DJ Yoda's How To Cut & Paste - 80's Edition

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  • The 80's is coming back in a big way lately, there's been the resurgence of the mullet and mohawk hairstyles and music wise punk and electro have crossed over into commercial music in a big way - big synthesiser melodies, vocodered vocals and rock guitars taking up as much space in today's production as are breakbeats, sirens and 303 melodies. DJ Yoda takes it back a step further by mixing up a collection of fairly recognisable 80's songs for the third installment of his acclaimed How To Cut & Paste series. What to expect from a DJ Yoda mix? Lot's of cheeky samples, scratching and cutting & pasting obscure tunes together. Hip Hop is well represented in the mix with Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five getting four songs included into the mix with the classics The Message and The Message II (Survival), but who could forget the bassline and Melle Mel's anti-coke rap on White Lines and also Grandmaster Flash's turntablist anthem "one for the treble, two for the time" Adventures On The WHeels Of Steel - all four from the 80's and still classics today. Other classic hip hop cuts include Nice & Smooth's Hip Hop Junkies and Kurtis Blow's The Breaks. The 80's gave birth to electro and Herbie Hancock's Rockit has to be classed as one of the biggest electro/jazz crossover tunes from the era giving rise to scratching and propelling Grandmixer D.ST to stardom. Paul Hardcastle's 19 is another notable tune, one which sampled documentaries of the plight of Vietnam war veterans upon returning to the US. Rock was a big sound back then and continues to play a major part in music today and Yoda includes the synthesiser heavy tunes like Europe's The Final Countdown - Yoda mashes this up with Rockit combining the two tracks' synthesiser melodies with each other! What really makes Yoda's mix shine is the cheesy 80's pop that is littered throughout the mix - Betty Boo's Doin' The Do, Rick Astley with Together Forever, Blondie with Rapture, Tony Basil with Mickey - the song which glorified cheerleaders in music videos and Culture Club's Karma Chameleon. Those who are old enough to remember will want to forget, yet a piece of them will yearn to want to hear it all again. Yoda even mixes in some adult contemporary/new romanctics tunes like Terence Trent D'Arby's Sign Your Name, Johnny Hates Jazz with Turn Back The Clock and my favourite A-Ha's Take On Me. On top of the tunes, Yoda plays around with the TV theme's that we all remember from the decade - Dallas, Dynasty, Knight Rider and Airwolf cutting and scratching samples on top. What's more, you hear film samples from Indiana Jones, The Goonies, Revenge Of The Nerds, hip hop samples from Public Enemy along with Yoda's signature turntablist skills. The drawback? a lot of the scratches and samples get really messy during the mix and detract from the tunes they're scratched on top of. How To Cut & Paste offers listeners nostalgia but most of all lots of laughs.
RA