“An outfit calling themselves Dean Gray (ho, ho) had taken Green Day’s American Idiot and fused each one of its tracks with other pieces of music, ranging from Bryan Adams to Queen. Then they changed the album’s name to American Edit and set it loose on the Internet. This is a mashup, the on-line stepchild of the remix and the latest way to anger a music company. It’s true that the concept sounds improbable; when pairing two different songs, the line between mashup and train wreck can be thin indeed. But the Zen of good mashing isn’t about pairing random songs; it’s about picking up on the similarities between two tracks, and tweaking the songs to have them create more than the sum of their parts.”