When the Mashup hits harder than the original [SilvaGunner]

Excuse my specific and hot take example haha, it's what came to mind!

Songs are cool. Either you're left with a song that divides the fanbase opinion-wise, a song that the fanbase agrees is dogshit, or a song the fanbase agrees is great! There's many examples for all of those types, including Simon Curtis' Super Psycho Love, Kanye West's Drunk and Hot Girls, the entirety of Frank Ocean's Blonde, basically the entirety of the Country genre that excludes alt-country (cough cough, poor man's poison)... You get me.

But sometimes there's remixes and alternative versions of songs and even mashups that hit harder than the original. Let's talk about both of these, starting with the remixes.

You know what it is. Sometimes that one dude makes that weird remix that has a completely different guitar over the original song. Or maybe it's the original song but a different guy cuts in at the beginning instead. There's plenty of examples I can name here, such as the remixes of Akon's Locked Up or even the Katy Perry remixes for the latter! As the former, you probably know if you accidentally played a remix once.

If you're not already aware what a mashup is, such as an internet rock or perhaps not familiar with music outside the "playlist" you usually listen to, a Mashup is where you put together parts of other songs. Sometimes it's something special like putting the guitar of The Weeknd's The Hills over Post Malone's Congratulations. Or something simple like putting the sung part of Breaking Benjamin's "Until The End" over the beat of Linkin Park's "Somewhere I Belong". Sometimes there's projects that overdo this, such as taking even existing remixes and other materials and mashing them all together with glue, like a junk journal of sorts. That's what we're going to talk about.

SilvaGunner is a great example of this, actually! If you don't know, it's a group effort of people who upload video game songs, but they're always a mashup. The most popular example is the Super Mario World Athletic rip, where instead of the song you think it is, it's just Witch Doctor with the SMW soundfont. You'll get it when you listen, just try it.

Okay, let's talk about the example I had. Kanye made a song called "Love Lockdown in 2008, about something like his partner not being open with their love, or whatever. Something's off, they're being secretive. Okay, that came from an album that influenced many people in the rap scene like the likes of The Weeknd, Travis Scott, hell even Drake if you want to go there. It used the Roland TR 808 to make memorable beats and it's just an album many will remember, although mixed results that divide the fanbase. Some say the album was great! Others think it's in the midway point of his album discography. But that's not important.

Let's also talk about Metallica. In 2008, being a metal band, they put out a modern project too, decades after being introduced to the world in the 80s! It was called "Death Magnetic" and a song on it was called "The Day That Never Comes", a pretty melodic song, though something one might not think of when listening to Metallica.

So we have these two completely unrelated genres together. How do we put them together? How would that work?
DJ Hero 2 had it figured out.

So the solution was to take the kick and vocals from Love Lockdown and put The Day That Never Comes's melody over it. Very funny. It's a pretty obscure thing so I don't know how liked it actually was, but some people I found in the comments agreed it was one of the best on that game, so we'll roll with that for now. But SilvaGunner is supposed to fit in, how? Say hello to Gummibar!

If you don't get where this is going, hold on, I'll explain it. But for those who know, feel free to skip this next paragraph.

In the 2000s to 2010s, there was a meme involving a green gummy bear that sang about how he was a gummy bear, jelly bear, talking and singing. During November 2024, SilvaGunner had an event that honored this, since in the original video, a "Gummy bear album" was supposed to be released in November too. So we have a bunch of mashups and a full album about it was released, but you'd never guess which one we're talking about that.

Kanye gummy bear.

SilvaGunner, during the event, had somebody made a version of that DJ Hero 2 song from before, but instead of some of the vocal chants, it's instead that bubble gum pop, and instead of Kanye... Well, for about ten or twenty seconds it's Kanye singing that fucking gummy bear song, but after that, instead of Kanye, it's the gummy bear!

And ironically, this makes the song better somehow. I never liked the original effects on that DJ Hero 2 song, so somehow, in complete shitpost fashion, the bubble pop is better than the original song. And that pitched down Kanye section at the beginning? Pretty good!

So, ironically, the mashup is better than the original. This has been my low quality blog post topic for the day.
Post more examples in the comments, this is just a general example and perhaps there's better ones! Any songs where a mashup makes the original better?