Mashup Roundup: DJ Earworm Combines 25 Biggest Songs of the Year

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United State of PopTalk about polishing turds. San Francisco producer DJ Earworm has done the seemingly impossible: he’s combined all of the Billboard Top 25-selling singles of the year into one, 4-minute mashup, and shockingly, it’s really pretty listenable. He calls it “United State of Pop,” and you can listen to it on his website here. He’s been getting a bit of blog press about it, but he’s my buddy so I get the first interview.

First up, why just the Top 25? Was #26 just too terrible? And how did you manage to combine all these songs?

I made a mashup a while back called “What’s my Name,” where I attempted to glue 22 songs together to give them some semblance of structure. I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to take a bunch of songs from a single year and mash them all up together, to make a sort of musical time capsule capturing the zeitgeist of the era. I’d use only the most identifiable hooks and riffs from the most popular hits, and try to keep them as short as possible, to pack them in.

Below: DJ Earworm
DJ EarwormLooking at the Billboard charts, I realized that many of the tracks had acapellas available. Not only that, but half the songs were either in the same key or at least close enough to shift the pitch without making the vocals sound too weird. I threw the hooks from Maroon 5, Justin Timberlake, “Glamorous”, “Umbrella”, and “Fergalicious” all over the umbrella beat, and liked how it sounded. I started adding more and more vocals, until at some point I had most of the chart-toppers in a single mashup. At that point, it became a challenge, just to see if it could be done. I wanted a nice round number for presentation’s sake, so I added a few more songs to make it 25. For the hopelessly out-of-key tracks, I could often find short enough melodic snippets that the song would remain in key for at least two seconds.

What’s cool about your track is that it isn’t just a random collage, it’s got a “hook” and some organization to it. Is this part of the Earworm agenda?

I believe that a mashup should sound like an actual song, rather than a mini-megamix. To really get a piece of music into your head, it needs to have structure: Parts that repeat, parts that almost repeat, and parts that don’t repeat. I decided the initial combination of hooks would be my chorus, and then I set about filling in the rest. A normal pop song will have a verse/chorus/bridge structure, with the choruses being identical, the verses being fairly similar, and the bridge standing out as different. As long as the chorus keeps returning, the listener will get enough repetition to make the song stick, and hopefully the whole thing will sound like a single song.

People ask me this all the time so I’ll ask you: is there any song that’s so terrible you wouldn’t use it in one of your productions? Do you have a line you won’t cross?

It’s all about the end result. If you can re-arrange a piece of crap song into something nice, it doesn’t matter how bad it used to sound. That being said, I prefer to use music I like. United State of Pop had me playing the role of dispassionate observer, so I was forced to put Fergie’s “Big Girls Don’t Cry” somewhere in there. I just tried to use the least icky part of it.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

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And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

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