Though obviously rooted in the beat matching and live mixing of the disc jockey, the mashup, as we know it today, is a distinctly '00s phenomenon that revealed itself at the very beginning of the decade. And the modern blueprint for expertly splicing together two songs (often from mind-blowingly disparate sources) comes from both Girl Talk and Danger Mouse.
The former has produced albums pulled directly from the Internet's punishing deluge of freely available music. Meanwhile, the latter has composed the mashup's most conceptually consistent statement to date: The Grey Album, a pairing of Jay-Z's Black Album with the Beatles' self-titled double LP also known as The White Album.
Though similarly skilled at balancing delicious novelty and supreme craftsmanship, Chicago production duo the Hood Internet falls somewhere between Girl Talk and Danger Mouse. Take, for example, the pair's mash du jour — a slick and smooth combination of Chromeo's synthy "When the Night Falls" and the soaring, soulful vocals from the late Whitney Houston's "How Will I Know."
Result: the best Miami freestyle club banger that never actually existed. And that's the beauty of the mashup.
