DJ Earworm, the musician otherwise known as Jordan Roseman, has a knack for for condensing large swaths of cultural time into commemorative mash-ups. In the past, he’s boiled The Backstreet Boys’ career into just 12 minutes of PG-13 romantic yearning and summarized entire years worth of hits through his annual United States Of Pop mixes. Now, eager to reinforce just how quickly a whole decade can pass by, DJ Earworm has run down 10 years of pop through a single three-minute video.
Instead of blasting a water cannon of disjointed chart-toppers at the listener, the mix works a huge number of tracks, spanning a whole lot of disparate genres, into a delirious whole. “Decade Of Pop: 100 Song Mashup”switches between an enormous range of styles from the 2010s, combining singles from artists like Bruno Mars and Adele with those by Rihanna, Daft Punk, and many, many others.
It’s impressive as a piece of music, but also as an archive of how wild our collective taste has been over the last 10 years. Remember LMFAO? Gotye? Those years when everyone apparently decided to celebrate “Blurred Lines,” “Moves Like Jagger” and “Thrift Shop” as some kind of cultural revelation? Can you recall a time when Nicki Minaj, Carley Rae Jepsen, and goddamned “Gangnam Style” weren’t embedded in our brains? Listen to the mix and you, too, can travel into a time vortex spanning the past ten years,