The Best Year-In-Review Tribute Ever

Hi everyone, this is a piece I was commissioned to write, I will put up a link once it's up but for now here it is:

We're already almost a month into 2010, and by now all the resolve and self-reflection we built up over the New Year's holiday has probably started to wear off. But there is one bit of self-reflection, a “year in review” style tribute, that I still haven't gotten over. In fact, this has been my feel-good jam for most of the beginning of this new year; it's so incredibly good that I'm hoping it's an omen for how awesome the rest of the year is going to be. The tribute in question is a mash-up called “Blame it on the Pop,” by DJ Earworm. Let me also say that I'm a big fan of the mash-up-- I've been celebrating this art form ever since I discovered Girl Talk a few years ago. In “Blame it on the Pop,” Earworm creates a mash-up of the top 25 pop songs of 2009. To say that the result is a sum greater than its parts is an understatement.
“Blame it on the Pop” manages to weave together these poppy anthems, most of which are about getting it on or getting crunk, into a song whose message-- I say this with complete sincerity-- is profound and inspiring. Wait a minute, you may be saying-- we're talking about Fergie here, right? And Flo Rida, and Taylor Swift, and Miley Cyrus? Believe it. And while I do love a ridiculous club jam as much as the next girl, I find most of these songs to be completely intolerable on their own. And even with those artists in the mix who I do really enjoy-- Beyonce, Lady Gaga, and Kanye, for example-- it would still be a stretch to call them “poetic.”
Of course, in any tribute to 2009 it's impossible to separate one's own feelings about the year itself from the tribute, and maybe that's why it's so easy to assign such depth to an arguably superficial song. To borrow a lyric from The Hold Steady, this past year had its massive highs and its crushing lows-- both personally and politically. We started off hopeful with the inauguration of Obama, but the despair of the recession and the war pervades much of our collective memory of the year. It seems impossible to hear the strung-together lyrics of Earworm without seeing an acknowledgement of this collective despair. It so happens that the most common word among all these songs is “down,” which becomes the refrain of “Blame it on the pop,” with a repeating chorus:
Baby don't worry/ even if the sky is falling down/
it's gonna be okay/ when it knocks you down
Variations on this theme repeat throughout, as well as what I find to be a particularly poignant lyrical mash-up: Just get back up/ when you're tumbling down/ down/ down.
The video is great too, if only for the hilarious juxtaposition of all these artists-- from shirtless Flo Rida simulating oral sex to Jason Mraz singing to the sky, imploring us: “look into your heart and you'll find love, love, love.” Earworm somehow isolates the best aspects of each artist, and the song builds on itself so well that by the end I was practically tearing up at an image of Fergie. And I swear to God, if you had told me last month that I would ever write such a sentence about Fergie, I would have bet a million dollars against you.
I think that's why mash-ups are so incredibly appealing; I don't use words like “cosmic” lightly, but a good mash-up has a way of creating a sense of cosmic beauty. When an artist can combine certain beats with with certain hooks to make something so much bigger than each of its parts, it has a way of making the universe seem more intentional. Because, ultimately, a mash-up makes things fit together-- things that were once alone, and maybe mediocre, and maybe forgettable. And there is something very comforting about knowing that those things can be put together to make something amazing.