With The Magic iPod anybody can be a good mashup DJ. Simply drag the mid-2000’s hip-hop song across to an available saccharine pop song and you got yourself a bangin’ mashup. Below are few mashups that I liked. But really, this is so magical you’re going to struggle to make any horrible mixes.
Lose Control – Soul Meets Body Mashup
Country Grammar – Complicated Mashup
Laffy Taffy – Misery Business Mashup
(If you download then donate to the ACLU while you’re there)
Right on the heals of this large hip hop mixtape dump comes an enlightening Vox video that explores the advancing complexity of rap lyrics and rhyme construction. Employing the research of Martin Connor and some helpful visual aids, the video explores how the best artists manipulate words, rhymes, beats, and motifs in continually sophisticated ways.
Here is a playlist highlighting songs used in the video and others that are choice examples of how outstanding rhyming in rap can be.
Jason Scott has uploaded thousands and thousands of hip-hop mixtapes to the Internet Archive (almost 6,000 to date). He says he has access to over 17,000 tapes and somewhere close to that number might end up on the Archive over the next few months. There is obviously a ton of hip-hop culture to dig through here. Jason notes:
There’s a lot coded into the covers of these mixtapes (not to even mention the stuff coded into the lyrics themselves) – there’s stressing of riches, drug use, sexual drive, and oppression. I’m personally fascinated at the amount of reference to codeine and the purple color of “Purple Drankâ€, which, if you’ve missed that subject matter up to now… good for you.
If you’re new to the world of hip-hop mixtapes (as I am) the links below should get your discovery started
This is a great time to point out that the Internet Archive is an invaluable resource. In these times of link rot and the haphazard closing of essential web services (we miss you Google Reader) the Internet Archive is, well, archiving the web. The Wayback Machine now indexes over 435 billion webpages going back nearly 20 years.
The end goal here, like all the things I do in this realm, is simple: Providing free access to huge amounts of culture, so people can reference, contextualize, enjoy and delight over material in an easy-to-reach, linkable, usable manner. Apparently it’s already taken off, but here you go too.
