Mash-up Lessons Steinski Taught Us

Basically, by making hip-hop mash-ups less subservient to the dance floor, he turned them into a self-justifying art project that eager critics could label “deconstructive,” then count as a subversive political act when copyright crackdowns eventually made uncleared samples legally risky. Which, okay, maybe Flash (not to mention any number of actual avant-garde composers) had already done too, to a certain extent. But Steinski and Double Dee did it more. And they did it really well, too.

On What Does It All Mean?, the first few tracks, especially their near-mythic “Lesson 2” and “Lesson 3,” are nonstop barrages of beat-mixed pop-culture references, jokes and puns: “Mama Used to Say,” “Jam on It,” “Double Dutch Bus,” “Dance to the Drummer’s Beat,” “Hernando’s Hideaway,” Treacherous Three, Fearless Four, Clint Eastwood, Bugs Bunny, Tweety Bird, Groucho Marx, dance lessons from old-time Hollywood, Buchannan and Goodman’s “Flying Saucer” novelty collages from the ‘50s, lots and lots of James Brown. And when you get to Disc Two, a 59-minute suite produced for BBC London and titled "Nothing to Fear" on the physical set, maybe also toss in the MC5, Gene Krupa, Dion and the Belmonts, “Rocky and Bullwinkle,” back-country preachers, tap-dance stuff, jazz stuff, Latin stuff, film dialogue from Diner about filing records by genre. The aural moral - that everything has a beat, and hip-hop is just another chapter in a mass entertainment story that dates back decades - is inevitably a smart one.

Thing is, especially when  he no longer had Double Dee helping him out, Steinski could get extremely clinical. That’s what happens on most of the second half of Disc One, most notably in his widely praised but hardly profound remembrances of the JFK assassination (“The Motorcade Sped On”) and 9-11 (“Number Three on Flight Eleven”). People are understandably impressed that these even exist, but truth is, the more conceptual Steinski gets - the more he bypasses that eternal beat -- the more cornball he gets as well. “It’s Up to You” is just about as well-meaningly meaningless as you’d expect a hodgepodge shuffling up Jello Biafra’s voice with the elder George Bush’s to be. If you find Negativland stomachable, you might well eat it up. Personally, I prefer Afrika Bambaataa.