Lady Gaga bumps into the Berries and Cream song. Louis Armstrong holds hands with the “What the fuck, Richard?” Vine. Doja Cat dances with the Education Connection jingle. This is @misc_mashups, home to some of TikTok’s “cursed” and chaotic musical transformations.
Adam Slomovitz, 22, is the brain behind misc_mashups. He has more than 400,000 followers on TikTok, and is about to graduate from college, where he’s studying music and marketing. While he’s been doing mashups with friends for years, he only joined TikTok less than a year ago.
Slomovitz had early success with some CupcakKe remixes, but the Berries and Cream revival of summer/fall 2021 was the tipping point. Slomovitz lists a few factors that gave the 2007 Starburst commercial mashup potential, but most importantly, he tells the Daily Dot, it was “a good audio file.” Creator Jacob Sutherland also thoroughly experimented with Berries and Cream last fall and, like Slomovitz, works with “meme audio.”
There are plenty of creators within mashup TikTok, and trends like “Songs that shouldn’t work together but do” or “Mashups that should be illegal.” But those accounts and trends often stitch together popular or TikTok-famous songs. Slomovitz doesn’t categorize himself as a DJ: ”I do some brass instruments, I do a little bit of piano,” he says of his off-TikTok life. He typically takes audio that’s already gone through a viral cycle on TikTok and finds an appropriate dance partner, giving audio trends a second wind. When he gets deep into one sound, that’s when he usually gets more requests to remix it with other songs.
One example is the Oh no! Our table! It’s broken! mashups that pushed him from 40,000 followers to roughly 200,000 last fall. A request to mashup the sound with “As the World Caves In” has more than 7.4 million views, and one to use “Never Gonna Give You Up” has more than 3 million. “I think similar to the Berries and Cream thing, it was something everyone had seen before getting remixed, so that helps,” he says. “There was also a really natural joke format to it, where you know you were gonna put the crash somewhere.” Same goes for the Reese’s Puffs cereal jingle, which is “so easy to lay over anything. It has a really fun beat but it also doesn’t really have any tonality to it so you don’t have to worry about a beat in the wrong key.” One remix has been used in more than 300,000 TikToks.
Slomovitz says one of his most viewed TikToks—a mashup of Sales’ “Pope Is a Rock Star” and a Nick Colletti Vine—is the one that “most surprised” him. “I thought maybe the 500 people that think this is funny will think this is funny,” he says. “And nobody else is gonna look at this. Which I was very, very wrong about.” It also produced something new: The resulting track, “Go Little Vine Star,” has been used in more than 15,000 TikToks.
