Dystopian Road Mix Vol. 1: Kansas City to Eastern Michigan

Editor's Note: If you've read anything at all on this blog, it should already be abundantly clear that I am a big ol' geek. As such, one of my favorite things to do whenever I take a road trip is listen to music by artists from the cities I'm passing through. Now, as it happens, today I will be driving from my current home in Kansas City, Missouri to my parents' house in Port Huron, Michigan; and next month, I'll be taking a second trip from Port Huron to my future home in the Washington, D.C. area. So I figured, since I like making mixes, and since this blog is just a giant vanity project anyway, why not turn my music-geek road trip game into a recurring feature?

I'm calling the feature Dystopian Road Mix. Similar to the previously-introduced Dystopian Dance Mix, it will be a Spotify playlist accompanied by my trademark reams of text. There will be two differences, though (other than the obvious travelogue conceit): first, no 80-minute time limit; and second, instead of track-by-track commentary, I'll be grouping the music selections together based on geography (don't worry, though, I'll still write a shit-ton--in fact, I'm pretty sure ). I'm honestly not sure how frequently this feature will recur. As mentioned above, there will definitely be another installment next month; after that, though, it's up in the air. Maybe I'll only make future installments when I'm actually traveling somewhere; maybe I'll revisit trips I've taken in the past; maybe I'll invent imaginary road trips. It all depends on how much time I have on my hands, basically. But in the meantime, please enjoy my guided musical tour through the Midwest; and, as I'm sure I left more than a few notable artists out, feel free to share whatever I've missed in the comments! - Z.H.

Dystopian Dance Mix Vol. 1: It's a Mother('s Day Mix)

Stolen from somebody's Pinterest, but I'm willing to bet this is Public Domain

Editor's Note: Way back in the distant past of my early twenties, I co-ran a pop culture blog similar to this one called the Modern Pea Pod. It was a great experience overall: I got some modicum of exposure for my writing, interviewed people like rock'n'roll pioneer Wanda Jackson and Kid Congo Powers of the Gun Club, and built up a backlog of content that I can now exploit for Throwback Thursdays when I'm too busy and/or lazy to write something new for this blog. Probably my favorite thing about the whole project, though, was our monthly Mixtape: an actual blueprint for making an actual, two-sided, 90-minute cassette tape of songs around a particular theme, complete with timecodes. It was, like most other things related to the Modern Pea Pod, a ludicrously anachronistic and overly complicated exercise (I'm pretty sure we were the only blog ever to advertise via black-and-white flyer, too). But it was also a lot of fun, and a chance to write about music that we loved but that wasn't necessarily "relevant" for a traditional review.

So, in my ongoing effort to strip the Pea Pod's corpse of every last bit of its salvageable flesh (ew), I'm pleased to introduce the spiritual successor to the Modern Pea Pod Mixtape: the Dystopian Dance Mix. The main difference this time around is that it's not meant to be a cassette tape, because this is 2014 and I'm not an insane person. Instead, we're taking advantage of real live 21st century technology and making the playlists streamable via Spotify. My one concession to the old anachronistic format is that each playlist will come in under 80 minutes, the idea being that you could burn it to a CD if you were so inclined (and if you owned all of the music, of course). I plan on getting these playlists out every month or so; the themes for the first two months are a little clichéd and predictable (Mother's Day and Father's Day for May and June, who'da thunk), but you can look forward to more inspired entries after I've gotten warmed up. So here it is, folks: my gift to all the mothers and motherfuckers out there reading this. Enjoy! - Z.H.

Thoughts on Recent Mashups

© The Melker Project

I love mashups--really, any kind of aural collage or remix--more than a reasonable person probably should. During my preteen years, I wasted hours on my Pioneer double cassette deck, mixing everything from Badfinger songs to The Hobbit on audio book into bastard combinations of Frank Zappa's Lumpy Gravy and YouTube Poop. To this day, there are mashups I prefer to any of their constituent parts: a 2005 version of LCD Soundsystem's "Daft Punk is Playing at My House," mixed with Janet Jackson's "Miss You Much" and ingeniously titled "Janet Jackson is Playing at My House," has been stuck in my head for almost a decade now, despite the song itself having seemingly succumbed to the twin Internet plagues of time and DMCA notices. And yeah, I'm one of those assholes who gets legitimately excited whenever a new Girl Talk album is announced.

So it should probably come as no surprise that I instantly fell in love when I heard New York DJ Scott Melker's series of mashup EPs combining recent mainstream hip-hop hits with '70s-'90s pop. My younger sister, who I don't even think would be embarrassed to be publicly described as a Hall and Oates fan, introduced me to last year's Ballin' Oates, the collection that finally gave us the combination of the blue-eyed soul duo's "Rich Girl" and Rich Boy's "Throw Some D's" we never knew we needed. There's also the wonderfully-titled Trill Collins, which left me surprised and frankly dismayed by the amount of latent affection I have for the solo music of Phil Collins, and the even-more-wonderfully-titled Skeetwood Mac, which mixes 2 Chainz' "Yuck!" with the Rumours cut "The Chain"...'nuff said. Most recently at the time of this writing, Melker released Red Hot Trilli Peppers: my least favorite of the bunch, but only because the Chili Peppers have a less interesting body of work than any of the other artists; whatever your feelings on the original songs, pairing B.o.B.'s "Headband" with "Give It Away" is still an inspired move.