It's such a Mash'!

Two singers are crooning Closer by The Chainsmokers and suddenly, yet brilliantly, one of them breaks into Kabira from Yeh Jawani Hain Deewani. Then, there’s another video where the songstress is singing an English number and beautifully blends it with a Tamil track. From Vidya Vox to Penn Masala and Shirley Setia, a range of Indian artistes are mashing up covers and youngsters are hooked to them.

Currently, Indian-American singer Vidya Vox is the queen of mashups and her YouTube videos have garnered millions of views from across the world. Some of her popular videos are the one where she merges a Coldplay song with a tune by The Chainsmokers and the one which mixes Ellie Goulding’s Love Me Like You Do with Tum Hi Ho from Aashiqui 2.

“The thing that I like about mashups is that they open music to a lot of interpretation. It’s not always that a mashup is better than an original, it’s just different and the talent it takes to merge so many different genres of music in different languages together is mind-blowing. It’s a reaffirmation that music is a universal language,” says food blogger Suganya Lakshmi.

Another mashup that’s caught the fancy of music buffs is the Shape Of You Hindi remix by Anil Chitrapu and Hari Ravi from Penn Masala who’ve crooned a mix of tunes in the video ranging from Enna Sona to Pani Da Rang. “I love the fact that they’ve taken Hindi hits and wonderfully combined them in one video. It was thoroughly enjoyable,” says student Shruti K. Navin Kundra, Darshit Nayak, Vidya Srinivasan, Sreerama Chandra and Arjun Kanungo are some of the other talented mashup cover artistes.

Violinist Aneesh Vidyashankar started re-posting his mashup covers on YouTube and has got a huge response to his live videos. “It’s not easy to do them as you need to have a good ear to pick the songs you want to mix. They’re a great way to express the essence of the music scale rather than the lyric. Many people do them, but only a few succeed,” says Aneesh, who admits that this might just be a passing fad.

However, DJ Anoop Absolute has a different take on the trend. “Technically, what these artistes are doing are not mashups – they recreate the music and do cover versions of these songs. Some are good, but some have destroyed the originals and are not a good judge of what they’re doing. Mashups are done by DJs and it means mashing up two original records on turntables and recording it in the studio,” says the DJ, whose latest mashup is called the Shape of bhangra which has Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You with Indian elements to it.