In a club/event setting where the DJ isn’t just there to be a human iPod Shuffle, it’s “cheating”, in my opinion. My exceptions are when said “mash-up” is an attempt to make a singular track using elements from two others. The more songs that get jammed into a single track, make it a “mega-mix” and that’s just… so… bleh.

I call it “cheating” because it’s… hmmm… how to say… Let’s just say that I think the reason why people got into Nicki Minaj’s ‘Anaconda’ was because 3/4 of it was just fuckin’ Sir Mix-Alot’s ‘Baby Got Back’…

Mash-ups are novelties of technological wizardry rather than artistic ingenuity.

I only just within the last few years went through the “DJ trauma” of going all-in on the digital conversion of my entire collection. There’s a lot of things about that that took many YEARS of … “apprenticeship”… to get to learn or be shown how to do. I revere scratch DJs from since I was old enough to ride my bike to the two screen movie theatre in my town to watch “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo”… but never met anyone in my travels that could (or would) teach me once I started DJing myself years later… when I was getting into debates about the benefits of CDs over vinyl. Go figure.

I buy the music. I play the music. My “mixes” are live using whatever knobs they give me to tweak.

Admittedly, the one superpower digital controllers have given me above what I already knew how to do is ‘recorded cue points’. It’s what I used to need a 3rd or 4th deck to achieve with the same song loaded so that I could turn a 4min song into a much longer one and create vocals for songs that had none (which was a “complaint” among my patrons that like books with pictures rather than “Peter and The Wolf”). Cue Points, yo.

I happened upon this combination of Prodigy & ICP after having recently done a full “scan” of my music library with some wrong setting or box checked; and as a result, I have a huge glut of tracks that I know for a FACT are somewhere in the 130-150bpm range that are reading as being in the 70+bpm range. I usually do this kind of scan only after a few months worth of music collection or when a certain folder is getting a little long-in-the-tooth with singles… It takes several hours to scan and sync my whole library so I haven’t worried about doing the correction just yet.

While playing around with some new shit that I KNEW was wrong, I noticed ‘Get Clowned’ and was like, “There’s NO WAY these two could be just ONE bpm away from each other!” knowing how generally plodding ‘Get Clowned’ is compared to the MUCH faster ‘Need Some 1’… but with a little tweaking of frequencies and cue point placement for future use… ‘Get Clowned’ sounds like it was MADE for a breakbeat vocal! “Fuck my meds, I’m about to go nutty!” makes for a prefect drop!