Vivid Memories Turn to Fantasies: On ‘Mouth Moods’

Shortly after the turn of the millennium, in an air-conditioned study in a sprawling suburban house in a town none of you have ever been to, my 9 year old friend snuck onto his dad’s computer to show me my first memes. Nobody called them that yet, but that’s what they were: Flash videos decontextualising pop cultural signifiers, most of which I had no context for in the first place, to make hyperkinetic, absurd theatre. There were dozens of sites, but the best was Albino Blacksheep. Its black and teal design made it feel clandestine which, for two kids years away from internet porn, is how it seemed. Colin Mochre, anthropomorphic jets, cartoon badgers and “ZEN FIRE ZE MISSILES!” became touchstones for our friendship. My favourite was “Jamez Bond”, a sort of fanmade music video/short film set to Megumi Hayashibara’s ‘Sakura Saku’, which I didn’t know anything about the time. I just liked that it was colourful and dense and sounded incredible.

By contrast, arguably the most famous animation to come out of that time, “Ultimate Showdown,” was positively lucid. Animated by someone called AltF4, it was a song composed by Lemon Demon, aka Neil Cicierega, capturing a popular playground hypothetical: Pop Icon vs Pop Icon, who would win? As an Australian tween, I’d never heard of Chuck Norris, but “Ultimate Showdown” primed me for years of Barrens chats when we graduated from dial-up to World of Warcraft.

So much of the shit I cared about over the next 15 years was forged in this surreal furnace. I could’ve predicted how much I’d love Japanese pop by how many times I replayed “Jamez Bond,” how I’d fall deep into the hole of MLG montage parodies with their obvious parallels to animutation, how these plays on nostalgia and recognition would lead to an enduring love affair with Girl Talk and, inevitably, Neil Cicierega’s work a decade later. Cicierega’s work as Lemon Demon — original compositions, often strange and irreverent but more or less pop songs — continues, and whether it’s ‘Jaws’ from his 2014 EP Nature Tapes about “a shark without a cause,” or ‘Cabinet Man’ on 2016’s Spirit Phone, he’s a keen songwriter. Occasionally, he puts out a mashup which, philosophically, is a lot closer to those days of the early web, when cultural detritus was thrown into a machine and asked Will It Blend?

Mouth Sounds, Mouth Silence, and now Mouth Moods are a series of mashup mixes held together by the conceit of Smash Mouth’s ‘All Star’. Cicierega started working them when he found the stems to the songs from Rock Band and since then they’ve become a bonafide phenomenon in certain corners: dropped like a Beyonce album, they now send writers as far flung as SPIN, the AV Club and NY Mag scribbling to back-announce them. The reason anybody gives a shit about someone from the Old Web making mashup albums is Cicierega’s unreal sense for comedy, commentary, and pleasure — the three tokens which elevate a mashup from bootleg curiosity to playlist fixture.

There are some fundamentals to the Mouth series:

1. They feature ‘All Star’.
2. They recall the headlines that came with the hits.
3. They turn the cheeks of songs mostly taken for granted, casting new light on them.

When I wrote about Mouth Sounds and Mouth Silence a couple years ago, it was Cicierega throwing samples of news reports about Pokemon hysteria against the demonization of Michael Jackson, slowing ‘Teenage Dream’ out of its euphoria and into a solemn haze, clashing the authenticity of Jimi Hendrix against the assembly-line churn of Rebecca Black. Here it’s Tim Allen vs Disturbed, INXS’s ‘Need You Tonight’ vs ‘Eye of the Tiger’, the Doobie Brothers vs Linkin Park.

Mouth Moods is just as compelling for its reflections on touchstones like the ones that bound me and my friend — artefacts of web subcultures which might never have a reason to make it into textbooks, but which nevertheless litter our clandestine histories online. Cicierega samples ‘Walk The Dinosaur’ by Was Not Was, the chorus of which is an enduring 4chan meme. Drowning Pool’s ‘Bodies’, once a staple of early Flash stick animation, is transposed into a glitch melody. Vanessa Carlton’s ‘A Thousand Miles’, which became a meme after its instantly recognisable music video featuring Carlton driving a piano through her town, appears early, pierced by AC/DC’s ‘Back In Black’. The Beastie Boys once tried to sample ‘Back In Black’ only to be told by Malcolm Young that the band “don’t endorse sampling,” which I imagine would be an appealing reason for someone like Cicierega to sample it anyway. ‘Du Hast’ slides in very briefly around the record’s one-third mark, a nod to its saturation among early gaming videos. Santana ft. Rob Thomas’s ‘Smooth’, naturally, appears again, mashed up with the Barenaked Ladies’ ‘One Week’. When Cicierega brings back old favourites like ‘Down With The Sickness’, Will Smith, and ‘Ghostbusters’ they feel intertextual for their appearances in the previous Mouth entries. We’re seeing how far down this rabbit hole we can go.

Elsewhere he explores deeper meaning. A kind of interlude in the middle section mashes up Dr. Nick and ‘The Real Slim Shady’ in a way that makes it sound like Em’s wondering/wandering through a formless abyss trying to find his way back to himself. It’s followed by The Village People’s ‘YMCA’ mashed up with Hans Zimmer’s ‘Time’ from the Inception soundtrack. For me, this is the most affecting moment on the record.

A few years ago I found a YouTube video featuring Charlie Chaplin’s soliloquy from The Great Dictator set to this song. It might be a reach to say Cicierega’s use of the track is a reference to that clip and its imitators instead of an original interest in ‘Time’ itself. As a swelling but unobtrusive piece of music, it’s a compelling choice to lend something gravity, which is maybe the reason Cicierega used it regardless of the Chaplin monologue. It does that job well here: stupidly, I’d never understood the gravity already present in the Village People’s single, but Cicierega strips away its bombastic instrumentation and makes plain the lyrics of becoming disenfranchised and depressed and finding community and support among other Black and gay men. Even with the Village People and the YMCA no longer fixtures in the public consciousness, that idea of community organisations and the isolation of marginalised folks still resonates.

Mouth Moods bears the third album tendency of moving away from its original conceit. ‘All Star’ is barely anywhere, only prominently returning towards the end for a baritone run against Queen and Bowie’s ‘Under Pressure’. When it comes, it’s triumphant, one last blast of that ridiculous refrain that started us down this path in the first place. When it breaks and the album peaks one last time for a three minute sprint to the actual end, it reminds me of another record that throws its energy a similar way: Girl Talk’s Feed The Animals. Feed The Animals saves its self-reference for the very last seconds (“Play your part, Three Stacks”) but ‘Don’t Stop’, its second last track, always sounds like the end until it breaks through to ‘Play Your Part (Pt. 2)’.

This is new ground for the Mouth series: Mouth Sounds and Mouth Silence had uneven dismounts, but Mouth Moods satisfies that crucial tenet of the mashup: you always leave ’em high. Whatever Cicierega does next, whether he keeps the franchise going or leaves it alone as a trilogy, these mixes feel like an unbelievable gift. They’re that funny, that smart, that perverse — a perseverance of that unlimited, anarchic creative energy which made the early web so thrilling without its attendant cretinism. In these brain-smart, head-dumb times, Mouth Moods is further evidence that it doesn’t make sense not to live for fun.