Steinski, What Does It All Mean? – 1983-2006 Retrospective

In 1983, a 30-ish ad copywriter named Steve Stein and his sound engineer friend Doug DiFranco followed an ad from Tommy Boy Records to the glory of a $100 remix contest win. Not much of a creation myth, but “The Payoff Mix,” with its gleeful and increasingly frantic spray of tiny tape-slices of Culture Club, Little Richard and Bugs Bunny, became a keystone of mash-up culture. Now, after decades of overpriced bootlegs and whispers from the underground, the collected works of the man called Steinski have finally surfaced in one place, courtesy of the pirates at Illegal Art (home of clear Steinski disciple Girl Talk). What set the world alight here was the anything-goes authority with which Stein and DiFranco (and later Coldcut) would marshal anything within reach, so long as it squared to the omnipotent beat.

The early party-rockers roll together the hits of James Brown, the Sugar Hill catalog and whatever was playing on KISS-FM at the time to create warped, elastic, floor-filling mixes. As utterly classic as those are, the real excitement comes when these elements were grafted to Big Statements, chopping up the words of anyone from Bush I to Gloria Steinem until they flow — like accidental MCs, scattering their words from their meanings and putting the “head” back in head-nod. Included is a mix Stein created for Coldcut's “Solid Steel” radio show in 2002, which riffs on Stein's practically Paleozoic age — he's pushing 60. But who else would begin a hip-hop mix with a snatch of '50s big-band rumble before tumbling into bed with Li'l Kim? Too much fun for a history lesson.