Chapomatic

No Mozart in this post; you’re forewarned, guy.

This is one of the more inspired mashup boots I’ve seen recently (h/t BoingBoing).

Mashups, or bootlegs, were a fad a couple of years ago where someone would take one song and force it to fit with another song, making a new song in the process and impossible to match with most countries’ copyright laws as for-profit items. So they hide in the shadows a bit. Sometimes they get in trouble, sometimes the EFF defends them, sometimes they show up on an hour long BBC special mix of nothing but boots.

There were some great boots out there, and a couple of songs released with a capella B sides got recontextualized about a million times (because it’s a lot easier to put an a capella track on top of Old Smokey, as it were).

Problem, though, is that Sturgeon’s Law applies: “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” So the ease of making a boot caused a flood of really bad attempts and they got less sexy. Now and then, though, a good one pops up. This one ain’t total revelation but a neat idea. One of the best is Rick James’s Super Freak with a crime jazz backing.