T w e n t y S i d e d

Since I seem to be blogging about music today, I just have to mention Party Ben, a mashup artist. In mashups, someone takes two very different songs – the more different the better – and overlaps them in such a way that they sound like they belong together. I heard some mashup via a FARK link a couple of years ago and I wasn’t impressed. It sounded more or less like you’d expect: Like listening to two different songs at once.

But Party Ben actually pulls it off, and the results are amazing. Some of the mashups sound even better than the source material. The most impressive is the one where he combines Green Day, Oasis, Travis, Aerosmith, and Eminem. And he makes it work. Check out “Boulevard of Broken Songs“. (About halfway down the page.) Then he mixes Snoop Dog with Led Zepplin, if you can believe that.

Remarkable. Normally I think of popular music as cool, but this has a certain “getting Linux running on a toaster” Geekyness to it.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

The tagline on this site claims “Geek culture ephemera”, but obviously there are many aspects of geek culture I don’t cover. I really only concern myself with a little corner of the subject. It’s just too broad, and any blog that really tried to write about all aspects of geek culture would be too unfocused. The world of geekdom is larger and more inclusive now than it was twenty years ago. Part of this is likely due to the fact that the term “geek” hs changed a great deal.

The original geek was a carnival performer whose act consisted of bizarre or grotesque feats, like biting the heads off of chickens. The term was roughly analogous to the term “freak” as we use it today. It was often used as a cruel slur to denote someone who was socially inept, repulsive, or otherwise unlikeable. From there the term lost some of its “freak” overtones and came to mean people who were simply social outcasts. Then it came to mean a very particular type of outcast: someone who avoids or shuns others because they are too busy with a cerebral or esoteric pursuit. Now geek is a label applied to many differing types of people who have no other common thread besides their interest in using their brains to amuse themselves. The “outcast” meaning is all but gone, and all that’s left is the stereotype that geeks have trouble dealing with the opposite sex.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “What’s in a Geek?”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.