A shot of DJ John, with a Samo chaser

Mashups and mixtapes, mixtapes and mashups... DJs be cuttin’ up all over the place, and sharing their work on the Web.

Music blogger Bill_45 this morning pointed to a hot mashup by a Bay Area guy named John Liechty, a.k.a. DJ John.

What DJ John did was, he spliced some DNA from Rob Base’s “It Takes Two” into Prince’s “Kiss” and – wah-laa! – he created “It Takes Two 2 Kiss.”

DJ John mixed this track almost three years ago... and it still smells like fresh-baked bread. John has received widespread acclaim for this one.

To hear “It Takes Two 2 Kiss” on my Vox blog, click here. To download it for yourself, follow this link to DJ John’s mashups page. (He has other ones available for download as well.)

Across the pond, there’s a DJ named Samo, and he’s offering a couple of digital mixtapes on his MySpace page.

I point you to “Tape 2,” a 30-minute mix of “rare 70s jazz, turkish psych, German rock, some funky jazz and jazzy funk, psychadelic funk, reggae, and some other stuff.”

To hear a 5½-minute slice of Samo’s mixtape on my Vox blog, click here. It features “Survival Song” by Bubbha Thomas & the Lightmen, “Cavern” by Liquid Liquid (you’ll recognize the bass line), and “The Stop and Go” by Bohannon.

Damn, I wish I could mix...

A shot of kosher gospel, with a Hasidic reggae chaser

Cross-culturalism can be cool. White dudes playing the blues, Rastafarians kicking out the punk-rock jams, Japanese chicks singing Beatles songs, Muslims rapping in French...

All cool.

Now, a musical question: What’s cooler – a black guy from Newark who sings in Hebrew? Or a Hasidic Jew from Brooklyn spitting reggae-style?

Ay gevalt, you want I should tell you how to boil an egg too? Bring that black Jew over here and give him a microphone!

Joshua Nelson, the so-called “Prince of Kosher Gospel,” is an interesting fellow. Click here to hear him sing “Hineh Ma Tov.” He does so in the traditional Jewish fashion... and then he injects some black church into it.

The track can be found on his 2005 CD, “Mi Chamocha?”

If you want to know more about Joshua Nelson, there’s a 4-minute audio piece streaming at the Public Radio Exchange. To hear it, follow this link. (I’m streaming a 2-minute slice of it on my Vox blog; click here to listen.)

As for the Hasidic reggae chaser, you know that’s gotta be Matisyahu. Here’s his video for “Jerusalem”:

A shot of Don Imus, with an Amiri Baraka chaser

So... it looks like Don Imus might return to New York radio come September.

And the Rev. Al Sharpton says he’s cool with that. While the National Association of Black Journalists says uh-uh, hell no.

I could give a shit either way. But it’s a good excuse to stream a little bit of “comedy” from Imus’s 1974 LP, “This Honky’s Nuts.” (Apparently he fancied himself the white race’s answer to Richard Pryor.)

Click here for a 5-minute portion of Imus’s “Uptight White” routine (which, by my reckoning, contains just one funny joke).

And why not wash it down with some fiery spoken words from Amiri Baraka, also from the mid ’70s? Click here to listen to “Dope,” which is available on the Smithsonian Folkways double-CD “Every Tone a Testimony.”

A shot of Groucho Marx, with a John Lennon chaser

“How do you tell an inferior train? Does it come from the wrong side of the tracks?”

“I imagine that this place [New York City] is like London must have been in Victorian days when Britain was at the height of its power.... The American empire is now what the British Empire used to be.”

Yup, the ol’ Marx-Lennon gag. It never goes out of style.

I’ve been into Groucho since the age of 13 or so, when Channel 20 in Washington, D.C., showed a bunch of Marx Brothers classics one week. (“Horsefeathers” was my fave.)

There’s a vast mp3 repository of episodes of Groucho’s old radio quiz show, “You Bet Your Life,” at The Internet Archive. You can download them for free.

I’m streaming an episode from March 1950 on my Vox audio stash. Click here to hear it. There are grin-inducing wordplays and ad-libs aplenty.

I also happen to be a huge Beatles fan. So I’m streaming a 26-minute British radio interview with John Lennon from 1975. Click here to listen to that. Lennon talks about being hounded by the U.S. government because he liked to hang around with radicals like and Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale.

You can purchase a download of this interview via iTunes or eMusic. Just search for artist name “Capital Radio” and the track titled “John Lennon.”

A shot of Travis Bickle, with a Betty Boop chaser

The winner of the Palme d’Or will be announced tomorrow at the Cannes Film Festival. Which is a good excuse to revisit a past Palme d’Or winner and one of my all-time favorite movies – “Taxi Driver.”

Click here to hear Robert De Niro (plus Bernard Herrmann’s marvelous score) on “Diary of a Taxi Driver” from the soundtrack LP.

And if that gets a little too dark for you, just click here for Cab Calloway and Betty Boop (voiced by Mae Questel) doing a duet – “You Gotta Hi-De-Ho” – from one of those old Max Fleischer cartoons.

Nothing puts a grin on my face like some Cab Calloway or some Betty Boop. Put ’em both together and, well, I’m good for the whole day.

A shot of George Lincoln Rockwell, with a Malcolm X chaser

“… If I were religious, I would say Hitler was the second coming of Christ. … [I]n terms of Christianity, I’m the St. Paul to Hitler’s Christ.”

“Why, you are dealing with nothing but a deceitful blue-eyed devil walking around here on this Earth, who will lead you to nowhere but Hell as long as you follow him.”

I am endlessly fascinated by the architecture of the racist mind. It’s part of my overall interest in deviance, be it spiritual (dark-path occultists), carnal (lifestyle fetishists) or intellectual.

I don’t place myself above any of it. It’s all part of the human story… prismatic reflections of our nature. Everybody’s weird some kind of way.

George Lincoln Rockwell would make a good subject for an HBO film. (Vincent D’Onofrio, ring me up, we’ll talk.) As founder of the American Nazi Party, he stirred up a lot of publicity in the ’60s, though I don’t think he ever “commanded” more than, like, 20 disciples at a time. And one of them wound up assassinating him.

(What you mean, “assassinate”? That cracka got SHOT!)

Somewhere online I found an mp3 file of Rockwell’s 1965 TV interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. It’s a 10-minute interrogation, and the money’s at the end when Rockwell is asked about rumors of “strong homosexual tendencies” in the American Nazi Party.

Rockwell didn’t take offense. Matter fact, he said this:

“In my organization, I have men who were homosexuals. They were sucked into that filth, just like drunkards or dope fiends. And I have been able to rescue them. And I’m not a bit ashamed of that.”

There’s more to learn here, and I’m not being snarky. If anybody knows where I can read up on the intersection of homosexuality and fascism, please leave a comment.

My juxtaposition of Rockwell’s interview with a 4-minute slice of a Malcolm X speech isn’t just irony. As Rockwell told his Canadian inquisitors, “I spoke before 9,000 Black Muslims in Chicago and I was cheered.” Rockwell dug Elijah Muhammad because they both wanted the same thing – separation of the races.

Click here to hear Rockwell; click here to hear Malcolm.

The Malcolm X track (“Crime in Harlem”) is from a CD, “The Wisdom of Malcolm X,” which can be downloaded via eMusic and iTunes.

A shot of Jello Biafra, with a John Wayne chaser

“… The ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’ can kiss our funky booty-hole!”

“… For as long as you believe in love and faith, hope and God above, the future of this land of ours is strong.”

Left-wing rant, right-wing cant – two great tastes that taste great together. And I got ’em both streaming on my Vox audio stash.

Ever stop to ponder just how drenched in politicized media we are these days?

Three round-the-clock cable news channels with robot armies of ideological talking heads… quasi-populist gasbags all over AM radio… amateur spin mechanics, like Roto-League fanboys – thousands and thousands of them! – spraying piss in all directions of the blogosphere, as if Thomas Paine would be proud of their time-wasting asses…

And yet, the more politics becomes a mass entertainment, the less I’m feeling entertained. Or informed. Or even engaged.

So, as with music, I look to the fringes – and to the past – for stuff that’ll cut through the noise and make some sparks jump in the ol’ frontal lobe. Because when a witless, unctuous fucker like Keith Olbermann can be taken seriously as a pull-no-punches political commentator, it’s hard to make sense of anything anymore.

(To be fair, if our troops in Iraq were found to be using corked bats, Olbermann is the first guy I’d turn to for analysis.)

Now… though I’m old enough to have dug Dead Kennedys, I haven’t followed Jello Biafra’s latter career as a hard-left spoken-word provocateur. But this 12 ½-minute track, “Become the Media” (2000), is an amusing little diatribe about our commercialist culture (Booo!) and the need for class warfare (Yaaay!).

That’s what I call entertainment.

After listening to Mr. Biafra do his thing, you might need to buck up your patriotic spirits. Gotcha covered. Just play this track – “The Good Things” – from John Wayne’s 1972 spoken-word album, “America, Why I Love Her.” (Yep, the hard right was doing spoken-word when spoken-word wasn’t cool.)

I’m talking church bells ringing, fishin’ with dad, and firemen rescuing kittens from trees. “The Good Things” is so cheesy, so cornball… Mmmm, cheesy corn ball!… I swear to God, it’ll make you long for the days when America’s husbands didn’t cheat on their wives, and none of their kids turned out gay, and all the Negroes stayed on their side of the tracks.

My thanks to rock-’n’-roll photographer Neil Motteram for permission to use the above picture of Jello Biafra.

Be well, my friends. And remember: it takes a right wing and a left wing for a turkey to fly.