To-day a YouTube video popped up in my feed with the curious title of “Mashed Up Peas (DJ Earworm vs Black Eyed Peas)”.

After a second of confusion I came to understand what the video might be. DJ Earworm is the nom de plume of a mashup artist who rose to fame for his “United State of Pop” series. Every year, beginning with “United State of Pop 2007”, he would take the hottest radio hits of each year and combine them into one gloriously excessive and surprisingly coherent mashup. The entire year’s musical zeitgeist distilled into four minutes. So of course “Mashed Up Peas (DJ Earworm vs Black Eyed Peas)” was most likely going to be a mashup of all the Black Eyed Peas’ greatest hits.

That wasn’t what flummoxed me. What caught my eye was the “vs”.

I liked to fancy that I could decipher the titles of music videos. There was a time when I was confused by “feat.”. What was “feat.”? Then I learned about featured artists, and how one artist (such as Gwen Stefani) might ask another artist (such as Akon) to lend his talents to her next song, which would come out as “The Sweet Escape - Gwen Stefani ft. Akon”. (Yes, sometimes “feat.” was further abbreviated to “ft.”, like feet, the unit of length.) And it seemed like everybody interacting with the music ecosystem understood what this notation was, and I had to figure it out by myself from context clues.

Then there was “opb.” This one I saw a little more recently, as in “Tally Bridge Shuffle - Cat Price (opb. Annabel Walters)”. And it meant that Cat Price was performing “Tally Bridge Shuffle”, but she wanted you to know that it was Annabel Walters’ song first. So basically “opb.” meant it was a cover. It’s an initialism for “originally performed by”.

Eventually I was able to decode titles like “PSY - ‘That That (prod. & feat. SUGA of BTS)’ MV”. This meant that the artist PSY was performing a song called “That That”, which was produced by SUGA, of the group BTS, and also included SUGA in a featured role. The “MV” simply meant that this was the music video for the song.

But all of the “feats” and “fts” and “opbs” and “prods” of the world could not prepare me for “vs”.

I know what “vs” traditionally means. It’s short for “versus”, the preposition that lets you know that somebody will be competing against somebody else. If you see a sports game advertised as “Penn vs. Princeton”, that means that you can expect to see a team from the University of Pennsylvania in competition with a team from Princeton University. I also often see it further abbreviated to “v”, usually in court cases, such as “Brown v. Board of Education”. That’s all well and good.

What does “DJ Earworm vs Black Eyed Peas” mean? Is DJ Earworm competing against the Black Eyed Peas? Does this mashup represent a form of musical combat between DJ Earworm, the mashup artist, and the Black Eyed Peas, the band?

How can we tell who wins? Will some referee or impartial observer pop up at the end of the video to adjudicate the match? Does DJ Earworm win if he mashes up the Black Eyed Peas’ hits well enough that they form a pleasing purée of musical content? Do the Black Eyed Peas win if their hits prove too eclectic and cumbersome for DJ Earworm to integrate them effectively with one another?

Have the Black Eyed Peas been fairly warned in advance of the match? Have they had the chance to, given prior notice, construct their decades-long discography in such a way as to frustrate the future DJ Earworm’s attempts to reduce it to a single coherent four-minute statement? Or is their performance in this match more of a passive thing, where all they can do is stand by helplessly and stare at the modern musical Dr. Frankenstein as he ransacks their oeuvre, grist for the mashup mill, and pieces together his monstrous mélange?

There’s only one way to find out!