the best thing i have written lately (justin)
is a mashup of "better than you" by cardi b with "father figure" by taylor swift, which you can listen to here. i say writing somewhat facetiously because i wrote no words for this, i just heard a possibility and pulled two pieces of the zeitgeist together.
in one view, not entirely meritless, mashups are the lowest form of modern pop musical art. they involve little "original" work (in my case, the only "new" elements added are a trap break to make a section feel more unique and then some overlaid drums on the bigger choruses) and to the degree they depend on skill, it's a mechanical skill (how to get the beats synced, how to ensure that the sounds of the pieces mix together smoothly) that is every day more well-handled by computers (i used them for both beat syncing and to separate out the stems of each song so i could get the vocal from the cardi song and instrumental layers that i could mix independently). instead of some form of "authentic" individual expression, i'm just lego-ing products together.
but, as a poster child of postmodernism, that's not my view: my view is that there is beauty in the possibility of the serendipitous collision between the brands and the fact that my contribution was having the idea to bring the pieces together and then seeing it through, doesn't matter. i don't really care about how much effort someone put into my pop music; i care whether it hits. friday night, i started out with the "father figure" beat (my favorite song from the life of a showgirl) and i knew i wanted a cardi song on it and was flipping through i am the drama but finding that the vibes just weren't matching how i'd want before i settled on "better than you" since it seemed like the most promising and there's some energy overlap. i invoked the commands to sync up the beats and listened to see if there was something there and i found that the early sections lined up perfectly with the beat with no changes. my most significant artistic intervention was cutting out one bar of the vocal at the beginning of the bridge so that the structure of the verses in the last half matched the beat changes. a few hours of mixing (a lot of which was just listening over and over and going "fuck yes") and i had the record.
