So, where to begin? The week-long outage has really put me off my game, I’m afraid, and I’m not quite sure which pieces to pick up first. Oh, let’s see, maybe… this one:

A few years ago, The Girlfriend and I had a semi-heated discussion over mash-ups, those songs in which two or more well-known tunes are digitally blended together to produce something new. Her favorite radio station had recently begun a new drive-time feature, the mash-up of the day, and she was pretty enchanted with them for a while. Anne argued that the ones that worked, worked very well, and on their own terms as actual songs, not merely as interesting or amusing novelties. She was impressed by the artistry behind picking just the right elements to combine in order to achieve a certain effect. While I didn’t (and still don’t) dispute that there is a certain skill involved in a successful mash-up, I was (and am) pretty uncomfortable with the basic concept of it, i.e., using pieces of someone else’s work to “create” one for yourself. Anne (and other friends I’ve discussed this with) have asked me how this is any different than George Lucas borrowing much of the plot of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress for Star Wars, or why I enjoy those YouTube videos that put scenes from well-known movies to theme songs from ’80s detective shows. I don’t have a good answer to that, except that the examples feel different. In the latter case, the end result is obviously intended to be nothing more than a joke, while in the former case, Lucas wasn’t splicing together actual footage from The Hidden Fortress with clips from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Being inspired by someone else’s story while creating your own similar-but-different story feels more legitimate to me than mashing up (or whatever the verb form is) bits of existing media. And YouTube gags seem harmless to me in a way that mash-up songs do not.

(For the record, I don’t care for sampling, either; I remember being infuriated by the popularity of “Ice Ice Baby” and “U Can’t Touch This” because no one seemed to realize — or care — that the backing instrumentals were from Queen’s “Under Pressure” and Rick James’ “Super Freak,” respectively.)

If you’ll notice, though, my hang-up seems to be with the use of existing recordings. I’m not nearly as troubled by the idea of someone re-arranging other people’s music if they record the final result themselves. Which is the loophole that enables me to think the following is a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of total awesome:

An insanely unlikely melding of ’80s pop and ’80s hair metal, done so skillfully that if you didn’t know the source material, you’d swear it was an original song? Oh, hell yeah! I’ve already ordered the CD. Yes, actual physical media. Because I’m old, and the website didn’t offer a download option anyhow.

I thought at first that Rock Sugar must be a cover band that came up with a clever marketing gimmick, but a little digging reveals that lead singer Jess Harnell is the voice-over artist who played Wacko on the early-90s TV series Animaniacs, among many, many other things. This leads me to believe that there was a bit more calculation involved in the birth of Rock Sugar than just “hey, wouldn’t it be funny if we started playing a Metallica song, but you started singing Journey lyrics instead?” However Harnell came up with this idea, though, I think it’s bloody brilliant. And they’re playing it to the hilt, too — check out the band’s website, read their insane story and member bios, and listen to the rest of their music. If you like the ’80s the way I like the ’80s — or even if you hate the ’80s and just like to snigger at the excess and schmaltz of that decade — you ought to be amused.

Via Scalzi, who may have just made up for all the snarky shit he’s said about Night Ranger over the past year.