Play For Today: Mashability Is Key

26 January 2009 | 12:46 AM

After another brief hiatus from my little experiment in creative schadenfreude – this time due to some actual work I which, much to my chagrin, I couldn’t avoid tackling any longer – I’m back and better than ever. Well, I’m back, at least. For tonight’s installment, I’m going to give a go at something I’ve been curious about trying for a week or two now – namely, creating a lyrical mashup. I’ve long been a fan of traditional audio mashups, in which DJ’s take tracks from two disparate songs and figure out how to meld them into one ditty (for an amazing example of the art-form, give this a listen), so I wondered if taking the aural piece out of the equation might still leave us with something, well, worthwhile. To give myself a little bit of a structure to leap off from, I’m borrowing an idea from a blog I came across a million years ago, First Lines, which (briefly) compiled a list of the the opening lines of works of literature. In my case, I’ll focus on opening lines of songs, and just to bring a bit of sanity to this (so I don’t spend all night listening to every song in my collection), I will grab a single playlist that I’ve already created and use only the songs in it as fodder. Keep in mind that the concept of what constitutes an “opening line” is pretty vague – perhaps the only creative part of this exercise is deciding where to snip? It’s a bit choppy, I’ll grant you, but I was a little surprised at how well it (almost) works:

Experiment #1

I was friendly with this girl who insisted on touching my face
Nobody’s perfect, and that’s something that I’m sure she’ll know.
‘I might be old but I’m someone new,’ she said.
She’s so strange
This is the moment that you know that you told her that you loved her but you don’t.

God that was strange to see you again
Bright, just like the stars above me
On my picture shelf, statues mocking me.
I heard you cry aloud all the way across town.
There’s still a little bit of your taste in my mouth.
You sure you want to be with me? I’ve nothing to give.
Please remember me happily by the rosebush laughing.

This is how it works, it feels a little worse
How does it feel like to wake up in the sun?
I live at the top of a mountain.
Every day I wake up and it’s Sunday.
I want to crawl back inside my mother’s womb.
Give it to me, don’t give it away.

You want to know why I hate you? Well I’ll try and explain
You said I’d wake up, dead drunk, alone in the park.
And I’m not going back into rags or in the hole.
Why should he come back through the park?

Extra credit to those of you who can name all of the songs in question without Googling the lyrics.

Posted by Andy in Play For Today