Super Mash Bros. -- "Islands May Close But Little Hawaii Is Forever" (2012)

How come every time you come around

My London, London Bridge wanna go down

The main character of the Showtime television series, Californication, Hank Moody, is an edgy, angry-young-man-type novelist from New York City.  When the series begins, Hank has been living in Los Angeles for five years, and he hasn't written a word since making the move.  

Actually, that's not entirely accurate.  Hank's worried agent persuades him to write a blog for a made-up Los Angeles magazine called Hell-A.  Hank views blogging as loathsome and a total waste of time, and most of his posts are off-the-top-of-his-head rants directed at whomever or whatever gets under his skin.  (Remind you of anyone?)

Hank Moody blogging

What does a hip novelist with writer's block do to fill up his days?  In Hank Moody's case, he drinks a lot.  He also gets laid at least a couple of times a day -- usually without even trying.

In other words, a lot of young lovelies are letting their London Bridge go down for our boy Hank.  

Hank gets laid so often that you might think he must be a bit of a cad.  But Hank is a good-hearted sort.  He's a loving father (to a very precocious 12-year-old daughter) and is carrying a major torch for his baby momma -- he would gladly stop chasing bimbos if she would just come back to him.  

Unfortunately, Hank learns in the first episode of the show that his ex has decided to marry a creepy rich guy.  The guy turns out to be the father of the 16-year-old girl Hank had picked up the day before at a bookstore -- he noticed her browsing through one of his novels, which is the most powerful aphrodisiac there is for a novelist.

Hank and his 16-year-old fan (Madeline Zima)

Of course, Hank had no idea when he took her home for a romp in the hay that she was 16 or the daughter of his ex's betrothed.  (This girl is a delightfully predatory creature who who was born without a smidgen of conscience -- she will no doubt ruin the lives of many men before she is through.)

We'll learn more about Hank's very busy sex life in the next 2 or 3 lines.  But this is a music blog, right?  So we need to talk about music.

The next several 2 or 3 lines posts are going to feature mashups, remixes, medleys, and "break-in" songs -- all of which are musical creations that take one or more songs and do something to make them different.  In some cases, the resulting creation is so different that the original song is essentially unrecognizable.

Webster's defines "mashup" (or "mash-up") as "a piece of music created by digitally overlaying an instrumental track with a vocal track from a different recording."

Let's listen to today's featured mashup, "Islands May Close But Little Hawaii Is Forever," by the Super Mash Bros.  

The first part of the song combines the vocal track from "Ice Cream Paint Job," a 2009 single by Dorrough (a Dallas rapper) and the instrumental track from "Dani California," the Red Hot Chili Peppers hit that was featured in the previous 2 or 3 lines.  

(Some of you are under the illusion that I just pick songs at random.  Nothing could be further from the truth, boys and girls.  Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote that, "The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky," but 2 or 3 lines is not the common law -- there is a brooding omnipresence at work here.  You may not be attuned enough to discern the subtle pattern that I have woven into 2 or 3 lines, but trust me -- it is there.)  

At 00:23, there's a snippet from EMF's #1 hit from 1991, "Unbelievable."  (Don't blink -- you might miss it.)  

Next, the unmistakable introduction to Led Zeppelin's "Good Times, Bad Times" is mashed up with Fergie's 2006 hit, "London Bridge" -- which is the source of the lyrics quoted at the top of the post.

Fergie in front of a (but
not the) London bridge

The "London Bridge" vocals continue as "Good Times, Bad Times" makes a seamless transition to Joan Jett's "I Love Rock 'n' Roll."  

"Islands May Close" then closes with a minute or so from "I'm Real (Murder Remix"), a 2001 collaboration by Jennifer Lopez and Ja Rule.  The instrumental track that accompanies J-Lo and Ja Rule's vocals is from "Heartbeats," a 2003 single by The Knife, which is an electronic music duo from Sweden.

Putting together mashups like this one requires an almost encyclopedic knowledge of pop music.  I'm sure that the process of stitching together all the disparate vocal and instrumental tracks that are vertically and horizontally combined in a mashup like this one requires a lot of technical skill and a lot of time.  But it seems to me that the key is having a brain that can retrieve just the right snippet from just the right song to plug into the musical jigsaw puzzle.

The Super Mash Bros. are a couple of guys who met up in 2006 while attending a Los Angeles high school.  Their name is taken from their favorite Nintendo 64 game, "Super Smash Bros," and most of their song titles are inside jokes that only their close friends understand. 

The Mile(y) High Club cover (2012)

I've been listening to the Super Mash Bros. nonstop for the last few days.  Their stuff is just delightful (not to mention addictive).  Their mashups incorporate many, many songs that deserve to be featured on 2 or 3 lines -- you can expect to see a post about "London Bridge" later this year.

I highly recommend following the Super Mash Bros. on Twitter (@SuperMashBros).  Here's just one example of their tweets:  "Anyone have tips on how to get my beard to look more like gosling in the notebook and less like to catch a predator?"

Ryan Gosling in The Notebook

"Islands May Close But Little Hawaii Is Forever" is from the duo's most recent album, The Mile(y) High Club.  I'm going to embed the song here so you don't have to scroll all the way back to the top to listen to it again.  (Is there anything else 2 or 3 lines can do to make your life easier?)

Click on this link and you can download The Mile(y) High Club for free.    

Red Hot Chili Peppers -- "Dani California" (2006)

Getting born in the state of Mississippi

Papa was a copper and mama was a hippie 

A Mississippi policeman for a father and a hippie for a mother?  No wonder the heroine of "Dani California" had problems fitting in.

Dani California certainly got around.  She broke rocks in an Alabama prison, broke the law in Louisiana, and robbed a bank in Indiana.  Dani tried to make it to Minnesota, but was shot down by a North Dakota lawman before she got there.

I'm guessing Dani California wasn't her real name.  The song never places her outside of the Central Time Zone, but you have to think she made it to California at some point.  Otherwise, her moniker doesn't make a lot of sense.

"Dani California" is a single from the RHCP's ninth studio album, Stadium Arcadium, which was released in 2006.  It was a top ten hit in the United States, Canada, Australia, the UK, and most European countries.  It only made it to #57 in France.  (What is it with those people anyway?)

Was Dani California based on a real person?  Many people believe that she is a composite of a number of past lovers of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' lead singer, Anthony Kiedis.  (We'll refer to the band as the "RHCP" from here on.)

Dani is also mentioned in the title track of the RHCP's previous album, By the Way:

Dani the girl 

Is singing songs to me

Beneath the marquee

Of her soul

In 2007, Showtime debuted a new television series titled Californication -- which just happens to be not only the name of the 1999 RHCP hit single that was featured in the previous 2 or 3 lines, but also the title of the hugely successful album of the same name.  (Click here to read that post.)  It sold five million copies in the U.S. alone, and over 15 million copies worldwide.

Californication DVDs

Not surprisingly, the RHCP lawyered up when they heard about the Showtime series.  Click here if you'd like to read the complaint they filed against Showtime and the producer of the Californication series.  (I can't imagine why you would want to read it, but some of my readers are very odd people.)

The case was settled out of court.  Litigation is very expensive, and it's difficult to justify spending the kind of money you have to spend to go to trial unless you have an open-and-shut case.  In addition, it's not clear that the band would have been entitled to much in the way of damages even if they had prevailed at trial.

The RHCP certainly didn't invent the word "Californication."  Time magazine had used it in 1972 in an article about the fears of non-Californians that the rapid population growth and resulting urban sprawl, traffic, and other problems that were beginning to rear their ugly heads in California would spill over into their states.

Oregonians were particularly anti-California.  The creator and executive producer of the Showtime TV series claimed that he had gotten the idea for the title of the series not from the RHCP album, but from the "Don't Californicate Oregon" bumper stickers that were popular in Oregon in the seventies.

However, the Showtime series also featured a character named Dani California, which makes you wonder whether the producer doth protest too much.  (As far as I know, Oregon cars weren't sporting Dani California bumper stickers in the seventies.)

Rachel Miner as "Dani California"
in Showtime's Californication

By the way, the titles given to the novels that the main character of the Californication TV show had supposedly written (God Hates Us All, Season in the Abyss, and South of Heaven) are also the titles of Slayer albums.  And individual episodes of the show were named after songs by Bob Seger ("Turn the Page") and the Sex Pistols ("Filthy Lucre") and the Martin Scorsese movie about the Band's final concert ("The Last Waltz").

Of course, people who live in glass houses are the pot calling the kettle black.  "Dani California" sounds suspiciously similar to Tom Petty's 1993 hit, "Mary Jane's Last Dance."  (Both songs were produced by Rick Rubin.)

The video for "Dani California" is very entertaining.  It simply shows the group performing the song on stage, but there are a number of costume changes.  

Flea channeling Bootsy Collins
in the "Dani California" music video

The band's various outfits provide a sort of illustrated history (in chronological order) of different pop music genres -- beginning with rockabilly (think Elvis) and progressing through the British Invasion (think the Beatles), psychedelic rock, funk (Parliament/Funkadelic was obviously the inspiration here), glam rock, punk, Goth, hair metal, and grunge (as personified by Kurt Cobain and Nirvana on MTV's "Unplugged").

Here's the music video for "Mary Jane's Last . . ." -- oops, I mean "Dani California":

Click here to buy the song from Amazon: