As December rolls around each year and Christmas decorations invade shopping centres around the country, a small but dedicated fan base eagerly await the new end-of-year mashup from DJ Earworm. Once again, the king of mashups has dropped his banger just in time for Christmas.
Each year, DJ Earworm (whose real name is Jordan Roseman), selects the biggest 25 pop songs from the past year and slices and dices them into a coherent and digestible jam. It’s a fantastic opportunity to reflect on the pop scene of the year, which inevitably leads to heated debates on YouTube as to which year of pop was the best (hint: it’s never the current year, it’s always long gone apparently).
This year he’s stepped it up a notch, and doubled the amount of songs in the mashup – reflected in the title 50 Shades of Pop. It’s also one of the most sultry of years past, something he says was intentional.
“Music has been going through a softer phase than it was a few years ago so there’s that return of adult contemporary. That’s maybe represented by the Ellie Goulding track, it’s very lush and soft. And then there’s sort of retro, uptempo dance stuff, and that’s represented by The Weeknd track,” he told Billboard.
Everything from Drake to Maroon 5 to Adele makes an appearance in the mashup. It starts a little slow, however, by the halfway point it comes into its own.
Inevitably there will be debate as to how it matches up to other years’ mashups. For long time fans, the question is not whether this could be the best mashup, but rather whether it could be the best mashup apart from 2009 (which simply cannot be beaten). In my opinion, it is probably the third best after 2009 and 2011.
We can at least agree that DJ Earworm deserves an immense amount of credit for mashing 50 songs into a coherent song where the lyrics actually makes sense.