American Edit
Posted by shanoah on March 18, 2008
First, just as a note, though I may put up a good deal of Irish music, I don’t actually have any Irish ancestry I know of, whereas if you go back far enough, you will eventually find Gypsies in my family tree. And, yeah, I quite enjoyed Sean’s last post.
So, before I move on to today’s post, thought I’d share this clip from “Train de vie“, a movie about Gypsies and Jewish people trying to escape the Holocaust. Here we have Jewish Klezmer meeting Romani music:
Anyways, back to one of the other types of music I take great interest in – mashups. A mashup is a piece of music created by taking clips from multiple pieces of music, combining them, and mangling them to your hearts content. In yet another example of how our copyright laws stifle innovation, they are normally illegal, due to the difficulty of getting permission for every sample involved.
And a mashup video would be a video for a mashup song that also combines videos for the various pieces of songs.
Now some of you may be familiar with an album by Green Day, American Idiot.
What you may not be familiar with is a mashup album based on American Idiot, called “American Edit“, by “Dean Grey”. It was actually a quite popular album before being taken off their website for copyright infringement[1], and it’s still fairly easy to find copies on bittorrent.
The following two songs are from that album:
Boulevard of Broken Songs (Note: One Swear Word, for the easily offended who weren’t already offended by the previous video)
This, naturally, is mainly “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” with large sections of Oasis’s “Wonderwall” (a great song in itself), and also including parts of Travis’s “Writing to Reach You”, Aerosmith singing “Dream On”, and Green Days “American Idiot”.
Dr. Who on Holiday
This wonderful song combines a speech by George W Bush, a speech by the Daleks, Green Day’s “Holiday”, the Timelords “Doctorin’ the Tardis”, and within *that* song, samples of Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part 2.”
And, yes, those Daleks look incredibly hokey. That’s because they are straight from the “Doctorin’ the Tardis” video. Fun song, though.
[1] By the record company, not Green Day[2], who’s lead singer expressed interest, after hearing “Boulevard of Broken Songs” on the radio.
[2] Which is not untypical. Often the record companies are a lot less open-minded[3] about these things then the artists.
[3] As witness Weird Al’s parody of James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful”, named “You’re Pitiful”. James Blunt had no problems with it whatsoever, but his record label objected[4] to it.
[4] Which is why, a) Weird Al scattered a dozen copies of it on the internet, and b) edits their Wikipedia entry in the “White and Nerdy” video[5] to say “YOU SUCK!”.
[5] Aren’t footnotes fun?
[6] There is no footnote 6.
