Blame it on DJ Earworm

On New Year’s Eve of 2009, as we watched fireworks tear up the aging sky, DJ Earworm (real name Jordan Roseman) released on YouTube a feat of musical pyrotechnics never heard before. United

State of Pop (Blame It On the Pop), loaded with 25 smash hits literally smashed together, was Earworm’s third attempt at mashing Billboard hits up into one cacophonous thing, and his most iconic creation. We are still feeling its ripple effects.

Never before had a mashup gone so far. Back then it was just two or three songs at a time smushed together. Take the bass line of Feel Good Inc. then slap a rap verse on it. Most mashups were at least mildly amusing, and when they were done well they were serendipitous: two art objects encountering each other, like strangers on a street, to form something greater than the sum of its parts. An exquisite mashup sounds the way Japanese wood joinery looks. (My personal favorite was a mashup cheekily called crushcrushfaint, a Paramore x Linkin Park hybrid that also sounded like the last triumphant roar of pop punk and nu metal’s dying embers.)

But Blame It On the Pop was a dazzling abomination. It’s the musical equivalent of a ransom note, the kind where each letter is cut and paste from random magazines. The song starts and it feels like walking into an overcrowded marketplace of hyperactive shills trying to sell you the same thing. Pitbull, The Black Eyed Peas, Beyoncé, and Lady Gaga tell you “I got POP! I got DA-ANCE! I got rockin’ electronic cluuUB BEATS” and you’re like, huh? Huh??? Frantic and haywire, no sentence is allowed to finish its own thought, an exercise in overheated parataxis. Meanwhile you’ve got Jay Sean, Keri Hilson, Flo Rida, and the guy from Kings of Leon telling you, “Baby don’t worry, even if the sky is falling down, just get back up when it knocks you down,” and you’re dealing with at least three specific experiences of “down,” and you’re like, what’re you consoling me for? Will I ever get back up from this barrage?

For a piece of music that relies on multiple components cooperating with each other, Blame

It On the Pop is anarchic and lawless. There are no kings or gods, only hits. (Save for this one sublime moment of apotheosis where will.i.am says “I got a feelin’” and then the guy from The Fray goes “I found God…” like what???)

Blame It On the Pop is misshapen in David Cronenberg way, but instead of heads and limbs it’s beats and hooks. It’s just so much. Was this what Walter Benjamin thought the angel of history was looking at, watching history pile an endless wreckage of relics before him, supposedly the true nature of progress? Perhaps the chimera is a more apt image — a mythical beast whose parts are majestic on their own, but are unnatural as a whole. We marvel at Blame

It On the Pop not (just) because it’s beautiful, even though it is, but because it’s an anomaly of creation. But it is beautiful. I say it’s a beast now but the first time I listened to Blame It On the Pop, I was enraptured. Earworm saw a single year as a unit of history brimming with electro-pop, embraced its chintz and kitsch, and wove a tapestry. Here was a mashup that injected nostalgia directly into the vein.

I can’t pinpoint when it happened but we’ve lately been experiencing mashups not just as art objects but as memes, which makes sense. Both memes and mashups are experiences of intertextuality, and come from the way an idea, or at least its basic template, can take on endless forms or permutations when put together with other things. Maybe it started when Jon Sudano started singing All Star by Smash Mouth over everything. Or maybe Baby x Psychosocial was what set it off. Rage Against the Machine x Vanessa Carlton probably helped it along as well, this movement of musical shitposting.

In a way, Blame It On the Pop prepared us for chimeric memes and media. It primed us to live in a world where we are always consuming juxtaposed things. Now we move through an entertainment landscape that references itself so much you have to get everything to get anything.

I don’t know if this is something to mourn, but I will tell you what isn’t worth the lamentation. Pedants might dismiss Blame It On the Pop as proof of pop’s homogeneity, how all pop music sounds the same and that the music industry at large is artistically bankrupt. And for sure, this world is never going to run out of Macklemores and imagined dragons. But listen to DJ Earworm’s newest mashup, Decade of Pop, clocking in at a hundred songs (in three minutes). It’s all Billboard crap, but it soars. Taio Cruz and Ke$ha sing “It goes on and on and on/tick-tock on the clock, don’t stop” and Adele and Ne-Yo come in with an imploration: “Remind me of/everything tonight.” It’s not a ransom letter. This mashup sings with the ramshackle perfection of a renga poem, forced enjambments and all.

I think Blame It On the Pop introduced many of us to the idea of how much pop music colors the days of our lives. We move through the world and come upon radio waves, hijacked house party speakers, mixtapes from lovers, and DJs getting us to fall in love again, and we take all those songs with us. We put them in our scrapbooks, the clock strikes midnight, fire lights the sky, and we move on to the future. And what is the future if not the expanding empire of memory?

‘United State of Pop,' the iconic annual mashup, set a precedent for how we experience media and nostalgia.