its water cooler and its journal, and in the case of Bastard Pop, Get Your Bootleg On established itself as the former while Boomselection took on the role of "blog of record". Not merely reflecting the scene, Boomselection publicised various challenges which resulted in hundreds, if not thousands, of new bootlegs being uploaded to sites around the world (while the scene was and still remains a primarily British phenomenon, there are notable bootleggers to be found in practically every corner of the globe - wherever an Internet connection and a record collection is to be found - including Australia, the USA, Belgium, France, Germany and Switzerland).

The name "Get Your Bootleg On" comes from the Missy Elliott track "Get Ur Freak On", which alongside Eminem's "Without Me" remains perhaps the most bootlegged, manipulated, remixed and reinterpreted song of the genre. Other popular artists include Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Madonna, and Beyoncé.

The Get Your Bootleg On site (affectionately abbreviated to GYBO) is the main launchpad for new Bastard Pop tunes, and is the home of a lively community of bootleggers who offer critiques of new songs, tips for newbies, pointers on where to find acappellas, legal advice, publicity for Bastard Pop events and general discussion of issues surrounding the Bastard Pop phenomenon.

In addition, the scene has its own illegitimate parody of a pop chart, Culture Deluxe, as well as a number of other portals which provide downloads, links, forums and news. These include oorsmeer and International Bastard.

Subgenres

A vs B

Pitting an acappella against a completely different backing track in order to make a "third song" is the original "mission" of Bastard Pop, and it is no surprise that, in the wake of "A Stroke of Genie-us", the genre has continued to focus on this basic premise.

Notable "versus" tunes include:

• Soulwax: "Dreadlock Child" (10CC's "Dreadlock Holiday" v Destiny's Child's "Independent Woman")
• McSleazy: "Don't Call Me Song 2" (Blur's "Song 2" v Madison Avenue's "Don't Call Me Baby")
• Loo and Placido: "My Favourite Name" (The Cardigans' "My Favourite Game" v Destiny's Child's "Say My Name")

In addition, Lionel Vinyl, Soundhog and Go Home Productions, amongst others, have produced a number of critically acclaimed songs in this vein, and many have secured record deals on the back of these exercises, which arguably serve as "demo MP3s" of their songwriting and production skills.

Glitch Pop

Glitch Pop is a subgenre of the Bastard Pop scene which marries the Digital Signal Processing (DSP) wizardry associated with Kid 606 and Tigerbeat 6 records to the ostensibly familiar contours of pop. Sometimes this is done in a spirit of homage; sometimes it serves merely as a form of ridicule and even vilification; often it is both at the same time.

An example of the "double science" at play in Glitch Pop is Skkatter's "Dirty Pop", which takes a song that is already an epic of carefully constructed digital micro-malfunctions (BT's delirious deconstruction of 'N Sync's "Pop") and pushes it even further out to the margins of musical mayhem. Similarly, Australian bootlegger and Glitch Pop co-conspirator Dsico has reworked a number of R'n'B tunes by such artists as The Neptunes and (again) 'N Sync in a spirit that is at once both satirical and steeped in fanboydom. In most cases these remixes render ostensibly mainstream songs avant garde and fresh, sometimes by working against the spirit of the original, but often by leveraging the sugar rush at the heart of much of the best contemporary pop, and adding sonic CGI to its already formidable emotional armoury.

Notable Glitch Pop tunes include:

• Skkatter: "Madonna Is A Filthy Slut"
• Dsico: "Hot In Herre", "Fuckin Girlfriend"
• DJ Lance Lockarm: "Bladderwaul"

Remixes

Technically, all Bastard Pop songs are remixes. But while most are made up entirely of plundered material, some bootleggers have fused old acappellas with completely new compositions of their own devising.

The most popular example of this phenomenon is the Björk Remix Web, which contained hundreds of remixes of Björk tunes (for which the acappellas are rarely, if ever, available - the vocals are typically extracted by the application of clever EQing or "phase inversion"). Unfortunately, the site is currently undergoing "reconstruction" and has been unavailable for some time.

Notable remixes include:

• Eminem: "Cleaning Out My Closet (Jacknife Lee mix)"

Bootleg Albums

DJ Danger Mouse's critically acclaimed remix project The Grey Album effectively launched a new Bastard Pop subgenre: the bootleg album. While The Beatles have made appearances on bootleg tracks prior to this album (for instance PPM's "A Life In The Day" and JPL's "Let It Be Missy Elliott (Beatlesmix)"), The Grey Album distinguishes itself by being made up entirely of samples from The Beatles' White Album and vocals from Jay-Z's smash hit The Black Album. Reminiscent of Georges Perec's constrained writing exercises (a novel written without the letter 'e'; a 5000 word palindrome), this project has aroused considerable publicity as a result of the apparently heavy-handed way in which it has been suppressed. Many who have listened to it have lobbied for an official release, but EMI has resisted this tide of opinion, insisting on maintaining the sanctity of copyright in a way which some aficionados see as contrary to the spirit of The Beatles, Jay-Z (who, presumably, sanctioned, if not actively encouraged the release of the acappellas) and musical expression in general.

Notable bootleg albums include:

• Various Artists: London Booted
• Various Artists: Parkspliced
• The Kleptones: A Night At The Hip-Hopera
• Various Artists: Always Outsiders, Never Outdone
• Various Artists: Flip The Switch

Cut-ups

While there is some overlap between the terms "cut up" and "mash up", the former has increasingly come to refer to pieces that rely on the humour (or pathos) of reconstructed spoken word and video material.

The best known cutups remix political speeches and rallies to satirical effect. Johan Söderberg's "Endless Love", in which George W. Bush and Tony Blair appear to serenade each other like lovebirds, and Chris Morris' "Bushwhacked", a détournement of Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address, are two popular examples.

Notable cut up artists include Cassette Boy, Osymyso, Chris Morris, Cartel Communique and Evolution Control Committee.

See also

• Glitch
• Sampling

External links

Bootleggers

• DJ Danger Mouse
• DJ Lance Lockarm
• Dsico
• Evolution Control Committee
• Go Home Productions
• JPL
• The Kleptones
• Loo and Placido
• McSleazy
• Osymyso
• Skkatter
• Johan Söderberg
• Soulwax
• Soundhog
• Steinski
• Lionel Vinyl

Cut-ups

• Bushwhacked
• Endless Love

Sites

• Björk Remix Web archive
• Boomselection
• Culture Deluxe
• Get Your Bootleg On (GYBO)
• Illegal Art
• Oorsmeer (Belgian Bastard Pop portal)

Articles

• Backlash as EMI Hunts Down the Grey Album
• Boot Camp: Mash Up Tutorial for Beginners
• Bootleg culture
• Bootlegs And Why I Love Them
• Copyright and Music: A History Told in MP3s
• Double Dee and Steinski's "The Lesson"
• Down by Law: Great Dance Records You Can't Buy
• Dsico's Guide To Making Bootlegs
• Goodman and Buchanan's original pirate material, "The Flying Saucer"
• The New Yorker: The new math of mashups
• Pop Will Eat Itself: Guardian article on Richard X
• Top 11 Bootlegs of 2001