DJ BC, local Somerville mash up artist, puts on Boston's night of "Bootie" once a month. The name Bootie itself is a mash up, a clever play on the word 'bootleg' and the stash of a pirate. The club night officially opened as Bootie in San Francisco in 2003. However, before that it had originated in London under the title "Bastard," also a name that played with the concept of mash ups.

Mash ups are a mixing together of multiple songs to create something new. Traditional mash ups are made up of two songs, but mash ups can really be any number of songs spliced together, be it four, five, six, or more. Bootie fliers illustrate this concept by splicing two different celebrity faces together to form one person.

Mash ups can be made for varying purposes-sometimes their intent is irony or humor by the clever splicing of opposing styles, like The Ramones' "Hey Ho, Let's Go" with "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer." Sometimes their purpose is to highlight an idea or concept, like Christmas, as Booties latest free album Santastic Four highlights. But it's always about putting together existing ideas to create something new.

DJ BC confirms that this is like a literary reference in writing, or a cultural reference in pop art. "Like with Andy Warhol taking something that was a piece of commercial crap and elevating it to being a piece of fine art hanging in a gallery," he said. "Of course you want to make people dance, but you want to continue to push it further and further in terms of the sources you use. The further flung, the better."

After officially opening as Bootie in San Francisco, the night proved so popular (over 1,000 people hit the floor each night) that its founders decided to expand to other cities. Only one year later they had opened successful Bootie nights in LA, New York City, Paris, Munich, Hong Kong, Mexico City, and the Burning Man Festival.

The club nights are actually run off an interactive Internet message board. This is where the original night in London, Bastard, took off from. The message board allows DJs around the world to talk and exchange songs, mixes and ideas. "It's really a community," DJ BC says. "People all over the world. The coolest thing is someone in Boston can make a track and it can be played in San Francisco that night. So before a song is twelve hours old it can be played around the planet."

DJ BC himself made his own name in electronic music with his album The Beastles, a mash up of Beastie Boys and Beatles songs. He was originally inspired back in college by blues, classic rock and punk rock, and then got into hip hop. Hip-hop in particular fascinated him, he said, by the way it could recontextualize things so well.

"The referencing was mind-blowing," DJ BC says. Besides The Beastles, DJ BC has worked on many other albums, including his latest, Strictly Mixed and Mashed with reggae-punk band Big D and the Kids Table. He has mixed and done radio shows all over the world, including France, the UK, New Zealand, and all the major cities in the US.

In December 2007 he was awarded a Boston Music Award for his remix of "Dave's Shiny New Rap." He has now been putting on Boston's version of Bootie since May.

"Bootie is a very open-inclusive night," he says. "The Bootie vibe is welcoming to everyone.. Everyone can hear something up their ally and be represented at this night."

And finally, although internationally acclaimed, DJ BC is not above his local town. "The scene in Boston is cool," he says.. "Its a pretty diverse scene…Somerville [in particular] is a city of artists, from the city light displays to the Kickass Cupcakes, to the DJs, to the bands, to the painters. It's really pretty amazing how many artists there are in Somerville and how cool Somerville is. I love being from Somerville, I'm very proud of it."