FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS - CLICK FOR ANSWERS!

Q: Who the hell is Party Ben?

Q: What kind of a stupid DJ name is that?

Q: Aren't you breaking the law?

Q: Can you please send me CDs of all your mixes and shows and everything? I'll pay you!

Q: I'm new to downloading songs, how do I get them on my computer?

Q: How do you get the vocals out of songs?

Q: What software do you use to make these dumb things?

Q: Hey, can you make this mashup, of ___ vs. ___ (two songs that both have a similar word in the title)? It'd be great!

Q: Can you DJ at our shindig??

Q: Who the hell is Party Ben?

Well, here's a brief bio!

Party Ben is a DJ, producer and radio host based in San Francisco, California, best known for his mashups, remixes, radio shows and eclectic live sets. His tracks have been worldwide viral hits, from the notorious Green Day/Oasis combo "Boulevard of Broken Songs" to a recent Hype Machine-charting remix of DJ Shadow. He was recently named a Top 10 "High Note" of the decade in Bay Area music by the San Francisco Chronicle, and two of his mashups (including a famous Snow Patrol/Police blend) were recently featured in the Adam Sandler comedy "Just Go With It." He's credited with helping jump-start the mashup phenomenon in the United States with his LIVE 105 "Sixx Mixx" program from 2002-2006. Party Ben's live DJ sets are known for their mix of cheeky samples and underground beats, and he's toured around the world. He can currently be heard as a resident DJ on two legendary Bay Area radio shows, LIVE 105's "Subsonic" and 99.7 NOW's "House Nation," bringing cutting-edge beats to the masses. He's also the programmer for five of internet radio company Slacker's electronic channels. More recently Party Ben has focused on remix production, creating epic new versions of tracks from artists like The Limousines, Gotye, Kreayshawn and Martin Solveig, and his DJ Shadow remix placed third on Shadow's own winners list.

And here's a slightly longer bio!

Originally from the small farm town of Gothenburg, Nebraska, Party Ben was already a "bedroom producer" in his pre-teens, creating tape-edit remixes and mix segues by switching around the inputs on his Sears stereo system. There might have been a few DJ gigs in the garage as well. Eventually he escaped Nebraska and attended Carleton College in Minnesota, where he became a fixture on the campus radio station, KRLX-FM, soon becoming the station program director and a DJ at campus parties, inspired by the burgeoning Chicago/Detroit house/techno scene. After moving to San Francisco in the early '90s, he began a long career at Bay Area alternative stalwart LIVE 105 as a producer, on-air personality and program host, eventually ascending to the position of Imaging Director, in charge of the "audio personality" of the station. One day in the late '90s, he realized that the audio editing software he used to make station IDs could also be used to mess around with the music as well. And so he did.

His blends, bootlegs, and remixes soon gained radio and nightclub attention, even before the word "mashup" was invented. In 1999, Party Ben reworked Fatboy Slim's own Rolling Stones-sampling "Satisfaction Skank" into a local radio and club hit, and a sample-based 2002 remix of Eminem's "Without Me" was a Bay Area phenomenon. After co-hosting LIVE 105's long-running electronic music program Subsonic for years, Party Ben started his own show in 2002 to feature his and others' mashups, remixes and whatever else seemed interesting. This half-hour show, airing Fridays at 6pm, was first called The Six Mix but eventually gained two more X's to become The Sixx Mixx. Inspired primarily by Belgian duo 2manydjs and their "Radio Soulwax" compilations, but aimed at a more mainstream/alternative rock listenership, the Sixx Mixx was a genre-smashing, fast-paced and topical show, gaining a large drive-time radio audience. The show was immediately controversial, venturing beyond the LIVE 105 playlist to air sometimes polarizing mashups, covers, and novelties as well as new music. The Sixx Mixx also helped to jump-start the Bay Area bastard pop scene, providing local producers like Earworm and international stars like Go Home Productions and Adam Freeland a prime-time audience of hundreds of thousands.

Of course, the Sixx Mixx was also a launching pad for Party Ben's own creations, and it's these musical combos for which he has become most well known. His first "hit" came in October, 2004, when a Green Day/Oasis/Travis/Eminem (and/or Aerosmith) hybrid “Boulevard of Broken Songs" became an unexpected worldwide viral phenomenon after its debut on the Sixx Mixx. The mash-up eventually received airplay on hundreds of radio stations around the world, from Tokyo to Cape Town, and the mainstream press started to pay attention. Green Day's own Billie Joe Armstrong called the mash-up "cool" on MTV News, Rick Dees invited Party Ben on The Weekly Top 40, and the San Francisco Chronicle made Party Ben front-page news. In fact, the mashup was such a phenomenon that it was credited with helping extend Green Day's run on the top of US rock airplay charts.

Party Ben later joined forces with Australian Team9 to produce the mash-up album American Edit under the pseudonym "Dean Gray" (a phonetic spoonerism of "Green Day"), combining the acclaimed Bay Area punk band's album with music from Johnny Cash to Queen. The album became an illicit internet sensation and received five stars from the San Francisco Chronicle as well as positive reviews from Spin and the Toronto Star. It also received a "cease and desist" order from Warner Brothers Records within 10 days of its free internet release. Team9 and Party Ben pulled the files from the Dean Gray web site, but in an act of defiance, fans worldwide posted the mp3s on a day of coordinated disobeyance of the C&D (modeled after an earlier such action in support of Danger Mouse's "Grey Album").

Many of Party Ben's unofficial mashups, remixes and blends have found unlikely audiences. A 2005 combo of Tegan & Sara with Mylo ended up on legendary Seattle dance station C89.5's Top 5 most played songs of the year, and a 2006 blend of The Chemical Brothers' "Galvanize" with John Williams' theme from "The Empire Strikes Back" inspired Star Wars fans worldwide. A combination of Snow Patrol and The Police called “Every Car You Chase” was a smash in Ireland, with 2fm calling it “probably the biggest hit in the country” in April of 2007. Another blend of General Public and Rihanna called "Tender Umbrella" got props from Dave Wakeling himself, and a cheeky mix of Beyonce's "Single Ladies" over the theme from the Andy Griffith Show recently grabbed media attention.

His mashups have received airplay on countless radio stations, from major networks like BBC Radio 1 and 2 and Australia's Triple-J to stations in American Samoa and even Party Ben's home state of Nebraska. Officially, he has done guest DJ mixes for a long list radio stations including Radio Bis Warsaw, XFM London, Fritz 102.6 Berlin, Pure FM Belgium, Oui FM Paris, Indie 103.1 Los Angeles, 91X/San Diego, and Sirius Sattelite Radio.

In 2010, comedian Adam Sandler heard "Every Car You Chase" and tracked Party Ben down to feature some mashups in his next movie. Eventually, both "Every Car" and "Tender Umbrella" appeared in the 2011 comedy "Just Go With It." Both mashups were fully licensed for the film, gaining rights from all the artists and songwriters involved, making it the first time mashups had been officially used in a major motion picture. Party Ben was given access to the original instrument and vocal tracks from the songs and recreated the mashups specifically for the film, along with two other producers whose work was also included.

In the last two years, Party Ben has focused more on original dance remixes, producing well-received versions of tracks by Martin Solveig, M.I.A., and Bay Area artists like Lyrics Born, The Limousines and Kreayshawn. A recent remix of DJ Shadow's "Scale It Back" was picked up for promotional distribution by Island Records and placed third in the final tally.

As a live DJ, Party Ben tries to put some extra effort into the experience, creating exclusive mixes just for his DJ sets, new versions of classic mashups, and a keen eye for new music, combining it all into a fast-paced party experience. He's performed in cities around the world, including two European tours and jaunts to Canada and Mexico.

Back home in San Francisco, he was the resident DJ at Club Bootie, America's first all-mash-up nightclub, from the time of its founding by the local duo Adrian and Mysterious D in 2003 until 2009. The club has been voted “San Francisco’s Best Club” in the San Francisco Weekly and San Francisco Bay Guardian multiple times since 2007 and spawned numerous international partners.

From 2006 to 2009, Party Ben was the music and culture writer for San Francisco magainze The Mother Jones' arts and culture blog "The Riff."

Since 2009, Party Ben has brought his radio experience and encyclopedic knowledge of electronic music to internet broadcaster Slacker Radio, the premier online streaming radio service, where he programs five of their electronic stations.

Starting in 2010, Party Ben was brought on board as a resident DJ on St. John's legendary San Francisco radio show, House Nation, airing Saturday nights on 99.7 NOW. In 2011 he returned to his alma mater LIVE 105 as one of the rotating hosts of the electronic show Subsonic.

Q: What kind of a stupid DJ name is that?

A: Yeah, I know. Ask Aaron Axelsen, LIVE 105 Music Director and host of Subsonic, the station's weekly electronic music program, since it's his fault.

Here's the story: Many years ago when I used to co-host the show with him, we would get a little punchy over the 5-hour (!) time slot, and give each other silly nicknames at various times, for the amusement of ourselves, and even, potentially, our listeners. For instance, if he was intent on completing a talk break quickly, I would call him "Action Aaron," and if I had attempted a joke, he would call me "Silly Ben." Fun for the whole family. One of the show's features was the "Party Report" on upcoming raves and DJ events, which I would read, and thus for this segment I was called "Party Ben." Of course it was in a kind of ironic sense, because I rarely seemed to make it out to most of the glowstick-filled freakshows I was talking about and in fact I'm typically rather sedate, morose even. But soon everybody was calling me Party Ben and here I am.

I would change it to something cool but I seem to be stuck with it, what with my various web sites and Twitter feeds already set up and my profound laziness. It is, though, truly a constant source of humiliation and sadness, and indeed, the dumbest name in showbiz (TM). Either people think I do a lot of drugs ("Do you party?!?!") or act as a sponsored-alcohol-consumption-encourager like Duffman. Unfortunately, neither of these are true. My family feigns pride in my accomplishments but I know they find my name embarrassing and ridiculous, and when I date somebody I have to pick the right moment to tell him my awful secret ("I'm a DJ." "Ooh, like at circuit parties?"). I can only imagine what it must be like to have a cool DJ name, with like a letter "X" or a "Z" or a number or an ironic reference to an 80s TV show in it, a name that makes people think you're cool even if you're just slapping hip-hop vocals over Pitchfork-approved indie jams. Who knows what I could have accomplished However, I suppose that like the White Stripes' "De Stijl" rejection of all colors except black, white, and red, it's often creatively productive to work within a set of restrictions, and while they chose theirs and I did not, having a horrific DJ name is, for better or for worse, my own artistic prison cell, within whose walls I must do the best I can, since there's nothing in here for me to hang myself with.

Q: Aren't mashups/bootlegs/unauthorized remixes breaking the law?

A: Well, that depends.

If you're talking about playing mashups on the radio, then no, of course not. How would you judge how much "alteration" of a song is allowed? Can DJs talk over a song? Lots of pop stations pitch all the songs up 2 or 3%, is that allowed? Radio stations pay fees to songwriters of all tracks they play, and so if a song or a sample in a song or a piece of a song is audible enough to set off that trigger, an artist will be compensated.

If you're talking about "putting mp3s containing elements of copyrighted song material on your website for anyone to download," then, technically, yes, that's distributing copyrighted material without permission, even if it's not for sale. As far as utilizing pre-existing music in your own musical work, that's called "sampling," and as artists from 2 Live Crew to the Verve know, sampling has a complex legal history, with some court cases finding that samples can be legally justified under fair use or parody, and others disagreeing. Practical realities are different from legal theory, however, and my reality is that this web site here is hosted by a company that doesn't want trouble, and record companies employ teams of lawyers with internet-scouring software, looking for supposed "piracy," and if a web host receives a letter from a lawyer complaining about material on a hosted web site, the web host generally pulls the page and doesn't even ask questions.

Copyright scholar Lawrence Lessig has called the copyright war "over," and the music industry has indeed calmed somewhat from its Napster-era overreactions to the threat of piracy and file-sharing. Girl Talk's still-unlicensed albums are now sold on iTunes and Amazon (along with countless unofficial money-grabbing "covers" of popular songs, apparently meant to confuse consumers). Beatport sells shitloads of barely-altered "remixes" of classic dance and disco songs. Oddly, when it comes to digital sales, record labels seem to have given up, for the most part. However, they still sometimes crack down on "amateur" sample-based producers, seemingly at random, and I'm not sure that Lessig's comment isn't premature or overly optimistic.

In the event an artist or label wishes I do not distribute tracks featuring samples of their work, I accommodate them. Thankfully this has been a rare occurrence.

Of course, morally, I have always felt sampling is a legitimate artistic process. The visual arts have a long history of acknowledging parody, fair use, collage, and various forms of reappropriation, yet in music, somehow, it's still looked down on. It's become fashionable to be anti-mashup, amongst lots of critics and some artists. Even Girl Talk himself feels compelled to defend his work against the illegitimacy of mashups, saying he's not even making "mashups" per se, and emphasizing in interviews how much time he spent working on his albums, a factor that is of course completely irrelevant to the quality of an artistic work. This is not to say that mine or anyone else's mashups aren't cheeky novelties, or even, well, crap, but only that so are lots of other "original" songs, and that the mashup should be judged as all works of art are judged: does it move you, speak to you, make you laugh, make you cry, make you reevaluate preconceived notions, make you recoil or give you pleasure? I suppose this paragraph is a lost cause -- I mean, Pitchfork and XLR8R are as firmly right-wing on mashups as the Tea Party is on taxes, and that doesn't seem to be changing. I on the other hand try to look at all musical expression along a continuum of "compositional" to "referential" and think it's kind of hypocritical to criticize mashups while worshiping Daft Punk -- nothing against Daft Punk -- and that even what you think of as "original" often is not. Mostly I think that if Beyonce might sound funny over the Andy Griffith show theme, why not make it and put it out there?

Q: How do you get the vocals out of songs? Can I have the vocal for "Boulevard" and the Snow Patrol song? Send it to me now! Why aren't you sending it to me!

A: I get variations on this question a lot. Let me try and explain.

Many of my mashups utilize what are called a capellas (i.e., the vocal-only track from a song) . These are separate the tracks (sometimes called "stems") that are recorded separately when the song is being made. That includes drums, guitar, cowbell, whatever. A capellas, and sometimes additional stems, are available from multiple sources: a) a legitimate release, where the label has included an acapella on a single; b) the artist wishes to put out stems specificall to allow DJs and remixers to play with their song, like a remix contest, c) just asking the artist or label; or d) unofficial channels, where someone with access to stems has made them available, either to you personally as a remix compadre, or publicly via the internet. commonly on the internet.

There are various pieces of software and processes that can isolate vocals in a song, "extracting" them, but these are often imperfect and result in poor sound quality. In desperation, I have used a capellas made in this way, but I've never really "made" an a capella myself.

Many of my mashups, like, say, the Clash/Killers "Somebody Rock Me," were made in this manner. I pulled the a capella off the "Somebody Told Me" CD single which featured a special "remix program" on it. Then I cut up and rearranged the existing Clash song (utilizing the single and remix versions) to create a backing "instrumental." Again, at no time did I magically "extract" the vocal from the Clash song. It's about careful arrangement, not trickery, and it's at times a frustrating and time-consuming process. Nowadays you can buy "karaoke" versions of lots of songs on iTunes (talk about flouting copyright!) but they're kind of iffy.

However, in lots of my mashups, I have used no a capellas or instrumentals whatsoever, since they weren't available. While "Boulevard of Broken Songs" sounds like I just put an Oasis vocal over a Green Day song, that mashup actually uses only the original versions, again, carefully edited and lightly EQed. You can hear it if you listen closely. I swear. "Every Car You Chase" is the same way -- which, judging by the amount of e-mails I got demanding the Snow Patrol vocal, people don't believe, but it's true. There are some editing "tricks" to this -- for instance, in the two rock mashups, I repeat the guitar line from both songs throughout the entire track, so that when the secondary vocal enters, it's less noticeable. But there are no shortcuts or special computer programs, merely a painstaking hand-editing process. This is, again, not to claim artistic legitimacy through claims of "hard work," but on the contrary, to emphasize that what I've done could have been done by anyone with simple audio editing software and some time on their hands, and also to try and explain to the legions of angry e-mailers why I didn't send them the Police vocal.

(Of course in the intervening years since I made those mashups, many of those a capellas have become available, so if I'd just have waited a few years it would have all been a lot easier.)

SOME PICTURES

Click to embiggen.


BFD, Shoreline Amphitheater (2011)


WOMP, Metro Opera House, Oakland (2011)


Bootie, DNA Lounge, SF (2008)


Bootie, DNA Lounge, SF (2008)


Bootie, Echo, LA (2008)


Munich Gay Pride (2009)


Bootie (2007)