Sep 13, 2010
Vocals for Van Halen’s “Jump” on top of the music of Lennon’s “Imagine”
Update: You may also like The Beatles’ “Come Together” mashed up with Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.”
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© 2012 Abuyo. All rights reserved.
Sep 13, 2010
Update: You may also like The Beatles’ “Come Together” mashed up with Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.”
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This is radical. I feel like I need to find other famous songs that share a key signature so they can be combined in new and exciting ways.
Van Lennon or John Halen?
That’s a little too similar that just the same key. Seems to be maybe a rip off? Oh well, who cares really? What would also be awesome to hear is the vocals for “Imagine” over the music for “Jump”. That would rock!
I guess the similarity could be an accident. The music leader for the church I used to attend wrote a song/hymn that just so happened to follow the same chord progression and structure as “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey. Most of the time, the guitar player in the band just played “Don’t Stop Believing” and no one knew. It was awesome.
I’d give that a listen to.
same key, then also same/similar chords (or the matching relative minor) for each… it’s not a perfect match i don’t think, there’s one part that sounds discordant a couple of times to my ear..?. but it’s definitely cool. :) i would dig hearing more like this.
It’s not really “just so happened,” and it’s not uncommon, either . . . musical comedians such as Rob Paravonian and the group Axis of Awesome have been playing with this for a while (NB: language warning on both):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMshvUReunc
This is a great one, but the best two I’ve ever heard are…
http://soundcloud.com/ccc1/clavinet-together
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cutZ6KvBz0g
Absolutely amazing!!!
Gross! I’m a purist.
Smashing is one of my favorite things. As one of the choir directors for my church, every time I direct for a special song, we end up smashing songs. It’s great!!
Also, fscottqc (#3), that is fantastic. My brother was playing instrumental background music while the pastor was talking. He was directed to play in a certain key and he went on autopilot and starting playing “After the Storm” by Mumford and Sons. Fortunately, only a few people noticed. :)
The mash-up shows that Imagine reduces to I in both the verse and chorus (where Jump needs reduction in neither case – lolz)… and that the bridges of both songs are prolongations of the dominant via IV as an extended ornament.
In the verse, Jump’s V and Imagine’s IV are both superficial.
The bridges’ melodies both prolong 2^ throughout. Both begin with accented upper neighbor structures (Roth’s 3^-2^ “record machiiiiine” and Lennon’s “all the peeeeple”), with almost identical timing, over subdominant progressions to ii. Sick! The fact that Jump’s bassline reaches ii so much later …and does so repeatedly… is trivial (-obviously- Van Halen is a Dutch composer and tolerates bass-voice suspensions more easily than his English predecessor). They’re both headed to V to support a melodic CS to 5^ (Roth’s “what I meeeeean” — an upper-neighbor appogiatura — and Lennon’s “youhooooo” via CS from below), but in neither case is the melody on 5^ structurally; the two-voice framework is clearly V/2^.
Jump’s chorus is I, barely embellished. Imagine’s chorus strengthens I with the progression IV-V-I-V/vi — but when melody is considered, both choruses reduce easily to I/1^. There’s an incidental role for 3^ in both melodies — Lennon’s is in the register below. But Van Halen’s 3^ (the first “Jump”!) against Lennon’s IV-V is more propulsive — arguably this is the same cadential dissonant 3^ that we find throughout the Chopin Noctornes.
Nice, but it’s no “Runnin’ with the Beatles” — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTxZs-pRZ_M