So the song that seems to tell me most about the decade just ending is not something off Kid A or Yankee Hotel Foxtrot but the Freelancer Hellraiser’s A Stroke of Genius. (…)
it also says a lot about what has happened to pop over the past decade. First, there’s the means of distribution. A few hundred one-sided seven-inches of Stroke of Genius were independently released, which was enough to provoke a cease-and-desist order from RCA, home to both Aguilera and the Strokes, but almost everyone who heard and acquired the song did so online.
Dorian Lynskey erläutert im Guardian, warum die Nullerjahre das Jahrzehnt des Mashup sind. Er erhebt A Stroke of Genius zum definierenden Song des Jahrzehnts und erklärt:
Looking back, it feels like digital music was the genie in the bottle and, now that it’s been let out, nobody can put it back in.
Die politische Dimension dessen versteht man übrigens, wenn man quasi als Text-Mashup Sandro Gayckens Text von Zeit-Online liest, in dem er erklärt, wie Der Kampf gegen illegale Downloads die Informationsgesellschaft bedroht
