As of this writing, musician/animator/internet guy Neil Cicierega has released four albums of mashups. It was exciting in 2014 when he released Mouth Sounds with absolutely no promotion or forewarning of any kind, and absolutely hilarious when he dropped its followup Mouth Silence a week later when we were still processing (read: meming) the shit out of the first one. Since then he has released Mouth Moods and Mouth Dreams, each of which has been less shocking but more technically accomplished than the previous. People have dropped theories about what message Cicierega has behind his project, but I suspect this is a mixture of misunderstanding the purpose behind the ‘clues’ and easter eggs dropped in Mouth Silence combined with projecting onto the stunning technical accomplishment that leads to a very weird almost-sincerity. I believe that Cicierega is one of the most playful artists of our time, combining things based on basic principles to see what results he gets (I’m backed up on this by both stories of his creative process and the occasional outtakes he puts out).

The Mouth series remixes pop music samples using the exact principles that pop music generally operates under. On its most basic level, music is about doing one thing, and then choosing to either do it again or do something different. Pop music aims to build and release energy rhythmically in a way that maintains the listener’s attention. Cicierega uses the reliable hooks of familiar, Top 40 pop music to ensure the listener is, uh, listening, and his brilliance is in arranging those hooks in a way that feels structurally logical even if the hook itself feels wildly inappropriate. The sudden appearance of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” in “Ribs” always cracks me up because it fits within the structure of the song – it’s effectively another verse – but opens up the tone in a way that feels transcendent, but it also feels utterly hokey. This is simply an expansion of the effect done in the intro, where the Babyback Ribs song is layered with the riff of “Everybody Wants To Rule The World”.

This kind of thing is where I think people are getting the idea that all of this is a satire of nostalgia. Part of why this series is so fucking funny is that it creates real emotions through those principles and sincere hooks – we need the song to open up at that point whilst retaining some continuity, and when it does it’s satisfying even though it shouldn’t be. It’s not a satire of nostalgia, it’s making pop music out of things that give you nostalgia. It’s kind of like how Norm MacDonald so effectively deconstructed the principles of standup comedy by following them to an extreme – these pop music principles are so fundamentally true, so fundamentally the correct decision to make musically, that they can make the shittiest pop music and lowest musical detritus into something that moves you emotionally.