What if Kanye West and Taylor Swift did a song together?

Early last month, a TikTok DJ called @notsocringevibes posted a remix of “Shake It Off” (2014) and “Carnival” (2024), and it immediately blew up. Two months later, the TikTok sound (titled “shake shake shake”) has been the soundtrack to over fifty thousand posts, including one from Kamala HQ and another featuring Selena Gomez. A YouTube version including Swift’s 2018 track, “…Ready For It?” has 150 thousand views.

The video quickly blew up, and the comments were flooded with compliments and questions. When interviewing the DJ behind the track, my good friend Avery, I ask her if her knowledge of the celebrities’ feud played an active role in inspiring the remix. Having known her since elementary school, it’s comical to read comments from people who think she just must’ve been trying to “stir drama”. I’m not shocked when Avery confirms, “The thought honestly wasn’t on my mind, but after I made it, I realized that it was ironic mixing them together… I was thinking of ‘Carnival’ more as a popular TikTok song than (as a Kanye West) song even though I knew it was by him.” She’s been a Swiftie for years, and says Swift has “the best discography”.

“Stirring drama” couldn’t be more irrelevant to the remix. Avery is simply flourishing her creativity, “(I think of two songs) that I think might sound cool together and use (Soundtrap) to mix them. A lot of them don’t end up working, but ‘…Ready For It?’ and ‘Carnival’ came right after each other on my playlist, and I realized the songs had similar tempos”. After putting both tracks into Soundtrap, she changed the pitch of “Carnival” to match that of “…Ready For It?”. A spot in the “Carnival” instrumental didn’t fit “…Ready For It?” and she happened to have “Shake It Off” downloaded, so the viral part of the remix featuring the 2014 track’s bridge was “just random luck”.

A screenshot of the remix in Soundtrap.

Remixes can take anywhere from half an hour to hours across several days to make. One of the quickest of Avery’s was for Swift’s “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart” with “Stay the Night” by Zedd and Hayley Williams, which took a half hour. But even with all the work done to avoid copyright, viral mixes are rare.

Avery is excited, but humbly nonchalant about the virality. After Kamala HQ used her remix on an edit, she promptly freaked out and posted on her Instagram (@averycringeloser) – a twice-a-year event for her. She otherwise states that recognition is, “not the reason why I’m doing it”, though it's a “nice bonus”.

Even so, she works hard on her remixes. To avoid copyright issues, Avery must keep her posts under a minute long. She also must change beats per minute and key. This makes it challenging to make a remix that works as well as “Shake it Off” and “Carnival” did. This also means that, to answer the pressing question about a potential streaming service release, “Someone else put it on Spotify but (it) got taken down quickly.” I jokingly suggest that she use a Beethoven song (which are public domain) for future remixes to avoid this happening, and she confidently responds, “I bet I can make Beethoven cool”. 

In fact, Avery can make anything cool. She makes it clear that remixing isn’t her primary passion – electronic music production is. This started in 2019 when she downloaded Garageband, and eventually expanded that love into songwriting. Though she tries to claim as we talk that her songwriting “isn’t the best”, statistics would disagree. Avery made use of free time over quarantine, and even caught a glimpse of this kind of success on SoundCloud with an original electronically produced song, titled “Ten Track Mind”. It got thousands of streams. She further treated her small online following with another dance-pop song titled “Break Up Song”, which was played on a UK radio station in late 2020.

A blog post on Avery's website from when she was primarily a singer/songwriter. She had operated under the pseudonym Lucia Blue.

It feels silly after all these years to even explicitly state this, but Avery is one of the smartest and most interesting people I know. It’s not often you find someone as multi-talented as her.

“My environment (inspires me)”, she tells of the two unpublished books she’s written, and another still in the works that she’s planning to publish. “All of my books have elements of social commentary… most of my plots seem to be vaguely inspired or influenced by things (I’ve learned) in school. For example, I wrote a dystopian book after learning about the cold war in history.”

So, DJ-ing isn’t her true passion, let alone the only passion she’s found success in. Music production isn’t her only passion, and writing isn’t her career passion. Her career passion is to become a media or publishing lawyer.

Avery is very aware of her surroundings because she’s spent her teenage years traveling the continents and floating between schools of completely different types. “I think being at so many schools in different countries and neighborhoods… made me (realize) how all of us are more similar than we are different… it’s given me a very global perspective on political and social issues, which I think has made my books (and goals) more nuanced and complex as opposed to if I hadn’t moved.”

The final question I ask is what’s next for Avery. She’s continuing to post on her DJ account. Two weeks ago, a mashup of Lana Del Rey's "Doin' Time" and Addison Rae's "Diet Pepsi" even got a repost from Rae. Avery is constantly expanding the artists and genres she listens to, so there’s a good chance you’ll find something random you forgot you liked or even a new song you love through her remixes.

If you want to keep up with the future of the “Carnival” and “Shake It Off” mashup and other future mashups, be sure to follow Avery on TikTok at @notsocringevibes.