This weekend I watched a documentary called Re:Generation on Hulu. The premise isn’t exactly high concept: take four popular producers (Mark Ronson, DJ Premiere, Pretty Lights, and of course Skrillex) and ask them to work in a genre other than their own. The whole thing was pretty polite and noncontroversial, exactly what the corporate sponsors, The Grammys and Hyundai, paid for. One reviewer called it "a commercial without a product," a line I wish I would have written my own self.

For his segment, Skrillex got to work with the remaining members of The Doors. Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger were into it, coming into the studio together to lay down some of their trademark organ and guitar over a programmed beat. Drummer John Densmore, long estranged from the other guys — apparently he thinks it’s pretty tasteless for the band to tour with Ian Astbury of The Cult as Jim Morrison Karaoke — came in separately to add percussion. I’m a lifelong fan of The Doors and I really like Skrillex, so it was great to see his excitement as they all walked around Venice, shooting the shit and grabbing b-roll footage.

What would you do if you found yourself in the studio with the living Doors for a brief afternoon? I know what I’d do, and that’s exactly what Skrillex did: record the jam session, sample some handclaps, take my laptop back to the hotel room and perfect the mix on my Beats headphones. For the pièce de résistance (whatever that means), some Jim Morrison vocal samples: Come on baby, light my fi...

And there you have it, a stadium anthem with the decidedly un-psychedelic name of "Breakn’ A Sweat."

Greil Marcus, in his recent book The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years, describes the thought process of the band as it plays "Light My Fire" at a club called The Family Dog in Denver, Colorado in 1967: "How do we make this song into something they haven’t heard before? How do we make it into something we haven’t heard before?" That’s the challenge for all artists. "Breakn’ A Sweat" sounds like the end of a process run amok, one that began in 1967. It sounds like The Doors stripped of everything that makes them, well, The Doors.

Sounds like we’re getting dumber, doesn’t it?

And why not? That’s a lot healthier, artistically-wise, than the alternative, which I believe is called Rasta Hookah, a twelve piece jam band with two drummers and six dreadlocks that performs almost once a month at Sherlock’s on North Park Row in Erie, PA. Or Crystal Ship, the Jersey Shore’s most famous Doors cover band.