Not all heroes wear capes.
Some toil in obscurity, slaving away at efforts that will improve life for the rest of us. We never learn their names, we never see their faces, but like the Unknown Soldier, we honor them for the selfless sacrifice they made in order to leave the world a better place than they found it.
One group of people whose contributions to humanity belong alongside those of people like Jonas Salk are those who make mashups of popular songs from seemingly incompatible genres. For example, YouTuber Wax Audio took the song “South of Heaven” by thrash metal titans Slayer and wedded it to Marvin Gaye’s immortal R&B classic “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” The resulting clip was “South of the Grapevine,” and we feel confident that if Marvin Gaye and Slayer guitarist Jeff Hanneman were alive today to hear it, they would be all over it.
The only problem with “South of the Grapevine” is that it is now eight years old and has been seen on YouTube almost 448,000 times. It’s old! The mashup ecosystem needs fresh blood, and YouTuber Bill McClintock has arrived just in time with vials full of it.
McClintock has created a mashup of Van Halen’s “Jump” and “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” as performed by Hank Williams. Like “South of the Grapevine,” the entire concept sounds absolutely moronic, but darned if it doesn’t all suddenly add up perfectly when you press “play.”
McClintock has done us all a solid by creating an entire account full of these videos, and almost all of them are as blasphemous as they are effective. So quit your job, lay down on the couch, and resign from civilized humanity so you can watch every video on his channel, unencumbered by concern for monthly deliverables or deadlines.
But watch this one first: