by DJ Morgoth (MP3)
Early in the decade, I was a sucker for blends, or mashups, or
A-plus-B mixes, or stupid gimmicks, or whatever you wanted to call
them. Then they all started to suck, and I stopped caring. So part of
the shock of this marvelous piece of work isn’t just that Germany’s DJ
Morgoth managed to fuse two of the most horribly obvious records ever
made—Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” and Nirvana’s
“Smells Like Teen Spirit”—into a brilliant whole. It’s that (a)
no one had done it before, even back when it seemed like this sort of
thing was what everyone was doing, and (b) anyone could make
something this good in that vein again, something that hits so giddy
and hard.
Morgoth’s blend is seamless, but more than that, it sounds like
inevitability that even those of us who love both songs on their own
never quite saw coming. Astley’s “I-I-I just want to tell you how I’m
feeling” over the bridge has as much tension-knot rising excitement as
Cobain’s “Hello, hello, how low.” And when one chorus meets the other,
every division between the two songs, their fan bases, their presumed
historical weight, and the sea change of their respective
eras—which the historian in me still vouches for even if the
tracks were originally released only four years apart—all
completely collapse.
Strictly as audio, this is one of the tracks of the year, but
watching the cut-together YouTube video makes it even better. Together,
Astley’s smooth, goofy dance moves and Nirvana’s snarling,
steam-generating high-school-gymnasium mosh pit work a visual tandem as
weirdly apt as the aural one. As someone who was awakened one morning
last summer by an unknown caller to my cell phone only to have “Never
Gonna Give You Up” blare in my half-sleeping ear at top volume, I can
assure you that “Rickrolling” isn’t even the half of it.
by Imogen Heap (myspace.com/enigmadjv)
Speaking of out-of-nowhere remixes and historical returns, Heap’s
2005 vocal-processed a cappella siren song is reworked into unabashedly
pretty dubstep that recalls nothing so much as the halcyon days of LTJ
Bukem: bass huge but not heavy, the whole thing floating like a soap
bubble.
by Millie & Andrea (Daphne)
Not that dubstep always has to be pretty, mind you. Sometimes, as
with this 12-inch by the pseudonymous DJ Miles and Andy Stott, it’s
best to just hurtle like a bullet train through a lightning storm. 
That Enigma mix is way too heavily vocalized to be classified as dubstep.
Are we just throwing around the word dubstep for anything that has any degree of sub bass now?
I like some of the Bootie mashups.