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Introducing Jaydiohead
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L to R: Jo Hale / Getty Images; Soul Brother, FilmMagic / Getty Images
A new Jay-Z-Radiohead mashup album brings new meaning to both artists’ work. Meet the DJ behind the latest Internet music sensation.
Until last week, I thought I might be the only person with a deep, heart-aching love for both Jay-Z and Radiohead. I mean, they’re such divergent joys: Radiohead, the brilliant, brooding, pessimistic, artful rockers from working-class Southern England who many think are the best rock band of their generation, and Jigga, the too-cool-for-school, hyper-self-confident, braggadocious, drug-dealer-turned-self-branded-multimillionaire mogul from the Brooklyn projects, who many think is the best MC of his generation.
But there are a lot of people who deeply love both, and finally, one of them decided they were two great tastes that’d taste great together. Minty Fresh Beats, aka 22-year-old Max Tannone, produced Jaydiohead, the new mashup album that’s quickly becoming an Internet sensation. It’s available as a free download at jaydiohead.com.
It’s fun listening to the puzzle coming together, and there’s a deep funkiness to this mixture of gangster tales and intellectual rock.
Minty Fresh is new to New York City. He moved to Manhattan in June after growing up in a tiny, rural town in upstate New York called South Kortright. He does audio post-production—sound effects—for commercials at a video production spot in Soho but because he’s new, his place still leaves much to be desired. “I was bored,” he says. “I have no Internet in my apartment, I got four channels on my TV, I just moved in, it’s small as hell, I said I gotta do something. So I made the project.”
A mashup is a three-way collaboration: a producer, and two pieces of music that were never meant to go together. It’s a postmodern song, maybe even a post-song song, a Burroughsian dream of a song. Technology has become so democratizing—from the programs used to create the music to the ‘Net as a means to distribute it—that anyone can be a big-name music producer and Minty Fresh took advantage.
Over the last six weeks of ’08, Minty Fresh spent all his free time working on the Jaydiohead mashup. Some think making an album like this one simply takes laying a vocal track over an instrumental music bed, but that’s not the way real producers do it. “It’s not like these songs took me ten minutes to do,” Minty Fresh told The Daily Beast. “They took days and days and weeks.” He did it all on a laptop, starting each song with an a cappella version of a Jay-Z song, and then searching for Radiohead songs that had a tempo close to that of Jay’s vocals. “On a lot of Jay-Z mashups [by other producers], “ he says, “The vocals are really sped up, so he sounds like a chipmunk or slowed down so he sounds like a giant. My golden rule is that the a cappella is the master tempo. I’m not tryin’ to change the tempo of his lyrics.” After choosing complementary beats, Minty Fresh considered what it would mean, emotionally, to fuse the tracks. “I say, what vibe do I wanna convey with the new musical world I’m gonna put the lyrics to?”
When he found the right two songs to mash he chopped up the Radiohead song a few measures at a time, to build a beat that the vocals can smoothly flow over. At times he creates loops from parts of the Radiohead songs and lays them cheek to jowl until the structure of the song dictates a music change. “It was like a jigsaw puzzle,” Minty Fresh says. “To make it all sound cohesive is the real battle.”
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KristaJulieva
This is a timely article. What's that? Not 2003 you say? Well than why could they have possibly thought it a subject worth writing an extended article about? Bizarre!
Aaronthethird
This is a quality album, glad to see it getting some recognition.
Adamski
Good article - but for the record, Oxford (where Radiohead come from) is FAR from working-class.
kylian
This album wasn't as good as I expected. I too, am a huge fan of both of these artists, but unfortunately found that the amalgam of their sounds left a lasting impact on only a couple of the tracks. I think the DJ did a really good job here, there's just something messy and forced about a few of the tracks on the album. By this, I mean sometimes the "novelty" factor of a song ("oooh...this is neat!") takes over the pursuit of making interesting music through recycling - the reason why, for example, the Grey Album is an excellent musical work outside of the artists used to sample it, while everything Girl Talk creates is reliant upon simply the "neat" factor of mashing up two disparate artists or genres - and is terrible.
Still definitely worth a listen, however. Glad its getting some press.
Krista-Julieva: What does 2003 have to do with this at all? The samples used in the production of this album were certainly taken from the past, probably late 90's up to 2007, but the final product, that is, a mashup of these two artists and their respective works, is wholly rooted in, and a product of, the current musical landscape of 2009. Your comment is ridiculous.
Alenka
The United Nation's Millennium Development Goals aim to cut world hunger in half by 2015 and eliminating it completely by 2025. An estimated $19 billion would eliminate malnutrition and starvation around the world. Our current defense budget is $522 billion, in comparison.
The Borgen Project (borgenproject.org) provides lots of information about this issue.
KristaJulieva
Kylian: I was not referring to the artists whose work is being mashed up. It is the mash-up concept that is passe. If people want to keep making and listening to mash-ups, okay, but it's ridiculous to devote in 2009 an article about a phenomenon that has been around for almost a decade now.
idkidm
yeah this album was super-boring. waste of toure's ability if you ask me
MinimalWage
I think this mashup is great. Jay-Z's a fantastic MC, but I've never liked his beats. As a DJ/Producer myself, and a champion of the remix, I prefer these tracks to his originals. Nice one Tour�.
FrankleeMiDeer
A contrarian opinion, here: I loved it. It didn't even sound like a mashup in most places.
The interwebs are sho' nuff full of haters, eh?
kylian
Although a phenomenon that has been around for a while, the mashup, like any other musical phenomenon, is continually evolving, continually changing, and eventually will be assimilated in other phenomenons/trends/styles in music - it doesn't just go away. This album is different in many ways than those that came before it, despite utilizing a similar basis of construction.
It is completely contradictory to allow for the fact that its "okay" for people to still listen to mashups - which by the way they ARE - and then to say that writing an article about it is ridiculous. The fact is, people are listening to this album, and the news has picked up on it (*note - it has become an "Internet Music Sensation"). Media report what is going on in the world, not the other way around. You're disregard of the mashup as a relevant musical style doesn't change the fact that thousands of other people are listening attentively to the ways in which this style is changing and shaping our musical landscape.
Again, not defending the album - I didn't like it that much really. But on principle, this article remains relevant.
thecolonel
Toure has the sweetest gig in the world. He's a purported tastemaker, a guy with his finger on the pulse of the streets, but he's about 5% more tuned in than my mom. You're the only guy that likes Jay-Z AND Radiohead? Because fraternities don't exist? People aren't slaves to the top 40? Give me a break.
Though, honestly, this article is perfect for The Beast, and betrays the reason why I should stop reading this site. This site IS for my mom, and is designed to surprise middle-aged white people by about 5%. Which is why Toure is perfect: he's just "cutting edge" enough to impress Tina and the rest of the Beast staff ("a 'mash-up' you say? How 2009!"), but not enough to freak them out.
And by the way: have you heard Coldplay's remake of Biggie's "Everyday Struggle" off their new album, "Sublime Mediocrity"? There's a deep funkiness to its mixture of gangster tales and intellectual rock!
theelfpat
This is not the first time this has happened. Girl Talk did a Radiohead/Jay Z mash-up on his last album, released last summer.
Besides, this isn't really a "sensation." The music tracking site Last.fm reports that they have only 5,000 listeners TOTAL, and are not gaining many more at a fast pace. Probably not a relevant article.
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