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Music

This Queens of the Stone Age and El-P Mashup Is the Weirdest Shit, Man

The tribute to the Run the Jewels rapper/producer and Josh Homme is clearly a labor of obsessive love, like all the strangest stuff online.

One of the beautiful things about the vast expanses of the information superhighway is that no one is going to stop you from pursuing your weird interests. It’s kinda beautiful that in cyberspace there’s a virtually infinite number of corners for you to secret away with whatever your fetish is and surround yourself with fellow weirdos who won’t yuck your yums. Look at how vibrant the furry community is! They’re just like, doing their thing to their little paws’ content, on the same platforms that your uncle is sharing crypto-conservative conspiracy theories—a little something for everybody.

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So in a way, this was really an inevitability. If an infinite number of monkeys pecking away at an infinite number of typewriters will eventually produce the collected works of Shakespeare, it follows that with a virtually limitless number of dudes with way too much free time and cracked copies of Traktor out there in cyberspace we’d eventually end up with this—a head-scratching mashup of Queens of the Stone Age songs and El-P beats.

A few weeks ago, a producer called ToTom released an album called El Q, layering Josh Homme’s blunted vocal takes over El’s apocalyptic bass hits and scorched synth melodies. As, admittedly, a casual fan and distant admirer of both the main thing that strikes me is that I’m impressed with the love and care that clearly went into it. It may sound like the sort of mashup-madlib a neural network might generate if you trained it on the last few years of music blog headlines, but you know, there’s clearly some amount of thought put into the doomy way the vocal to QOTSA’s “Little Sister” squirms around the doomy ambience of the beat for Killer Mike’s “R.A.P. Music.” Does it need to exist? God no! But I’m fascinated with the fact that this is something someone spent hours doing, in the same way that I am fascinated with elaborate fan art of Mario being crucified by a Koopa after being betrayed by Luigi. Which, you know, whatever rustles your jimmies.

Anyway, El-P caught wind of it yesterday and appreciatively called it a “weird gift” which it certainly is. If you’re into this sorta thing—no judgement—the whole thing’s available over at ToTom’s Bandcamp for free.