To be honest, I have no absolutely recollection of how or why I made this one. However it started, I chose Lady Gaga’s Poker Face for the vocal track and started with a cover of Dirty Water by the band Singapore Sling as the main backing track. Perhaps I did this because Lady Gaga’s attitude and persona suggested something gritty and dirty, but her music was glossy and polished. The Singapore Sling cover sounds like someone who is drunk and tired, but still trying to party. Seriously, though, I don’t remember the reason.
At some point, I decided that the mashup needed stronger percussion at points and added Daft Punk is Playing at My House by LCD Soundsystem, using the logic that the two songs would match up well since they were in the same key and had a similar ending melody. This did mean, however, that the whole song would have to be faster, as my music program would make everything sound choppy if I slowed down the LCD Soundsystem song too much.
Just for kicks, I decided to include Oye Como Va by Carlos Santana, though I could not use too much of the song due to the minor key of “Poker Face†clashing with the major chords. I even had to cut out part of the melody from “Oye Como Va†during the part at the end of the mashup and stitch it together with another part, creating a little riff that kind of trails off before it starts. Actually, there were a couple of other songs that I could have picked, such as “Spirit in the Skyâ€, but could not due to clashing rhythms or melodies. I suppose that “Slow Ride†by Foghat could have theoretically worked, but it also sounded very similar to the Singapore Sling song in tone, though a bit cleaner. Whatever the case was, I did choose another song to include in the mashup, just towards the end: Superfreak by Rick James. The sample might be slightly difficult to hear, but it is there. There was no real reason to include it, particularly if I was being subtle about it, but it symptomatic of my tendency to signal the end of a song by either piling a bunch of samples on top of each other or making everything louder to make it sound like a musical climax.
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