...Except Rap and Country.

The website BoingBoing (click on picture for source) pointed me to this mashup. It's by DJ Top Cat, and it mashes "Folsom Prison Blues" by Johnny Cash with "Let's Take a Trip" by Eazy-E. It's a really interesting mashup for me, because it comes just as I'm about to assign this blog post to my students, about genre, class, and race.

My husband has a theory that rappers and country musicians are particularly talented when they cross over and act in movies - significantly better than other types of musicians. He says that it might be, as Laura Pochodylo says, because the concept of authenticity is so integral to both of these spectral extreme genres. These artists are so used to proving (pretending?) their realness to us that putting on a costume and becoming a character can be quite familiar.

This mashup starts with Johnny Cash's famous introduction, and the opening guitar riff from "Folsom Prison Blues," completely unaltered. Instead of Cash's vocals, however, Eazy-E takes center stage as he starts rapping: "Aw yeah! Let's take a trip..." These vocals seem much more energized when compared with their original setting: the phrases are sped up to Johnny Cash's tempo. A single chord from "Folsom Prison Blues" is looped as the backing for the rap. I wrote in my dissertation that rap is relatively easy to mash things up with, because the vocals aren't sung. (And, to be clear, easier to produce doesn't necessarily means less valuable, less creative, or less anything else!) Mashing with rap, actually, is what rappers and producers do, and have done historically, with samples since the late 1970s. The only thing that separates a track like this from Eazy-E's original track is that a mashup uses at least two completed, commercially-released songs, and keeps them both in a recognizable format. (See my Music Theory Online article for more details.)

It's an interesting concept - mixing rap and country, and when I was doing dissertation research, I discovered this group: Gangstagrass. It's essentially the same idea as the Johnny Cash/Eazy-E mashup, but (a) it's done live, and (b) it's original music (as far as I know). I'm hearing fewer people say that they listen to "everything except rap and country" these days. But we do need to be aware of what we're saying when we make statements like that, and that's why I'm going to assign Pochodylo's blog post to my students.