M Is FOR MASHUP - February 20th, 2013
Lighters In The Air For Rock Mashups!
By DJ Useo
I always say mashups are perfect for when you want to hear the Rolling Stones AND Madonna, but you only have time for one. That's the essence of
bootlegging; combining various musical elements into a new arrangement that has appeal. As I've mentioned so often here in this column, most
mashups are intended for club play. It's obvious the vast majority of mashups adhere to techno, and dance formulas. I like those type plenty. So do
most of my 'audience'. But, because I enjoy such a wide swath of music, I like to work with other styles as well as club. The way I see it, there's already
a zilion mashers out there mining the club fodder for their mixes. They're doing great, too. So I feel free to mix with everything else.
Over the last few months, I noticed I was accruing a ?ne batch of Rock vs Rock mixes. It soon occurred to me to expand the number to a full discs'
worth. If you've read my column much, you'll ?nd no surprise in my decision. It started when I wanted to mix the Replacements' 'Alex Chilton'. The very
?rst acapella I tried was the Guess Who's 'American Woman'. You can hear how well it turned out as I picked that one for the ?rst track. It's really funny
to me that I did a rock vs rock album, since I was mainly into punk music until I stumbled into making mashups. I hear the music in a new way now. The
lyrics of the wrong songs pop into my head unbidden. It's a cinch to mix them into a track that sounds like it started that way.
I really got a kick out of putting Deep Purples' 'Highway Star' to the music of Bad Company's 'Shooting Star'. They seemed like such an unlikely pairing,
but I swear, if you'd never heard both songs before, you'd think they were made this way initially. I continued to have a blast combining fave rock bands
to like fave rock bands. Well, as like as you might ?nd Jethro Tull singing 'Aqualung' over Kiss' 'Love Gun'.
I remember a time when I hated AC/DC and The Grateful Dead. Well, I got over that. So on this new album, you get to hear The Grateful Dead sing over AC/DC with a good bit of Van Halen thrown
in there. There's more Van Halen as well with T.Rex singing over it. The pattern continues throughout the 18 cuts. There's a groovy animated gif
version of the cover included.
You can see it here
( i85.photobucket.com/albums/k67/useo8/DJ%20Useo%20Covers%202/djuseo-when-mashups-rock1_zps53a2bfa3.gif )
I'm so happy with my own reaction and that of the few I've previewed the album for that I'm still doing more rock on rock tracks, and the albums already
done. The enthusiasm thrives off itself. Currently, I'm working up a new Beatles vs Pink Floyd mix. I hope I get back to modern music as well soon.
In the meanwhile, I hope you jam out LOUD to
WHEN MASHUPS ROCK
( www.groovytimewithdjuseo.blogspot.com/2013/02/when-mashups-rock- new-collection.html ).
Later, Dudes.
Mix Of The Week
One of my favorite mixers around has journeyed beyond this sphere of existence. Naz was the ?rst mixer I heard at
B00MB0X
( www.bmbx.org/ ) lo those years ago. He in?uenced me a lot, & was always communicative and intelligent. I'll miss him greatly. His
B00MB0X archive of mixes remains
( www.bmbx.org/category/naz/ ) . Please sample his wonderful output. He will be missed.
( www.bmbx.org/category/naz/ )
Mashup Tip
Add a sampled guitar, or keyboard riff to your A Plus B mashups to spice them up.
Latest Useo Thing
'Hold Ya Head Auslander' (Biggie Smalls vs Elvis Presley vs Pop Will Eat Itself) Music derived from PWEI. Singing from Biggie and
Elvis. The pleasure is all ours. Listen or stream here
( http://official.fm/tracks/knN6 )
or here
( www.groovytimewithdjuseo.blogspot.com/2013/02/biggie-smalls-vs-elvis-vs-pwei.html )
Podgornio, The Mashup Psychic Predicts
Mashups will get more popular when it's discovered how much better they are with cheese dip.
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman: The Myth of Reagan's Miracle (New York Times)
Look at median family income. The basic story of postwar America is one of big gains in the first generation, near-stagnation in the second and after, with fluctuation due to the business cycle.
Paul Krugman: Goldbugs, Greece, and Affinity Fraud (New York Times)
The truth is that Barron's isn't that different from the WSJ editorial page, which has also been warning about inflation and soaring interest rates for four years or more, and never seems daunted by being wrong again and again. Nor do readers seem to be put off.
Froma Harrop: Republicans Plagued by Good News (Creators Syndicate)
Most viewers weren't dining with the fact-checkers, but even if they had, the news sounded pretty good. Over half a million new jobs, more American cars sold, less foreign oil used, a housing market on the mend. As Obama reminded everyone, "We have cleared away the rubble of crisis" created by you-know-who.
Froma Harrop: Amazon Rules the Sales-tax Jungle (Creators Syndicate)
So, with a few exceptions, Amazon does not burden out-of-state shoppers with sales taxes. This gives it a significant advantage over brick-and-mortar stores that must tack on such taxes. Amazon understandably likes it that way.
Cyriaque Lamar: The Worst Scifi Snubs in Oscar History (io9)
It's Oscar season, so brace yourself for more snubs when it comes to science fiction movies. Speculative fiction has a crummy track record when it comes to the Academy Awards, and even when an iconic scifi flick scores Oscar nods, it tends to be ignored in everything but the technical categories (see: E.T., Star Wars, Avatar). Many unfairly overlooked scifi Oscar nominees have been vindicated by history, but we nevertheless feel compelled to dredge these examples up.
Gayke: Teen Comes Out with a Gay Cake (Neatorama)
15-year-old gay teen named Laurel came out of the closet with great taste. Literally. She baked a "gayke" cake and presented her parents with a touching note:
David Bruce: Wise Up! Mothers (Athens News)
Artists and writers must be creative. St. Louis cartoonist Sacha Mardou once wrote and illustrated an erotic comic in which a woman seduced a man who was blind. This worried her mother, who was afraid that the comic was autobiographical. Ms. Mardow says, "When I told her I had made all that stuff up, she thought it was genius. She was also very relieved."
David Bruce: From the Iliad to the Odyssey: A Retelling in Prose of Quintus of Smyrna's Posthomerica ($2 Smashwords EBook)
Quintus of Smyrna told the story of the Trojan War from the burial of Hector until the Greeks set sail for home after the fall of Troy. In other words, he told the story of the Trojan War from the end of the Iliad to when Odysseus sets sail for home in the Odyssey after Troy has fallen.
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
David Bruce's Smashwords Page
David Bruce's Blog
David Bruce's Lulu Storefront
David Bruce's Apple iBookstore
David Bruce has approximately 50 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
wrote:
answered:
said:
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Veljko Suggests
Meteor Craters
Thanks, Veljko!
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Overcast afternoon, rainy night.
Selling Stake In Gun Makers
Calpers
The investment committee of Calpers, the biggest U.S. pension fund, voted on Tuesday to divest its holding in two manufacturers of guns and high-capacity ammunition clips banned in California.
The move affects about $5 million in investments in Smith & Wesson Holding Corp and Sturm, Ruger & Co at the $254 billion California Public Employees' Retirement System, best known at Calpers.
The vote follows a divestment motion by Calpers board member, investment committee member and California State Treasurer Bill Lockyer in response to the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in December.
Lockyer said divestment by Calpers would be largely symbolic given the amount of money involved but argued to fellow investment committee members that it would hold "special meaning" for school faculty and employees who are members of the pension fund.
Lockyer also sits on the board of the California State Teachers' Retirement System, which decided last month to divest its holdings in makers of firearms and high-capacity ammunition clips illegal in California.
Calpers
Joins NBC News
David Axelrod
David Axelrod, the former White House senior adviser and senior strategist for President Barack Obama's 2008 and 2012 campaigns, has joined NBC News and MSNBC as a senior political analyst.
He joins a roster that includes former John McCain campaign adviser Steve Schmidt, ex-Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele and former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell. Last week, Robert Gibbs, former White House press secretary and senior adviser to Obama's 2012 campaign.
For Axelrod, it's something of a return to his roots: Before making the jump to politics in 1984, Axelrod spent eight years at the Chicago Tribune as a political writer, columnist and City Hall bureau chief. And he's had a particularly close relationship with MSNBC, appearing as a frequent guest on "Morning Joe" during the past campaign cycle.
David Axelrod
For Oscar "Losers"
$45,000 Gift Bags
Oscar nominees who don't end up with a coveted gold statuette at the Academy Awards on Sunday won't go home empty handed after all.
Los Angeles-based marketing firm Distinctive Assets will be handing out its annual "Everyone Wins at the Oscars Nominee Gift Bag", valued at more than $45,000, to the talented and well-dressed "losers," the company said on Tuesday.
Among the items in the gift bags, known as swag bags, are trips to Australia, Hawaii and Mexico, personal training sessions, condoms, a bottle of tequila, hand-illustrated tennis shoes, appointments for injectable fillers and 'portion-controlled' dinnerware for those watching their figure, Distinctive Assets said in a statement.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which hands out the Oscars, stopped its practice of giving gift baskets to presenters and performers in 2007 after the practice came under closer scrutiny from U.S. tax authorities.
The Distinctive Assets gift bag is not endorsed by the Academy but has been creating consolation goodie bags for 11 years now. The bags are delivered to the losing nominees to their homes directly or through their agents or publicists.
$45,000 Gift Bags
Michael Jackson's Son Lands TV Gig
Prince Jackson
The teenage son of late pop star Michael Jackson has signed up to be a correspondent for the "Entertainment Tonight" television show, following in the footsteps of his show business family.
Prince Jackson, 16, was to debut on "Entertainment Tonight" on Tuesday, interviewing actors James Franco, Zach Braff and director Sam Raimi as they promote their upcoming film "Oz the Great and Powerful," the program said.
Prince, who was born Michael Joseph Jackson Jr., is the oldest of Michael Jackson's three children.
Jackson's sister Paris, 14, signed up in 2011 to star in a movie called "Lundon's Bridge and the Three Keys," based on a young adult fantasy novel. The film is still in development.
Prince Jackson
Judge Blocks NYC From Film Footage
Ken Burns
A federal judge on Tuesday blocked New York City from getting footage gathered by documentary filmmaker Ken Burns in research for his movie about the five men exonerated in the Central Park jogger rape case.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Ronald L. Ellis said the city had failed to show him a concern so compelling to trump the "precious rights of freedom of speech and the press" when it last fall requested outtakes and other materials from the film "The Central Park Five."
The request was connected to a $250 million federal lawsuit filed by the men against the city nine years ago after their sentences were vacated. The attack on a 28-year-old investment banker occurred in April 1989, when she was found in the park after being beaten and raped while jogging. She was in a coma for 12 days and was left with permanent damage. The men were exonerated after a man already jailed for other crimes confessed, and DNA evidence supported his claim.
Ellis rejected arguments by the city that Florentine Films and filmmakers Ken Burns, David McMahon and Sarah Burns were not independent journalists entitled to reporter's privilege.
Ken Burns
Wins Lawsuit
Patricia Cornwell
A federal jury awarded crime writer Patricia Cornwell nearly $51 million Tuesday in her lawsuit against her former financial management company and a former principal in the firm.
The author best known for her series of novels featuring medical examiner Kay Scarpetta claimed that Anchin, Block & Anchin LLP was negligent in handling her finances and cost her millions in losses or unaccounted for revenue.
Lawyers for the New York firm and former principal Evan Snapper said there was no money missing from Cornwell's accounts. They blamed losses on the economic downturn and what they called Cornwell's extravagant lifestyle, which included Ferraris, helicopters and a temporary apartment in New York City she rented for $40,000 per month.
Cornwell, 56, testified that Anchin moved her from a conservative management strategy to an aggressive one without her permission. She said she fired the firm in 2009 after discovering that her net worth was a little under $13 million, despite having eight-figure earnings in each of the previous four years.
Cornwell said the firm caused her to miss a book deadline for the first time in her career when it failed to find her a suitable place to write after renovation work on her house in Concord went on much longer than expected.
Patricia Cornwell
Reduced Sentence Appealed
Amy Locane-Bovenizer
A state prosecutor on Tuesday appealed the three-year prison sentence given to a former "Melrose Place" actress for a drunken driving death, saying the judge improperly focused on the personal circumstances of the defendant, who has a sick and disabled child.
Amy Locane-Bovenizer, who appeared in 13 episodes of TV's "Melrose Place" and in movies including "Cry-Baby," ''School Ties" and "Secretary," was convicted of vehicular manslaughter and assault by auto in a deadly 2010 accident.
Prosecutors say she was driving with a blood-alcohol level nearly three times the legal limit when her SUV slammed into a car driven by Fred Seeman as he was turning into his driveway in Montgomery Township, in central New Jersey. His wife, Helene, 60, was killed, and he was seriously injured.
Locane-Bovenizer, 41, had faced a prison term of five to 10 years on the most serious count. But citing the needs of her two young children, one of them sick and disabled, the judge last week decided to sentence her at the bottom of a lower sentencing range for a lesser crime, and to have the sentence run concurrently with the term given on the assault charge.
Amy Locane-Bovenizer
Multimillion-Dollar Diamond Heist
Brussels
Eight masked gunmen forced their way through the security fence at Brussels' international airport, drove onto the tarmac and snatched some $50 million worth of diamonds from the hold of a Swiss-bound plane without firing a shot.
The gang responsible for one of the biggest diamond heists in recent years used two black vehicles with a flashing blue police lights in their daring raid late Monday, said Anja Bijnens, spokeswoman for the Brussels prosecutor's office.
"They tried to pass themselves off as police officers," Bijnens said Tuesday. The robbers, who wore outfits resembling dark police clothing, got away with 120 parcels, mostly containing diamonds but some also holding precious metals.
The heist was estimated at some $50 million in diamonds, said Caroline De Wolf of the Antwerp World Diamond Center. "What we are talking about is obviously a gigantic sum," De Wolf said.
Brussels
Apologizes To Women
Ireland
Ireland ignored the mistreatment of thousands of women who were incarcerated within Catholic nun-operated laundries and must pay the survivors compensation, Prime Minister Enda Kenny said Tuesday in an emotional state apology for the decades of abuses in the so-called Magdalene Laundries.
"By any standards it was a cruel, pitiless Ireland, distinctly lacking in a quality of mercy," Kenny said, as dozens of former Magdalenes watched tearfully from parliament's public gallery overhead.
Kenny told lawmakers his government has appointed a senior judge to recommend an aid program for the approximately 1,000 women still living from the residential workhouses, the last of which closed in 1996. He also pledged government funding for the erection of a national memorial "to remind us all of this dark part of our history."
A government-commissioned report published two weeks ago found that more than 10,000 women were consigned to the laundries after being branded "fallen" women, a euphemism for prostitutes, even though virtually none of them were - and instead were products of poverty, homelessness and dysfunctional families. More than a quarter were directly referred by public officials, such as judges or truancy officers, and all spent months or years in menial labor without access to education. Most did laundry for local hotels, hospitals and prisons, while others scrubbed floors or made rosary beads for the church's profit.
Tuesday's state apology marks another step in Ireland's two-decade effort to come to grips with the human rights abuses committed in Catholic-run institutions following Ireland's independence from Britain in 1922, when the fledgling state gave church authorities substantial authority over the education of the young and care for the poor.
Ireland
Blowback
Roger Mahony
American and Italian Catholics have called for a U.S. cardinal accused of covering up sexual abuse by priests not to take part in electing a new pope, saying he would taint the new pontiff with the same scandal that dogged Benedict.
Italy's best-selling magazine Famiglia Cristiana - "Christian Family" - asked its readers whether Roger Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles until 2011, should attend the conclave that elects a successor to Pope Benedict next month - and the overwhelming answer was "no".
The magazine, a weekly popular among churchgoers and very influential in Italy, took up the charge after the U.S. group Catholics United launched a signature drive against Mahony and asked its own readers to vote yes or no.
As archbishop of Los Angeles from 1985, Mahony worked to send priests known to be abusers out of state to shield them from law enforcement scrutiny in the 1980s, according to church files unsealed under a U.S. court order last month.
Although his successor, Archbishop Jose Gomez, removed him from all public and administrative duties, Mahony has announced his intention to fly to Rome where he would be among 117 cardinals allowed into the Vatican's Sistine Chapel to vote for the next leader of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics.
Roger Mahony
Man-Made Chemicals
EDCs
Man-made chemicals in everyday products are likely to be at least the partial cause of a global surge in birth deformities, hormonal cancers and psychiatric diseases, a U.N.-sponsored research team reported on Tuesday.
These substances, dubbed EDCs, could also be linked to a decline in the human male sperm count and female fertility, to an increase in once-rare childhood cancers and to the disappearance of some animal species, they said.
The international group, academic experts working under the umbrella of the United Nations environmental and health agencies UNEP and WHO, issued their findings in a paper updating a 2002 study on the potential dangers of synthetic chemicals.
"We live in a world in which man-made chemicals have become part of everyday life," said their 28-page report, "State of the Science of Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals, 2012," issued as a policy guide for governments.
Using studies of the effect of the chemicals on humans and animals, the team added, a link to EDCs could be suspected in breast and prostate cancer, diabetes, infertility, asthma, obesity, strokes, and Alzheimer and Parkinson's diseases.
EDCs
Horsemeat Scandal Spreads
Nestle
Nestle has removed beef pasta meals sold under its Buitoni brand from sale in Italy and Spain after finding traces of horsemeat, becoming the latest victim of a food scandal still spreading across Europe.
The world's biggest food company, which said as recently as last week its products had not been affected by the scare, said the decision to withdraw the products came after tests over the weekend showed traces of horse DNA in batches of meat used to prepare the meals.
Nestle spokesman Chris Hogg said on Tuesday the withdrawals would have no material financial impact on the company. "These are chilled pasta products that do not have a long shelf life so there are very low levels of inventory," he said.
Swiss-based Nestle withdrew two chilled pasta products, Buitoni Beef Ravioli and Beef Tortellini, in Italy and Spain. Lasagnes à la Bolognaise Gourmandes, a frozen product for catering businesses produced in France, will also be pulled, it said.
The group said tests had found more than 1 percent horse DNA in the products. It was not immediately clear whether the tests had been carried out by Nestle or by a third party.
Nestle
Memorabilia Fetches About $2M
JFK
A private collection of John F. Kennedy memorabilia brought in almost $2 million at auction, including $570,000 for the former president's Air Force One leather bomber jacket.
The collection of about 2,000 photographs, documents, gifts and other items was auctioned Sunday at John McInnis Auctioneers in Amesbury.
The jacket, like many of the items, sold to an anonymous bidder for much more than expected.
An American flag that flew at the White House during the Kennedy administration went for $21,000, even though the price was $3,000 to $6,000.
JFK
In Memory
Tony Sheridan
Tony Sheridan, a British singer who performed with the Beatles during their early years in Hamburg, has died in Germany. He was 72.
Frank Orth, the owner of Wemo Records, a German label that issued his last album, said Sheridan died Saturday. He didn't have details of the cause.
Former Beatle Paul McCartney said on his website that Sheridan "was a good guy who we knew and worked with from the early days in Hamburg."
Sheridan was born in Norwich, England, on May 21, 1940. He went to Hamburg in 1960 with a makeshift band, the Jets - and during his time in the German port city was backed by the Beatles. Sheridan and the Beatles together recorded "My Bonnie," released in 1962.
Sheridan lived near Hamburg in recent years.
Tony Sheridan
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