Yo Reader! I’m really happy that you get to see this – and I’mma let you finish – but this audiovisual mashup of Beck, Beyonce, T-Swift, & Yeezus is the best audiovisual mashup of Beck, Beyonce, T-Swift, & Yeezus of ALL TIME!!!
Ok, so there’s not a particularly large sample size to go off, but nonetheless, this is pretty damn impressive. Released earlier today by veteran internet mashup artist iPunx, “Loser Walks (With Troubles)” combines a recent country/pop hit, a proto-hipster experiment, a girl-power dance anthem, and the definitive turn of the century hip-hop gospel into a piece of true multimedia that pleases popular and non-conformist sensibilities with equal gusto. Though it isn’t at the level of The Grey Album, and most certainly won't have the staying power of Danger Mouse's 2004 epic Jay-Z/Beatles mashup, iPunx has created something that ever-so-briefly transcends the sum of its parts, and while he makes it seem easy, the differences between the music and musicians he’s working with cannot be understated.
Imagine if Beck, Bey, Swift, & West were physically combined into a singular mythical creature of popular culture, a musical Sphinx if you will, and that such a creature assumed a naturally beautiful form, and the difficulty of engineering such an ambitious vision makes itself clear. Four divergent sounds that span three decades should not mix with the seamless alacrity of a musical Magic Eye puzzle, yet they do, and quite well.
(Sidenote: Beck, Bey, Swift, & West sounds like a law firm you do not want to mess with)
Which begs the question: are these four musicians, these artists with seemingly polarizing disparities, so different after all? On the surface: absolutely. From the lyrics they sing to the clothes that they wear to the manner in which they walk onto stage, these four bastions of pop-culture present vibrations of differing frequencies, yet from tempo to melody to arrangement, it’s very difficult to deny that they’ve drawn from eerily similar wells of creativity in their individual songwriting efforts.
Perhaps this is by design – they and the people who’ve influenced their artistic decision making are deeply rooted in an industry notorious for smoke and mirrors. After all, the members of Milli Vanilli weren’t the ones who decided that lip-synching would be a fortuitous career choice (Artisa, the duo’s former label, maintained that they had nothing to do with the group’s career ruining scandal), and while nobody is accusing anybody of fraud here, it’s ludicrous to earnestly believe that the multi-million dollar enterprises of Beck, Bey, Swift, & West make business decisions without anything that resembles cold-blooded pragmatism.
Even so, it’s equally unfair to accuse them of discovering the Rosetta Stone of pop song form as it is to blame them of profiting from its exploitation. Far more likely is that these four artists of different ages, cultures, and backgrounds have tapped into a creative force that resonates regardless of delivery. Or as Kanye would say: pure genius.