Shania, Mark III

she's looking faker by the day though

For my next trick, I'm going to mash up Eddy Grant and Michael Jackson.

(Really she is better than the Flaming Lips, of course.)

Cf. roughly four tracks from Lil' Kim's Bella Mafia.

Is this the best pun in history?

On the other hand, the few redeeming parts of the disc remind me of what Tom once wrote – when, opposing the notion of “watered-down music”, he proposed a critical model of thinking of it as a cocktail, rich with flavours and refreshing. The blue mix of “Juanita” is one of the only things on there that I can genuinely imagine inducing sevdah (Bosnian term for getting into state of euphoria through music, espesh balkan folk-pop) in people who listen to “the real deal” type of this stuff, and start dancing on tables and breaking glasses. It’s great because, while it plays to the strenghts of arabic pop it leeches off, it also plays to Shania&Lange’s strenghts, delivering a tour-de-force bubblegum blast and letting the song have some breathing space (a la all those sudden halts before gigantic anthemic choruses she usually excels at). The blue version of “When You Kiss Me” is dilettantist tourism at its most glorious, a pick’n’mix cocktail of cliches of global pop culture that, instead of neutering all of its components, turns them to a peak into a wonderful world that doesn’t really exist but some of us hope and feel it DOES, marrying the mythical-marketing vision of Ireland (you know, shamrocks’n’fiddles’n’violins’n’great green pastures with dancin’ leprechauns & stuff) with frivolous tabla action and awesome hooks and a gorgeous melancholic undercurrent.

The point, I guess, would be that “dilettantism”, when pulled off well, can be just as great and exciting as “fanaticism”. And, vice versa, bad fanaticism can – to take garage as example - turn into a nondescript, sludgy mess of playstation-cheap Swizz Beatz-aping riddims and inane doomy basslines. (By the way, am I the only one here who’s IMMENSELY annoyed by Wiley’s productions, especially those basslines? They’re blaring AND twee at the same time - what a horrid combination!)

Oh oh does anyone else think the Sean Kota track on Gabba/net is a US engagement with gutter-garridge (blimey that was quick - which sort of proves my point about the eradication of lag - it's great anyway)

Haven't heard that gabba.net track yet, but I'll just add one last thing about Shania. For more than ten years, people have been bitching about the perils of the CD format: how it destroys the sacredness of the album experience of yore, how albums are reduced to handfuls of tracks at the disposal of remote control buttons etc etc... But barely anyone has admitted that CDs won't go away, and tried to actually engage and play with its format (at least not beyond all those shitty multimedia bonuses).

"Up!" is just that - it quite literally invites listeners to make their own comps of favourite versions (Shania herself admits in the liner notes that she likes to mix it up by putting it all on random play), and since 90% of the tracks on the discs have the exact song structures, anyone with the minimum of .wav editing knowledge can mesh tracks together into something new, which can sound bad, but at times also fantastic (when done well, red+blue mixes of "C'est La Vie", "Forever And For Always", "What A Way To Wanna Be" are fabulous! I wish I had some place to put them up so you could all hear...) In such light, maybe it's no coincidence that the disks have no copy/computer protection, like most of the blockbuster releases of her calibre do?

It's such a pity that more people aren't exploring the myriad of fun possibilities that format/media of CD could offer instead of just moaning. Well, I'll just have to wait and see what Shania comes up with next!

P.S. It's a pity that most of you people aren't in touch with balkan pop, I'd like to read about it more from western perspective (I'm from Croatia, btw). Try downloading off Kazaa or whatever Vuco's "Pijanica" or "Napijte me napijte", you might like it!

I like Sean's mash-ups.

The woman is in her 30s. She's probably seen plenty of AC/DC shows.