This does not really fit with any of the questions (in my comparative music class), but I thought it was absolutely fascinating and wanted to share it with the class. The links are to (legal, free) files - either audio clips from Amazon (Windows Media) or full-length MP3s. Album or artist names that are hyperlinks are to either thier web page or the appropriate Amazon page for that album. Joy Division was an English post-punk band from the late seventies. Over a decade before I became interested in that style of music, the lead singer Ian Curtis had committed suicide in 1980, and the band had, by a compact they'd all made, reformed into the New Wave band New Order. One of Joy Division's better known songs (and one of the first I ever heard) is "Love Will Tear Us Apart". There's a studio version (from the 1988 compliation album Substance) here and a live version from the Complete BBC recordings album here. Both were recorded in during the same time period - late 1979. A tribute album, A Means to an End came out in 1995. Here's a clip of "Stanton-Miranda" covering the same song. While it's still true to the original (the singer even sounds similar), it's got a slightly different feel. Some of the other songs on the album have little to no resemblance to the original (Read the reviews of the album if you don't want to listen). But the purist fans hadn't heard anything yet... Sometime around 2003 (the webpage is annoyingly spare) there sprang up a band called "Jah Division", who create dub versions of songs - including "Love Will Tear Us Apart". Here's the MP3. VERY markedly different from the original, transforming the original into ... well, dub. With the advent of "mash-ups", someone called "Dsico" created a mix between Missy Elliott and Joy Division (called "Love Will Freak Us Apart"). The MP3 can be found here. The fusion of these originally disparate sounds is part of the attraction of such mashups - it's both wrong, yet... in another sense, it works pretty well. (Note: There are some explicit lyrics in this mashup. A better-done (and with no naughty lyrics) mashup of Beyonce and Led Zeppelin is here. Which leads us to the final example - and the one that originally got me to put this together and think of this class. It's Albert Kuvezin & Yat-Kha, Tuvan throat singers (yes, as mentioned in Ch. 1) covering the same song. Bizarre, unexpected, and... well, neat. Listen to the MP3 here. There's no great point or original observation here - it's just fascinating to see this song metamorphose as it changes through time, artists, and genres. It's neat - and somewhat sobering in implications - that this kind of cultural transmission simply would not occur like this prior to the 20th century. Anyhow, I thought you all might also find it interesting. If you'd like to check out more, there are histories of Joy Division here. Wikipedia articles explain mash-ups and dub music. If you'd like to hear more mashups, check out Mashmix for lots of examples. Oh, and the lyrics for "Love Will Tear Us Apart" are here.
Back to Newness is Relative