A Year of Music

It’s nearly impossible to describe the state of mind engendered by listening to Frenchbloke’s recentish DJ set (I don’t know its provenance, but it came to me entitled And a Big Fuck You Too, which is par for the course with Frenchbloke). Frenchbloke, in case you don’t know, is one of the most prolific and talented of the original wave of mashup / bastard pop internerds who came to prominence in the early ’00s. My favorite of his mashups is “Bad Spicy Horny”, which combines bits of songs by the Bloodhound Gang, Bolz Bolz, some random R&B singer, and the Spice Girls. It shouldn’t work at all but something about the way he flows it all together produces something far more interesting than the individual pieces.

He seems to have developed into a DJ that aims for “diverse” and ends up somewhere west of “completely bonkers”, but he’s maintained that ability to sew together pieces that shouldn’t fit: Spahn Ranch (no, not that one, the one that came before it with the dude from Numb) into The Passions’ “I Fell in Love With a German Film Star” (both incredibly obscure bands remembered only by die-hard goth and New Wave fans), languid vocodered disco into Test Department at their most confrontational into Afrika Bambaataa & John Lydon into a cheesy grebo cover of The Undertones’ “Teenage Kicks”, Brian Eno’s “The Quiet Men” into Heaven 17’s “Fascist Groove Thang”, spoken-word rants against jukeboxes mixing into “No Can Do” – somehow he welds all this cultural flotsam into a mix that exudes jaded sophistication and wit. I think this kind of cleverness is what a lot of college radio DJs aim for, but almost none of them make it, because they concentrate too hard on the eclecticism and not enough on the flow. If anyone’s interested, I can make it available, because I doubt Frenchbloke cares if I mirror it.