Mash-ups are the poetry of Youtube. No, that doesn't mean they're a deep form of emotional expression or an artistic take on the meaning and rhythm of images (some are, most aren't). What I mean is that mash-ups, like poems, are things that just about anyone with the inclination can make but only a few who ever attempt to do so will succeed in making something that's not terrible. A mash-up can be as lazy as a grade-school acrostic, as needlessly fussy as a villanelle or, in the rarest of cases, as poignant as a passionate Beat verse or as loving as a perfect sonnet. It takes talent, dedication and that inborn excellence of craft found in all great artists to make a mash-up that means something. This past week, a guy who goes by the handle error606 on Youtube and other places accomplished this.

error606 is a fella named Fin (Internet detectives more capable than me are welcome to dig up his full identity). Fin is an architecture student in England with the eye of a master photographer and some fairly impressive video editing skills. Though the subject of today's feature is his mash-up of the song "Party Rock Anthem" by LMFAO (so many stupid things about that band/song title combination) and various bits of North Korean national pride videos from the reign of Kim Jong-Il, I'd also like to direct you to Fin's "Dark Stop Motion". It's 2000 black and white photographs strung together for a movie experience that's odd, striking and just a little unsettling.

The power of "North Korea Party Rock Anthem" is its multiple levels of perfection. On the surface, it's great for being perfectly synched. It's no simple task to edit a song into a video that was never meant to match it, let alone a collection of video clips that were made at different times and for different purposes. Youtube is replete with examples of lazy synching work and if nothing else those slapdash pieces serve as a testament to the processing power of the human mind. Even when a synch is slightly off, we can tell and it's annoying as hell. error606's viral hit is as on-time as the goose-stepping soldiers in the military pride video he splices into the mix.

But being clever on the technical side alone doesn't make this mash-up worth talking about. There's also the cultural commentary inherent to the song/video choices. "Party Rock Anthem" is a quintessentially vacuous, American song, a dance track that aspires to nothing beyond the club and is thoroughly apolitical. The North Korean videos are 100% political and they feature things we never really see in American society. Sure, we have as much gung-ho militarism as any country on Earth and our political climate is fully saturated with propaganda, but the U.S. government never puts together stadium-filling pep squads, mandatory folk dancing gatherings or fascist infantry parades.

And yet, juxtaposing these two seemingly dissimilar things highlights their alikeness by making a joke of their differences. Aesthetically and culturally the song and the videos are opposites, but their hearts are the same. They're both examples of empty pandering and pageantry. They're equally without substance despite their flash and they're both designed to appeal to the broadest swath of the populace. The mash-up unifies artifacts of two cultures that, at first glance, seem as different as possible by showing us their common bond in hollowness. If that doesn't qualify a mash-up as art, I don't know what will.