One thing about living in the world we do is how postmodern our culture is. We blow things up and put them back together, sometimes with surprising results. Things that don’t seem to go together actually get along quite well. Things that we never thought of before come to be and take on a life of their own.

Mashups are the perfect example of this. The internet is full of these improbable mixes of old and new. Looking around , it’s quite cool how many of them there are and how inspired folks are to make them work.

Here are some awesome ones I’ve heard.

Mighty Mike, who creates a lot of these things out there has taken the pensive piano from John Lennon’s ballad “Imagine” and gives it Van Halen’s vocals. I don’t know how it works but it does.

“City Down Under” is another Mighty Mike brainchild. It takes a classic song from Men At Work and a recent hit from M83 to another surprising level.

Here’s Mighty Mike’s blog.

Sampling all the popular rock songs from the 90’s, Wick-it the Instigator has created “Nineties FTW”. It’s got Soundgarden, Beck, Nirvana, Oasis… well, everybody.

Check him out on Soundcloud.

Ryan Nellis has us “Rolling with the Tiger” in another inexplicable change up combining Survivor and Adele. Like the Lennon/Van Halen mashup, we get something that makes me wonder how can someone comes up with this stuff, but it really clicks.

You can find more of his work on his site.

And lastly, in a different kind of mashup, Gotye mixes up the tributes to his crazy-popular, sadly played out song “Somebody I Used To Know”. In “Somebodies”, he has mixed as many tributes and covers of his song as he can. And it breathes new life into it, showing that creativity that created the hit in the first place. Excellent work.

And he has listed all the videos here.

Any others out there that have caught your ear?