The Singles Jukebox

A…mash-up?

[Video][Website]
[5.00]

Thomas Inskeep: I guess poor Brandy is desperate enough for a hit to re-sing her vocal from “The Boy Is Mine” as it’s mashed up un-inventively with Destiny’s Child’s “Girl.” Toss in some generic house piano and a Casio preset: insta-hit (in the UK)!
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Scott Mildenhall: The stated involvement in this of Replay Heaven‘s Hal Ritson and vocalist Vula Malinga, whom they recently used as a substitute Michael Jackson, is curious. Brandy specially re-recorded her parts — look, here she is — and 99 Souls’ accompanying blurb for that also suggests Mathew Knowles, at least, gave the go-ahead for the rest. Still, 99 out of every 100 souls listening probably don’t care. This is a dizzying collage of vocal slices and an imaginative mash-up, not alazy cut-and-shut like the last time “The Boy is Mine” went top 10. It’s good to hear generic house that’s actively trying to be fun.
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Jessica Doyle: Five minutes after listening, what I can remember is Brandy’s part, deeper and more blurred than her original recording: startling after the glossy inertia of the original “The Boy Is Mine” and the patchy, playful remix. 
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Dorian Sinclair: I’m never sure how to evaluate a mashup — do you grade it on how well it compares to the source songs? How successfully it reinvents them? Or do you grade it as if it’s a completely original piece? I’m not sure I enjoy this as much as either “Girl” or “The Boy Is Mine” (and I miss the cheesy synthesized harp from the latter, I’m not gonna lie), but it’s still a lot of fun and it would definitely get me dancing. So on that level, it’s a success. And it’s great to hear Brandy revisit her vocal 15 years after the original song premiered.
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Patrick St. Michel: Wow — I guess SoundCloud producers can get pretty big budgets, huh.
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Katherine St Asaph: It takes more soullessness than this to ruin some classics. Maybe I’m just a sucker for artists re-recording their youthful work, older and regretful (cf Brightman, Bush)
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Brad Shoup: In which “Girl” becomes a statement of romantic intention. 99 Souls map concern onto yearning. It kinda works! This is one of those cases where the vocal pitchshifting works, since it puts some thematic distance between a couple of classics. The track is goosed with an acoustic sample here and there, but mostly it’s a house cut more detailed than it needed to be.
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Will Adams: Mashups are the most accessible point of entry in the remixing world. YouTube and SoundCloud teem with producers who rack up playcounts any amateur would kill for (not that this translates to any monetary gain). And they’re prolific, too; when you’re only a few Googles away from finding instrumentals and bootleg acapella tracks, syncing tempos, and exporting a WAV, it’s easy to churn them out. From a creative standpoint, though, mashups often fall prey to being quick grabs for viewers (with twice (maybe more) the name recognition, you can siphon fans from multiple directions and build your audience from there). At their best, mashups are like remixes, igniting an alternate reality of a familiar song that works seamlessly. Lesser (i.e. the majority) of mashups wear through their novelty of x + y pretty quick. Enter “The Girl Is Mine,” which asks you little more than, “Remember ‘Girl’? Remember ‘The Boy Is Mine’? ‘The Girl Is Mine’!!” and pairs it with Shrinky Dink house and an oddly placed guitar. Thing is, there’s already a great house remix of “Girl,” any excitement from Brandy’s re-recording is sullied by the “GIRL” that barges in, and the source material has been evaporated, leaving a puddle of nostalgia-mongering.
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Alfred Soto: Was this necessary?
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