A Night at the Hip-Hopera by The Kleptones (Review)

First came DJ Danger Mouse and The Grey Album, which mashed together The Beatles’ White Album with Jay-Z’s Black Album, much to the delight of listeners and to the chagrin of record label EMI.

And now along come The Kleptones and A Night at the Hip-Hopera, which takes all of your favorite Queen songs and mashes them together with the likes of Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Eminem, Vanilla Ice (of course!), Belinda Carlisle, The Beastie Boys, Neon Genesis Evangelion, The Big Lebowski, Fight Club, and a buttload of samples concerning copyright and free communications, to name but a few. And lest you think it all sounds like a total mess, it’s pretty uncanny how well much of this stuff fits together, be it “Bicycle Race” and “The Real Slim Shady” or “I Want to Break Free” and “Shake Your Rump”.

All in all, A Night at the Hip-Hopera is an amazing display of mashup skills, and works brilliantly as both a commentary on the current state of music and copyright and as a musical piece. (In other words, it’s got a funky beat and I definitely can bug out to tracks like “Break” and “Listen.”)

Unfortunately, the original site’s bandwidth has been overwhelmed, but several other sites have stepped in to pick up the slack (or just listen to it below). Waxy even has a comprehensive list of all of the primary sources used in the remix.