Mashups, covers, or remixes are here for our entertainment. They can give a song a much needed adrenaline shot, offer insight and wit to a track we otherwise wouldn’t have thought twice about, and reignite artists and albums that have since fallen out of the limelight. But every once and a while, they do something transcendent and otherworldly, creating art by colliding two fading stars forming a neutron collision that Muse could only begin to write about.
For anyone who never bought into The xx; for anyone who never got behind Biggie’s hardcore east-coast rhymes, here’s your rabbit hole. Producer wait what has turned ostensible discord into overwhelming concord with his mashup of The xx’s self-titled debut and a variety of Notorious B.I.G. cuts entitled “The Notorious xx” (via LA Weekly).
Unlike The Grey Album, ‘what wait’ utilizes minimal mixing and beat production. He lays Biggie and his crew’s rhymes oh so gingerly on top of The xx’s pensive and dour beats. The effect is amazing. Biggie’s macabre themes are highlighted throughout the album, and The xx gets a well-needed elctro-shock treatment. The album ebbs and flows between lifting up hits like “The Curious Incident of Big Boppa In The Nighttime” and “Basic Hypnosis”, and tearing down songs until they’re uncomfortably raw and barren. “Mo Stars Mo Problems” listens like a ghostly cautionary tale and ”Suicidal Fantasy” might be the saddest, terrifying, most harrowing song I’ve heard in a long while. If you were to blast this album out your trunk, your ride would immediately transmogrify into a hearse.
Check out the SoundCloud stream below, which also lets you download the album. Also, this is required listening.
And if you don’t know, now you know.
