Start Press: Hey Mr. DJ

Long before DJ Hero crashed the rhythm-game party, I itched to scratch. I can remember sitting by my stereo when I was just 12 years old, cutting my own straight-to-cassette custom remixes of pop songs off the radio. Ok, I admit: calling these experiments “remixes” gives them more legitimacy than they rightfully deserve. I simply pressed down three buttons on my stereo’s cassette deck—play, record and pause—and then released the pause button at strategic times while the radio played to create Frankenstein versions of my favorite Top-40 songs.

Using this non-patented technique, I gleefully turned DJ Marky Mark’s “Wildside” into complete and utter gibberish by ommitting lyrics at random. When I was feeling more artful, I’d stitch together all of a song’s instrumental refrains so that they coalesced into a vibrant, uninterrupted river of sound. I popped over to YouTube moments ago to watch the video for Paula Abdul’s 1991 hit “Promise of a New Day,” and I’m pretty sure my stuttering, freakish remix would sound fresher to contemporary audiences than the original with its mild-cheddar keyboard plinking and nauseating lyrics.

My childhood dabbling in the DJ arts eventually petered out, but not my belief that we should foster a healthy irreverence toward art. I love the chemistry-playset bravado of Danger Mouse’s Grey Album, which mashes together Jay Z’s The Black Album and The Beatles’ self-titled “white album.” I appreciate Girl Talk’s stubborn refusal to segregate by genre, inviting Metallica and Lil’ Mama onstage for a thrilling, unexpected duet. While purists might view such tinkering as Louvre tourists drawing Sharpie mustaches on the Mona Lisa, these supplementary creations are never meant to replace the originals. If anything, mash-ups simply create a fresh context for the art so that listeners are able to hear familiar songs with fresh ears. Well-executed mash-ups testify to the vitality of their component parts.

The Guitar Hero franchise has provided me countless hours of enjoyment over the years, but I’ve always felt like the challenge presented by those games involved becoming a more dexterous mimic. Especially if you’re playing a popular track, you know exactly what hitting all the notes will sound like. No surprises. With DJ Hero, on the other hand, there’s an infinitely more thrilling sense of midstream discovery. As there’s no way of predicting exactly how a given mix will morph and reshape itself, you feel like you’re clinging to the wing of a jet plane as it performs tricky aerial maneuvers. But you’re not just hanging on for dear life; you’re actually—how is this possible?—steering.

Not all the mixes in DJ Hero are explosive. Some are merely fantastic. But hoo boy, every once in a while, you’ll stumble upon a combination—like Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust” + Daft Punk’s “Da Funk”—that gets the crowd bouncing around so crazy, you’d think the frequency-modulation dial on your turntable cranked up the temperature on a hot plate beneath the dance floor.

Jason Killingsworth is Paste’s games editor. He is based in Dublin, Ireland, and writes about music, film, tech and games for a variety of outlets. You can reach him online at jason [at] pastemagazine.com.