When it comes to making a good mashup, the songs an artist blends together tend to fall into two broad categories: pairings that make total sense in a traditional sense, and pairings that make absolutely no sense but sound bizarrely great. Though it can still be tricky for mashup artists to monetize their music, the way in which we share music today at the very least makes it a lot easier for their songs to be heard. Mashups became so pervasive that they even spawned arguments over whether they were "real" art or not due to the utilization of preexisting music, which also created problems for many mashup artists who wanted to release their the music on a traditional label (sound familiar, hip-hop fans?).
As the free distribution model of sharing music was slowly turning into the norm and audio editing programs became more easily accessible to the average person, we saw a boom in the creation of mashups in the mid-2000s that's continued on to this day.
When it comes down to it, hip-hop essentially was just a mashup at its inception- DJs would loop breakbeats from well-known funk and disco songs and MCs would rap over them, creating something new out of something familiar (i.e., what any good mashup should do). We run through some of the best mash-ups from the mid-aughts.Ĭonsidering how important and pervasive sampling has always been in rap, it’s no surprise the genre is a perfect fit for mashups.