Back in April, one of my favorite minor internet celebrities, Hennessy Youngman, announced his foray into deejaying. Excited, I downloaded the mix and put it on my iPod to enjoy on my commute. As I cued it up, Hennessy’s trademark “What up, Internet?” popped into my headphones amid an air raid siren, hyping me up for  . . .  a Foreigner power ballad? What was going on here? I should have been more prepared: after all, this was Hennessy, AKA Hen-rock Obama, a master of irreverence, and his mix was entitled CVS Bangers.

Hennessy’s work has long used hip-hop-style provocations to highlight the pretensions of the art world. His Art Thoughtz video lectures mix street slang with High Theory jargon, outfitted with blunt (and possibly blunted) detachment and cartoon-character baseball caps. A sample from one of my favorites, “Post-structuralism, what the fuck is that?” illustrates his technique nicely: “You be like, ‘This painting is truly transcendental,’ and poststructuralism be like, ‘Motherfucker, you can’t stand outside of history, the fuck you smoking on?’” I have to admit, it’s a better lecture on poststructuralism than I’ve ever managed to put together.

CVS Bangers extends Hennessy’s incisive detournement techniques into popular music. Hennessy draws from the eighties soft rock ubiquitous in checkout lines nationwide: the gentle synths, gated drums, and grim yet innocuous bleating that passed for singing during the Reagan years. Hennessy’s joke is to stuff the oversized shoulder pads of adult contemporary into the youthful structure of a hip-hop mixtape. Airhorns resound over the climactic key change in Steve Perry’s “Oh Sherrie”; hockey-hair-gone-comb-over fist-pumpers like Glass Tiger’s “Don’t Forget Me” are punched up with squelched samples of More Fire like we’re popping molly instead of stuffed jalapeños.