It's stating the obvious to say "Smells Like Teen Spirit" hits faster and harder than "Edge of Seventeen." The oddity is that the pace of the song actually seems to relax the vocal, allowing every ounce of its lubriciousness to drop over the record like honey. It opens with the spider-vine crawl of Nirvana's opening riff and the vocal asking, "Kelly, can you handle this? Michelle, can you handle this? Beyoncé, can you handle this? I don't think they can handle this!" That has no sooner ended when Kurt Cobain's guitar, Krist Novoselic's bass, and especially Dave Grohl's drums explode and the release has already come.

But instead of being a premature ejaculation, the tension keeps building, band and vocalists striving to outdo each other's mounting excitement. "I don't think you're ready for this jelly," Beyoncé teases as the guitar and bass and drums work to an ever more crushing crescendo to prove otherwise. As she reaches the vocal's ultimate tease -- "I don't think you're ready for this" repeated again and again, the track reaches the moment in "Teen Spirit" where the rhythm is interrupted by the sound of the guitar, like a rubber band being yanked back. When the track reaches those interruptions, it's as if Beyoncé has succeeded in rocking her pursuer back on his heels, and as if she's smacking her bottom to punctuate her triumph.

This has to be one of the sexiest recordings ever. If "Stroke of Genius" is a dance of seduction, surrender, and retreat, this is a full-fledged sexual face-off, predatory and retaliatory between two sides determined not to give an inch. And lest it sound as if it's Destiny's Child alone who benefits from this pairing, Nirvana gains something, too, and what they gain is precisely the thing that grunge never had: sex. "Smells Like Booty" adds the one thing to their résumé that was missing: a great rock 'n' roll fuck song.

If mash-ups hit you in the wrong mood, they can be as annoying as the quick cutting that's become common in movies, leaving you feeling as if you can't focus on anything. They can also make you feel your senses are being sharpened, making all sorts of unforeseen connections, reshaping the very way you hear. There can be a problem with repetition, especially on the 2 Many DJs releases, which tend to repeat some tracks from volume to volume. But there's also a fan's obsessiveness for riffs and choruses, favorite moments, for savoring the initial rush that a song gives you when it first comes out of the speakers.

Steinski's "Nothing to Fear: A Rough Mix" might seem to share more with the found-music collages of DJ Shadow. But it's on this flabbergasting record that the inclusiveness of mash-up culture, its willingness to bring anything and everything together, comes right up against its insularity. After all, to love all these records and bits of records, famous and obscure, you have to have a voluminous knowledge of them; to make records like this, you have to own thousands. You have to be willing to indulge in scavenging the most minute flecks of sound, of finding ways to match them, to integrate them. Obsessiveness would seem to be a prerequisite.

"Nothing to Fear" is both funny -- Lenny Bruce, Jack Benny, the Marx Brothers, Bill Cosby and Robin Williams as Lawrence Welk ("Le's all get down, get fohn-kee!") all make appearances -- and frightening, as laid back as someone casually slipping one record after another onto a turntable over the course of a rainy afternoon, yet crazily intense.

It starts out like a big variety show from the '60s. First a drum roll, and then an announcer breathlessly hyping what's to come: "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen! Tonight from New York!" You can practically see those black-dot reflections that the sequins on the performer's gowns cast into TV cameras in those years. Almost immediately, unease sets in. The drum roll is reduced to the muted sound of approaching thunder, a disembodied voice creeps in: "It is ironic to see how quickly he has faded from memory considering what an astounding record he made. It certainly is a very bizarre story."

At once, the dazzling array of performers we've been promised seem to have become ghosts before they've appeared, slated for some future limbo where they exist only on forgotten kinescopes and scratchy records. "Listen please, I want everybody's attention" says a female voice, sounding like an elementary school teacher ordering her class into silence, and then another voice, older, English comes in, "I am a traveler, a wanderer." From where? To where? And then it's the opening doo-wop riff from Dion & the Belmonts "I Wonder Why": "Dun-dun-dun-dun-de-da-dun-dun-de-de-da-dun-dun-dun-dun-da-doo-doo-de-da-da-aaa" -- but repeated endlessly, the syllables, so effortless in the original, stumbling over each other like a skipping 45.

It's the sound of being stuck in a song, of wanting to extend the rush of the opening and then not being able to get past it. And it finds its apotheosis, next, in the moment that has struck pained recognition in the heart of every record geek, the scene in "Diner" when Daniel Stern tells his wife Ellen Barkin not to touch his records. "It's just music," she says, and he, scarcely able to believe what he's hearing, explodes like a petulant boy, "Every one of my records means something! ... When I listen to my records, they take me back to certain points in my life. Just don't touch my records -- ever," and that last word hits with the finality of the piano chord that closes "A Day in the Life."

Meanwhile, a smooth-sounding DJ tells us, "That's the way it was, that's the way it is, and it's always changing and it's always the same" and a blandly, somnambulant voice soothes, "There's nothing to worry about, there's nothing to fear." And underneath it, mocking this relationship gone wrong, are the opening chords of the greatest of all seduction songs, "Let's Get It On," which subconsciously hooks up with another record geek, Jack Black at the end of Stephen Frears' film of "High Fidelity," taking the stage to sing the song as if there were no reason why a pudgy white boy couldn't be Marvin Gaye, at least in his own mind.

From there, private obsessions share space with public disgraces. James Mason's voice as Humbert Humbert in "Lolita" purrs with impossible delicacy and insidiousness about "little girls" while Bill Cosby, his voice sounding as if it's coming out of the innermost circle of hell, asks, "Do you wanna burn?" Malcolm X warns, "If anyone puts a hand on you, send him to the cemetery," and that call to self-reliance is mocked a few tracks later by a rapper, whom we've previously heard saying he's a role model for young people by setting an example not to follow, talking about the police rape of Abner Louima, a nightmare Malcolm X didn't live to see.

Through it all, the groove never falters, whether Steinski is playing Foxy Brown's "Hot Spot" or Nelly's "Country Grammar" or Blackalicious' "Swan Lake." The hits just keep on coming and as that pod person promised us, there's nothing to worry about, nothing to fear. You can free your soul and drift away, just like Dobie Gray said you could.

Fall into "Nothing to Fear" and you begin to feel like Jimmy Stewart in "Vertigo," experiencing not the terror of being trapped in a fantasy but the soothing Valium-calmness of losing yourself in one. "Nothing to Fear," which is one of the smoothest, most listenable records I know -- a concoction where the grooves feel as effortless and necessary as breathing -- is the apotheosis of mash-ups, an open road and a dead end. It leaves you suspended between freedom and servitude, between the belief that a pop song can change the world and the glorious delusion that a pop song can be the world.

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