Distilling a year of music into five minutes
Nine years in, and the dazzling act of curation known as “The United State of Pop” has attained the status of a party trick that can make you smile while also illuminating part of your world.
Begun in 2007 by San Francisco DJ Jordan Roseman, better known as DJ Earworm, the videos extract the essence of 25 of the year’s biggest singles and mash them up into an unfailingly seamless five-minute pop history lesson.
For this year’s entry, Roseman upped the ante, doubling the number of singles and subtitling the result“50 Shades of Pop.” In its first six days, it racked up 3.6 million views on YouTube.
Despite the increase in raw material, the video’s foundation rests on five main ingredients: The Weeknd’s “Can’t Feel My Face,” Ellie Goulding’s “Love Me Like You Do,” Ma- roon 5’s “Sugar,” a dash of Adele’s “Hello,” and lots and lots of Taylor Swift.
The end result certainly bears out Roseman’s observation to Billboard that music in 2015 is “going through a softer phase . . . so there’s that return of adult contemporary.”
How much of that is a true reflection of the year and how much can be chalked up to a natural bias toward selecting tracks that fit with what you’ve already chosen may not be as black and white as it seems.
After all, even a cursory glance at not only the Billboard charts but the most played songs on Spotify and YouTube reveals an unsettling homogeneity: Adele, Justin Bieber, Drake, Justin Bieber, the Weeknd, Justin Bieber. It’s not DJ Earworm’s fault if his exercise makes a point we might not want to confront.
But was popular music in 2015 really as narrow as that? After all, this week brought another annual exercise in mapping the mainstream, the habitually risible Grammy nominations, and the view from there is considerably less obstructed. Any year in which rapper Kendrick Lamar pulls in more nominations than either Taylor Swift or the Weeknd can be safely said to defy a 300-second summation.
This was also a year in which country songwriter Chris Stapleton achieved literally overnight stardom from a single TV appearance, although having Justin Timberlake along as a duet partner didn’t hurt.
Neither of those bona fide mainstream successes shows up in “The United State of Pop” — by design, we should add — but they make a compelling argument that 2015 was too unruly to fit into a single narrative.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for a painless way of supporting (or refuting) the argument, YouTube has a handy compilation of all but the first edition of DJ Earworm’s musical yearbooks: a 34-minute summary of a bunch of summaries, as it were.
Regardless of which side of the debate you fall on, “The United State of Pop” undeniably reflects the work of a master craftsman. The similarly ambitious year-in-fiveminutes mash-ups that Vancouver DJ Daniel Kim creates, on the other hand, feel a little more like an act of auteurship.
This year’s “Danthology,” the sixth annual, has been split into two parts. Part one covers 45 songs in under 4 1⁄ minutes. Part two is positively
2 expansive by comparison, mashing up 37 tracks in just under 5 1⁄ min
2 utes.
Despite using much of the same source material — the Weeknd, Ellie Goulding, Bieber, Swift — Kim takes a broader view, mixing hits with relative failures such as Britney Spears’ and Iggy Azalea’s “Pretty Girls” and Madonna’s “Bitch, I’m Madonna.”
He even works in fleeting snippets of his own music as a sort of low-key conversation with the rest of the proceedings.
The end product remains technically impressive but admirably idiosyncratic. There is no monolithic beat from beginning to end, for starters, and the music wanders beyond DJ Earworm’s deliberately strict parameters, taking in everyone from Paris electro act Martin Solveig to Sweden’s Tove Lo to German house DJ Zedd.
In the process, Kim makes the mainstream in 2015 sound more eclectic than DJ Earworm does. And, possibly, more than it actually was.