Five remix projects I'd like to see:
1. John Coltrane's My Favorite Things Vs. the Mountain Goats song of the same name.
2. That freakin' Beyonce song Vs. Bill Cosby's "I Know I Can Handle it" from the album "Bill Cosby Talks to Kids about Drugs. (which I affectionately call "Kids Say the Darndest Things About Drugs.")
3. Neutral Milk Hotel's "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" Vs. Anybody Ballsy Enough to Try That One. (All will fail.)
4. The Entire Decibully Album "City of Festivals" Vs. Jeff Tweedy. I dont' care what he does to it, he can just re-recorded all the vocals and I'd be happier than a pig in shit.
5. The Entire Pixies Catalogue turned into a series of rap albums by Eminem. Hell, as long as they're trying to sell them so hard.
This was originally going to be a long dissection of "the grey album" that I wrote in a notebook a few weeks ago, but instead I've decided that that was too much. Plus, the notebook's in DeKalb and I'm in Rockford. Let me just say instead that there seems to be a monster looming on the horizon.
We're all in danger of having a ton of overzealous DJs and MCs taking pop (i.e. non-rap) albums and making them all rappy. This is not necessarily a bad thing, in fact it's yielded some moments of genius. A while ago, this guy named Freelance Hellraiser started pairing bands with rappers or other bands (D12 Vs. Depeche Mode, Missy Elliott and George Michael, Dexy's Midnight Runners and Public Enemy) and combinging their songs. Almost everything FH did deserves praise, and I know it's been done by DJs for years, but there's an oddity and freshness about these two things that really didn't belong together coexisting all of a sudden. I mean, "hits from the bong" sampled dusty sprinfield really well, but hell..."Son of a Preacher Man" has a groove that begs to be recycled. Come On Eileen does not. And the whole "Grey Album" phenomenon is just the next step. It's a great idea--an entire album of remixes with an ambitious theme. And there is some pure goodness in Danger Mouse's work, but there are also some really skippable bits. For now, I'll just talk about the plusses.
One thing I really love about it (and another thing that puts it ahead of lots of other remixes in my book) is the fact that no song is sampled outright--you don't have a remake in the bunch. The closest thing to a remake is "December 4th," which chops up all the sections of "mother nature's son" and alternates plaintative passages of Shawn's mom talking with the rapping itself. The Beatles music is rearranged, but largely unchanged (except for the harder, stuttering beat behind the guitar.) At the other side of the spectrum are "Dirt off Your Shoulder" and "Allure" which rip off "Julia" and "Dear Prudence" respectively. The most incredible thing about both of these tracks is that I know the white album really well, and I wouldn't be sure where the accompaniments were sampled from if there weren't parts of the remixes that had bits of the song played without alteration (and Allure being Dear Prudence is still a guess, to be honest. But I'm pretty sure about the guess.)
One of the looming problems that's bound to present itself when lots of people start trying to put remix projects like this together is that sometimes, the best possibilities are going to go unexplored and expectations are not going to be met most of the time. The Grey Album is a great idea that delivers, but I head someone suggest that some of the songs on it sounded like they were rushed to get the product out before the ideas were fully fleshed out. This makes some sense if you listen critically to the Grey Album. At this point I get the feeling we're about to have a flooded market filled with ideas that sound good, but were rushed out onto P2P networks as fast as possible, just because the producers had to beat someone else to the punch on the idea.
I could be wrong about all of this. But in my defense, I have a record called "Yoshimi Battles The Hip-Hop Robots" on my computer right now. It's full of Public Enemy, Eminem, 50 Cent and some others. And, well, the jury is still out on how good it really is. But it's something.
1. John Coltrane's My Favorite Things Vs. the Mountain Goats song of the same name.
2. That freakin' Beyonce song Vs. Bill Cosby's "I Know I Can Handle it" from the album "Bill Cosby Talks to Kids about Drugs. (which I affectionately call "Kids Say the Darndest Things About Drugs.")
3. Neutral Milk Hotel's "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" Vs. Anybody Ballsy Enough to Try That One. (All will fail.)
4. The Entire Decibully Album "City of Festivals" Vs. Jeff Tweedy. I dont' care what he does to it, he can just re-recorded all the vocals and I'd be happier than a pig in shit.
5. The Entire Pixies Catalogue turned into a series of rap albums by Eminem. Hell, as long as they're trying to sell them so hard.
This was originally going to be a long dissection of "the grey album" that I wrote in a notebook a few weeks ago, but instead I've decided that that was too much. Plus, the notebook's in DeKalb and I'm in Rockford. Let me just say instead that there seems to be a monster looming on the horizon.
We're all in danger of having a ton of overzealous DJs and MCs taking pop (i.e. non-rap) albums and making them all rappy. This is not necessarily a bad thing, in fact it's yielded some moments of genius. A while ago, this guy named Freelance Hellraiser started pairing bands with rappers or other bands (D12 Vs. Depeche Mode, Missy Elliott and George Michael, Dexy's Midnight Runners and Public Enemy) and combinging their songs. Almost everything FH did deserves praise, and I know it's been done by DJs for years, but there's an oddity and freshness about these two things that really didn't belong together coexisting all of a sudden. I mean, "hits from the bong" sampled dusty sprinfield really well, but hell..."Son of a Preacher Man" has a groove that begs to be recycled. Come On Eileen does not. And the whole "Grey Album" phenomenon is just the next step. It's a great idea--an entire album of remixes with an ambitious theme. And there is some pure goodness in Danger Mouse's work, but there are also some really skippable bits. For now, I'll just talk about the plusses.
One thing I really love about it (and another thing that puts it ahead of lots of other remixes in my book) is the fact that no song is sampled outright--you don't have a remake in the bunch. The closest thing to a remake is "December 4th," which chops up all the sections of "mother nature's son" and alternates plaintative passages of Shawn's mom talking with the rapping itself. The Beatles music is rearranged, but largely unchanged (except for the harder, stuttering beat behind the guitar.) At the other side of the spectrum are "Dirt off Your Shoulder" and "Allure" which rip off "Julia" and "Dear Prudence" respectively. The most incredible thing about both of these tracks is that I know the white album really well, and I wouldn't be sure where the accompaniments were sampled from if there weren't parts of the remixes that had bits of the song played without alteration (and Allure being Dear Prudence is still a guess, to be honest. But I'm pretty sure about the guess.)
One of the looming problems that's bound to present itself when lots of people start trying to put remix projects like this together is that sometimes, the best possibilities are going to go unexplored and expectations are not going to be met most of the time. The Grey Album is a great idea that delivers, but I head someone suggest that some of the songs on it sounded like they were rushed to get the product out before the ideas were fully fleshed out. This makes some sense if you listen critically to the Grey Album. At this point I get the feeling we're about to have a flooded market filled with ideas that sound good, but were rushed out onto P2P networks as fast as possible, just because the producers had to beat someone else to the punch on the idea.
I could be wrong about all of this. But in my defense, I have a record called "Yoshimi Battles The Hip-Hop Robots" on my computer right now. It's full of Public Enemy, Eminem, 50 Cent and some others. And, well, the jury is still out on how good it really is. But it's something.
posted by Brian at 4:52:00 PM
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