Recently a collegue of mine, Anthony Cushing, directed me to this article by Alexander Iadarola. (The picture is from the article, written for Fader magazine.)
Aha! This is exactly where my research is taking me next. How timely. Enough time has passed since their inception (commonly agreed upon as 2001) to look back on mashups and make the types of generalizations that are only possibily with a retrospective gaze. In his recent book, Retromania, Simon Reynolds asserts that mashups, with the exception of those created by Girl Talk, had “petered out” by the middle of the last decade, only a few years after their emergence onto the music scene (Reynold, 359). Yet Iadarola seems to have a different opinion. "While the mash-up in its purest form is still largely absent from the 2015 musical landscape," he acknowledges, "a new generation of producers are quietly using the mash-up aesthetic to create abstract sound collages that reflect our hectic online lives" (Iadarola). This so-called mashup aestheic is reminiscent of the way I use the term "mashing" in my MTO article.
Mashing isn't just for mashups, in other words. The technique is everywhere, from software development to fashion. Iadarola hypothesizes that the internet itself is something of a "media collage" that presents so much data to us simultaneously that we're sort of forced into putting it all together in a meaningful way. But we're left with a chicken-or-egg conundrum in the end. Did the mashup aestheic influence technology and/or the way we process technology? Or did technology lead to the development of mashing? I'm willing to say that it's certainly something of a mutually reinforcing relationship. Of course, the advent of home-mixing software led to the possibility of a mashup being created by an amateur in his or her bedroom. The genre itself is dependent on technology. On the other hand, mashups and mashing have been undeniably influential. Who knows if our internet experience in 2015 would be nearly as chaotic were it not for the widespread embrace of the mashing aesthetic?