Awesome Pop Music

After a 24-year hiatus, UK pop duo Everything But the Girl is back. From the sound of Nothing Left to Lose, they haven’t skipped a beat. The first single from their new album Fuse is a song about love, dedication, and desperation set against a sizzling electronic dance groove.

When you think of pop music, it’s usually pretty upbeat stuff, but back in the 1960s, a strange trend emerged – pop songs about tragic accidents and death. Yesterday’s Papers offers an intriguing look back at this unusual fad and some of most popular “splatter platters”. It’s worth watching for Wayne Cochran’s epic hair helmet alone.

The Aqua song Barbie Girl is one of the cheesiest pop songs of all time. But what if it was actually a really complicated track that required serious skills to perform? Bass player Charles Berthoud explores just that idea by turning it into the hardest song to play.

Musician Alex Melton is back with another song remade in the pop-punk style of Blink-182. This time, he did it with the Barenaked Ladies track One Week, complete with Chickity China, the Chinese chicken. We wonder if this could be done with any 1990s song. We’d like to request TMBG’s Birdhouse in Your Soul.

DJ Earworm is famous for their annual United States of Pop mashups. Rather than a single year, this clip strings together songs representing the height of pop music from the last five decades without revealing their vocals. See how many of the tracks you can identify, then check your answers in the description on YouTube.

“Best ye go, faster than mine arrow…” Hildegard von Blingin’ imagines what pop songs might have sounded like in medieval times. Working with music by Cornelius Link, she revamps the tracks with period-appropriate lyrics and vocals. Here’s her olde tyme take on Foster the People’s 2010 hit, Pumped Up Kicks.

Musical mashup maestro Bill McClintock issues his apologies in advance for this hilariously weird melding of The Spice Girls and Slipknot, with a dash of The Black Crowes tossed in for extra seasoning. All we really want is to zig-a-zig-aaaaaaarrrrgh.

The guys from Pomplamoose perform an excellent mashup of pop hits with the word “Bad” in the title – Michael Jackson’s Bad, Taylor Swift’s Bad Blood, and Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance, with a little bit of Inner Circle’s Bad Boys tossed in for good measure.

Ten Second Songs’ Anthony Vincent is joined by singer Joel “Roomie” Berghult to perform a medley of popular songs, joined together by a single unifying beat. It’s amazing how well they all work despite their original tempos.

Remix maker The Amazing Mashups Mixes combined the theme song from The Simpsons with the Jessie J, Ariana Grande, Nicki Minaj pop hit Bang Bang, and it works surprisingly well for the most part. Skip to 0:11.