I’ve just returned from the 40th annual meeting of the Society for Music Theory. Although I didn’t give a paper myself, I was excited to see that there was going to be a brief presentation on mashups during the Popular Music Interest Group meeting. It was titled “Perceiving the Mosaic: Form in the Mashups of DJ Earworm” by Jeff Yunek, Benjamin Wadsworth, and Simon Needle; Yunek presented the paper. I found this research particularly interesting, perhaps because I’ve never focused on form in my own work. In fact, Yunek began the presentation by quoting DJ Earworm on his opinion about form in mashups. I’ve used this particular quote myself, too. He says that mashups should maintain a form similar to that of a pop song - listeners are used to hearing verses and choruses, and mashups should maintain that structure. Someone like Girl Talk obviously doesn’t abide by this prescription, as he constructs megamix mashups, but Earworm also uses a large number of songs in his mashups, and they don’t play out the same way that Girl Talk’s do. Yunek argued that despite his call for traditional verse/chorus form, DJ Earworm’s own mashups don’t strictly follow that rule. There are often multiple choruses in his mashups, for example, from multiple source songs.
The research was labeled a “corpus study,” a claim I found rather dubious. Yunek himself admitted that he was slightly uncomfortable with this label: the set studied was of only seven songs, although upward of 100 source songs were used in constructing these seven mashups. DJ Earworm has a significant amount of output, and I think to do a true corpus study, the majority of his work would have to be considered. Still, the work was mostly convincing. Yunek used Trevor deClercq’s concepts of “role” to trace the locations of samples within Earworm’s mashups. He found that what he calls “role unity” was quite common: verses map onto verses, choruses map onto choruses, etc. Role unity is, in his words, “when all of the borrowed samples in a section share the same role.” Overall, I thought it was well done. I was glad to hear this presentation, and excited to think about an aspect of mashups that I’ve haven’t done much work with before.