http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Oo2XO_ub18
Compare this to the original, another similar, good, but very, very different song. Stil, the vibe here is amazing, a sunny day and a smile and a swing in your step all in one, complete and self-sure and brilliant, carefree. It's ambitious rap, and it's totally justified in how amazing it is.
Talking about hip-hop with a friend of mine, it becomes apparent that one of the reasons it's often inaccessible is that it's incohesive. Each line of poetry is tonally and rhythmically related to each other, but often they don't form a strict story, the way songs often do. It's free-form, live-as-thought, clever and cheeky and relevant as hell.
Showing posts with label Remixes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Remixes. Show all posts
Monday, April 29, 2013
Monday, April 15, 2013
Lisztomania — Phoenix (Shook remix)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGbVaJ5kl7s
Shook (one of my favorite remix artists) takes Phoenix's Lisztomania and makes it more French, more disco-poppy, more dance hall, more syncopated and synth-y, more sparse and reverb, stripping it down to its minimalist essentials, the choralized vocals; it builds back up a bassline, a clav synth, and claps, and pretty much nothing else. And you get this portrait of a song which has been torn open, ribs exposed, and you can see how it works; the song swells properly as the bridge leads into the chorus; the bassline mirrors the repetitions, and the song trudges along nn-ts, nn-ts like a good disco song, connecting another remix bridge between time periods, dragging the past out into the light, examining the stuff Phoenix is made of.
Shook (one of my favorite remix artists) takes Phoenix's Lisztomania and makes it more French, more disco-poppy, more dance hall, more syncopated and synth-y, more sparse and reverb, stripping it down to its minimalist essentials, the choralized vocals; it builds back up a bassline, a clav synth, and claps, and pretty much nothing else. And you get this portrait of a song which has been torn open, ribs exposed, and you can see how it works; the song swells properly as the bridge leads into the chorus; the bassline mirrors the repetitions, and the song trudges along nn-ts, nn-ts like a good disco song, connecting another remix bridge between time periods, dragging the past out into the light, examining the stuff Phoenix is made of.
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Echo — Foxes (FIXYN remix)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aemEQYNZkyY
This sort of music — it's remix music, certainly, processed into next week, built up from real voices and instruments, a history of record scratching and repurposing, distorted until nothing is recognizable but the true music theory behind the music — contrapuntal motion, syncopation, dynamics and style, without the pesky instrumentation that live music demands. Cheating? Maybe. But also far more freeing, with time to dote over every smidge, time enough to process and mix and create rhythms that weave in and out of real music. I don't care about the culture around it or the context or even the song itself, but the sorts of people who create this music are praiseworthy, innovative, the musical equivalent of academics, so caught up in music that they can't help but take new tracks and really think about them.
This sort of music — it's remix music, certainly, processed into next week, built up from real voices and instruments, a history of record scratching and repurposing, distorted until nothing is recognizable but the true music theory behind the music — contrapuntal motion, syncopation, dynamics and style, without the pesky instrumentation that live music demands. Cheating? Maybe. But also far more freeing, with time to dote over every smidge, time enough to process and mix and create rhythms that weave in and out of real music. I don't care about the culture around it or the context or even the song itself, but the sorts of people who create this music are praiseworthy, innovative, the musical equivalent of academics, so caught up in music that they can't help but take new tracks and really think about them.
Monday, April 8, 2013
In Your Eyes (Extended Mix) — Peter Gabriel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5sgYYE-J3w
To find out suddenly that one of your favorite songs, imbued with significance over many years, played on repeat, sometimes laughed, cried over; company on train rides and slow dances and drenched in adolescent hormones; to know a hundred other people who all attribute the same significance to this song, so regarded it's nearly scripture; to find out that this song, a song I once recognized from the triangle line alone, able to hear the treble on the speakers in a Starbucks through another song I was listening to, to be jolted to attention by a mere fraction of this song; to find out that this one song I'd been listening to for all these years was but a part of another, longer song, a deconstruction thereof, beginning and ending with extra content, isolated motifs from the height of the song — the sudden, deep, in your eyes that first appears around the 1:12 mark, the verses at the climax sung in Wolof — to disassemble a pop song whose parts have never been dissociated — and better yet, for it to be done not as sacrilege, but as part of the original intention, like finding a new book of the New Testament — I cannot express.
To find out suddenly that one of your favorite songs, imbued with significance over many years, played on repeat, sometimes laughed, cried over; company on train rides and slow dances and drenched in adolescent hormones; to know a hundred other people who all attribute the same significance to this song, so regarded it's nearly scripture; to find out that this song, a song I once recognized from the triangle line alone, able to hear the treble on the speakers in a Starbucks through another song I was listening to, to be jolted to attention by a mere fraction of this song; to find out that this one song I'd been listening to for all these years was but a part of another, longer song, a deconstruction thereof, beginning and ending with extra content, isolated motifs from the height of the song — the sudden, deep, in your eyes that first appears around the 1:12 mark, the verses at the climax sung in Wolof — to disassemble a pop song whose parts have never been dissociated — and better yet, for it to be done not as sacrilege, but as part of the original intention, like finding a new book of the New Testament — I cannot express.
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Shook — Emancipator (Mobb Deep X Sigur Ros)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVEwemk-TRU
Sigur Ros has never quite done the trick for me; I need my music to have driving rhythms, even if it's ambient; nothing downtempo for me. When I first heard this around a year ago, I thought it was merely a remix some Sigur Ros song; when it kicks into high gear around 1:01, it is transfixing, chopping and filtering and switching between vocals and chants and backgrounds, two layers of already indistinct gibberish further removed from context, built into a layered quilt of texture and sound — and then the rap section begins at 2:00, another minute later. The lyrics are unrelated; I love the contrast between the abrasive, violent lyrics and the peaceful backgrounds, mediated by a chopped midtempo beat, made of Sigur Ros but made to fit Mobb Deep. The two artists have never — will never — meet or collaborate, but somebody (Emancipator, here) thought they should, and they were right.
Sigur Ros has never quite done the trick for me; I need my music to have driving rhythms, even if it's ambient; nothing downtempo for me. When I first heard this around a year ago, I thought it was merely a remix some Sigur Ros song; when it kicks into high gear around 1:01, it is transfixing, chopping and filtering and switching between vocals and chants and backgrounds, two layers of already indistinct gibberish further removed from context, built into a layered quilt of texture and sound — and then the rap section begins at 2:00, another minute later. The lyrics are unrelated; I love the contrast between the abrasive, violent lyrics and the peaceful backgrounds, mediated by a chopped midtempo beat, made of Sigur Ros but made to fit Mobb Deep. The two artists have never — will never — meet or collaborate, but somebody (Emancipator, here) thought they should, and they were right.
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Get Lucky (Astre Edit) — Daft Punk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mh9eJJ8cKsU#!
Daft Punk — I speak from a tiny, tiny experience with them and their library — inhabits that range of sound that, if you know the source, you can tell it's sampled; if you don't, it's pure sound, from tabula rasa, no identifiable synths or strings or what. It's all just full tones and sweeps and fast glitches, and it's too much to parse or understand; maybe it's voice, or it was voice, or maybe it'd be clear if I could understand the french accent buried underneath layers of processing; the background was once drums, filtered and chained through 808s and reverbs and compressors; now they're just flittering hits and withdrawals of bass and treble tones, a crash or a pound or a bump here or there. With any experience in pop music, this is perfectly normal, but imagine someone a hundred, two hundred years listening — the chords and rhythms are rational enough, but the arrangement is beyond imagination. What does another hunded hold?
Daft Punk — I speak from a tiny, tiny experience with them and their library — inhabits that range of sound that, if you know the source, you can tell it's sampled; if you don't, it's pure sound, from tabula rasa, no identifiable synths or strings or what. It's all just full tones and sweeps and fast glitches, and it's too much to parse or understand; maybe it's voice, or it was voice, or maybe it'd be clear if I could understand the french accent buried underneath layers of processing; the background was once drums, filtered and chained through 808s and reverbs and compressors; now they're just flittering hits and withdrawals of bass and treble tones, a crash or a pound or a bump here or there. With any experience in pop music, this is perfectly normal, but imagine someone a hundred, two hundred years listening — the chords and rhythms are rational enough, but the arrangement is beyond imagination. What does another hunded hold?
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Roll Over Beethoven
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOrMg3pY7hw
Music is a genre that endlessly steals from itself. Music is up-front about it, though. It's easy to identify references and homages in music, because our ears pick them out whether we're looking for them or not. Books and movies can steal plots and characters; sometimes we won't even notice that O Brother Where Art Thou is an homage to the Odyssey.
But musical homages insist upon being recognized. We have the 1956 Chuck Berry original, above; we have The Beatles' cover in 1963, who give the song a little je ne sais qoui; we have Electric Light Orchestra's cover in 1973, which begins with Beethoven's fifth itself. Then something was sparked; Beethoven's fifth became part of popular consciousness again, maybe. Disco artist Walter Murphy went gold with Fifth of Beethoven in 1976. Recently, a Flight Facilities remix of the disco edit.
Whenever one reads about celebrated thinkers and figures of antiquity, there's always this direct, easily traced line of descent; we have Socrates and his student Plato and his student Aristotle. We have Haydn and especially Mozart before Beethoven, and Bach before them.
It's easy to pick a figure and claim them as unparalleled genius; Bach appears to have had no predecessors; nor Socrates, nor Chuck Berry. Einstein had the same figure of genius around him; he was self-taught and self-emergent.
I would wager these chains of popular figures exist in all fields. Is this a product of human progress or simply human memory?
Music is a genre that endlessly steals from itself. Music is up-front about it, though. It's easy to identify references and homages in music, because our ears pick them out whether we're looking for them or not. Books and movies can steal plots and characters; sometimes we won't even notice that O Brother Where Art Thou is an homage to the Odyssey.
But musical homages insist upon being recognized. We have the 1956 Chuck Berry original, above; we have The Beatles' cover in 1963, who give the song a little je ne sais qoui; we have Electric Light Orchestra's cover in 1973, which begins with Beethoven's fifth itself. Then something was sparked; Beethoven's fifth became part of popular consciousness again, maybe. Disco artist Walter Murphy went gold with Fifth of Beethoven in 1976. Recently, a Flight Facilities remix of the disco edit.
Whenever one reads about celebrated thinkers and figures of antiquity, there's always this direct, easily traced line of descent; we have Socrates and his student Plato and his student Aristotle. We have Haydn and especially Mozart before Beethoven, and Bach before them.
It's easy to pick a figure and claim them as unparalleled genius; Bach appears to have had no predecessors; nor Socrates, nor Chuck Berry. Einstein had the same figure of genius around him; he was self-taught and self-emergent.
I would wager these chains of popular figures exist in all fields. Is this a product of human progress or simply human memory?
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