what's the big deal about remixes?

this may be kinda off-topic but....

what's the big deal about remixes? i've always ignored them because they always seem to be really substandard versions of the real thing. rarely are remixes ever shorter than the original version, and with my experience, they seem like epic songs!

í've heard remixes of ordinary rock songs no freaking keyboards or any hint of electronica in the song, but they decide to get a remixer anyways! what's with that? i remember a remix of a Pluto song (great forgotten canadian rock band) and all they did was sped up the vocals and put a dance beat behind it. nothing original at all.

and quality control...about what percentage of the remixes out there are actually good? i've heard a few good ones, but most of them are just boring.

I don't know who invented the remix (but I know it wasn't Puff Daddy) but in the 1970's some disco DJ's started producing own extended versions of tracks with longer intros, breaks or endings by copying and pasting the relevant parts using tape machines or by live mixing two copies of the track (although this may have been inspired by the way reggae producers made dub versions of tracks by removing the vocals and adding sound effects). When bands, producers and record companies found out what they were doing they started to produce extended versions and released them on the new twelve-inch vinyl single format.

It was only after hip-hop's pioneers started sampling and changing tracks and bands that used synths (such as New Order, Depeche Mode and Soft Cell) realised that their music was being played in discos in the late 1970's and early 1980's that artists or record companies started getting other people to produce a different version of a track based on parts of the original recordings. Sometimes this was done because artists wanted to know what other people could do with their work, sometimes this was done because artists or record companies wanted their music to be heard by people who wouldn't normally hear it and sometimes this was done to fill up twelve inch singles without writing new songs (another trick that was used at least once to help fill up a single was to put a backwards version of the A-side on the B-side, give it a new title and claim royalties with minimum effort).

As music technology got better and the club scene got bigger remixers became more ambitious, using less and less of the original track, changing the original tracks more and putting in more sounds from other sources (although ironically one of the first really famous remixes, Coldcut's "Seven Minutes of Madness" remix of Eric B and Rakim's "Paid In Full", was made by live mixing the original and various other tracks such as a track by Ofra Haza). By the early 1990's remixing had become an art form in its own right with some DJs producing great dance tracks using very little of the track they were remixing and lots of samples and music they had made themselves (such as Primal Scream's "Loaded", Andrew Weatherall's radical remix of "I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have").

So what's the big deal about remixes? You're right to say that some remixes contain nothing original at all which is true of some early remixes (such as some of the remixes of NO tracks made in the 1980's) when there was little that people could do to change a track. You're right to say that some remixes are boring which is true of some more recent remixes in which the vocals are placed over a bog-standard dance track (such as the Perfecto remix of NO's "World" which is very similar to the Perfecto remix of U2's "Even Better Than The Real Thing" - if there had been a Perfecto remix of Frank Sinatra's "New York, New York" it would probably have been very similar as well). You could also say that some songs contain nothing original at all and some songs are boring.

However, some remixes are so original that you can barely tell which song has been remixed (a few years ago some remixers began claiming that they put so much into their remixes and made previously unsuccessful songs into big hits that they should be credited as producers and paid royalties rather than just paid a one-off remix fee). The best remixes can be almost as good as the original (such as the Fire Island mix of New Order's "Regret", a house remix which really suits the song), as good as the original (such as Paul Oakenfold and Steve Osborne's 12-inch remix of The Stone Roses' "Waterfall" which sounds like an alternative version of the original on which John Squire and Mani play a different intro) or even better than the original (such as Norman Cook's remix of Cornershop's "Brimful Of Asha" in which he took the flat-sounding original, speeded it up a bit and added a new rhythm track to bring out the joyous quality in the song). Some remixers and remixes aren't worth bothering with but some remixers and remixes are, just as some artists and songs aren't worth bothering with and some artists and songs are, and when you hear a few by someone you decide whether or not you want to listen to more by them in future.

i'll check out some of the remixes you suggested. thanks for the info fingers.

Excellent post, Fingers

JOB WELL DONE, FINGERS.....

I have always been a fan of remixes ( ...and of course, been disappointed more often than not...with most of todays bog standard remixes... read Vanelli's 1963 - biggest anti-climax )

Its amazing that those classics you've mentioned are in my 12" collection - Paid In Full, Loaded, etc..

I'm curious what happened to Blue Monday 2002 ?....year 2002 will be over soon, so does that mean it won't get released?...and anyone here heard of it?...Please tell me what you think.....

.....coz I once past up a chance on owning a promo/ or acetate Cd of Blue Monday 2002 via E-bay......

Thanks for the compliments on my post. I didn't know how much The Cartographer's Girlfriend knew about remixing, how many remixes she had heard and what good ones were in there so I just told what I thought was the story of remixing and pointed her in the direction of some of the best ones. However, since this thread is turning into a list of good and bad remixes I'll add some to the list of good ones all of which are by remixers whose names I would recommend that you should look and listen out for.

Norman Cook a.k.a Fatboy Slim (and numerous other aliases) is arguably the best remixer in the world because he knows what parts of a track already work and only adds or changes a small number of elements to improve the track without making it unrecognisable. His afore-mentioned remix of "Brimful Of Asha" is probably his best but his remix of Jean Jacques Perrey's "E.V.A." (if you haven't heard the original it's a funky "Tubular Bells") is a corker, his Coldcut-style James Brown "Payback" mix is as funky as you'd expect it to be and he was half of the "Double Trouble" team whose Jackson 5-sampling remix of Eric B and Rakim's "I Know You Got Soul" is even funkier and much more fun. There are two collections of tracks he's remixed and/or produced, "Fatboy Slim's Greatest Remixes" and "The Fatboy Slim/Norman Cook Collection", and I would recommend both but if the thought of buying them is off-putting because quite a few tracks are on both then buy the former because it includes his bigger-than-big-beat mix of Wildchild's "Renegade Master" and the irresistable Mighty Dub Katz's "Magic Carpet Ride" (which isn't a remix - it's all his own work and it's Norman at his off-the-wall but dancefloor-filling best).

Armand Van Helden's own music may not be as good as people hoped it would be but he has produced some fine remixes, especially when he is dealing with unpromising material. His remix of Tori Amos' "Professional Widow" is fantastic but his "Dark Garage" remix of trip-hop also-rans the Sneaker Pimps' "Spin Spin Sugar" is absolutely stunning and features one of the best basslines ever. He is very very talented and imaginative but unlike Norman Cook he hasn't been consistently brilliant.

Like Norman Cook The Chemical Brothers are superstar DJs and make their own brilliant records and they can also make great remixes. However, unlike Norman Cook when they do a remix they take very little of the original (which is often a track by an indie band) and add a lot of their own new material so the result sounds more like a new Chemical Brothers track than a remix. Their remixes of Mercury Rev's "Delta Sun Bottleneck Swamp", Spiritualized's "I Think I'm In Love" and the Manic Street Preachers' "Everything Must Go" (which was used in a version of the driving game Gran Turismo and would be unrecognisable if it didn't include snatches of James Dean Bradfield's vocals) are worth mentioning but their best is probably their remix of The Charlatans' "Nice Acre Court" (renamed "Nine Acre Dust") with its long psychedelic intro finally making way for multi-layered big beat mayhem. By the way, another great track to look out for is the version of "Time For Livin'" (which, if I remember rightly, was originally by Sly And The Family Stone) by The Charlatans and The Chemical Brothers (the Chemical Brothers weren't credited on the version of the album I got but they produced and performed on the track) which is on the compilation album "Help" which was recorded in a day and sold in aid of the War Child charity.

I think that's enough great remixes for today because all of you who may be interested in finding them will be spending tonight and tomorrow looking for the phone numbers of record shops and ringing around asking if anyone has them in stock and certainly won't be searching for and downloading them using whatever naughty programs have replaced Audiogalaxy.

The word "REMIXES" nowadays would pretty much send a chill up the spine of any discerning person (i.e. - ME!) who may possess an aversion to all things "thump thump thump thump" - mindless musical placebos possessing no heart, soul or even a smidgeon of aesthetical merit whatsoever...

These days, to "do a remix" would - 95% of the time - entail taking this favoured approach (whittling the track down to the lowest of the lowest-common-denominator crowd-pleasing tactics of the same bpm and such like). It just reeks of cop out and taking the easy option. There is no accounting for quality control these days with the majority of these travesties - the majority of remixes possess a stunning lack of skill, innovation and originality which only serve to further undermine the credibility of the artist in question whose work is being treated in such an unsympathetic - and parasitic - way.

But of course it wasn't always like this - even in the 1980s and early 1990s, there were lots of very inventive remixes doing the rounds... Fingers has cited a fair few examples in his posts above so I need not repeat anything from that....suffice to say that these days "remixes" - the whole ethics of it - just seems like a lazy excuse for:

1. not having enough songs to begin with
2. running out of fresh ideas
3. catering for the (club-footed ?) dance massives
4. ensuring a twat like Pete Tong gets to cream his pants over the radical top-hole makeover. (see "Someone Like You" - a classic case of what we call icing the proverbial turd)
5. fleecing the fans, natch.

Okay so the argument persists that the whole point of remixes is to add a new slant to a song so people can get to hear it in a new guise or a different context - fair enough, but if this "new guise" tends towards the uninspired (which is probably a fair majority of the time) then this exercise is rendered rather futile isn't it? Surely some songs should just be left well alone as they function well enough without all the unnecessary and tiresome - and in some cases laughable - embellishments in a feeble attempt to bring them "up to date". You want a classic recent example? "God Save The Queen". There.

I despise remixes with a passion. And the recent New Order ones are no exceptions.

Hubert, there's a lot of truth in your post. Remixing was an innovative idea that created exciting possibilities and if no-one had ever had the idea some great tracks (some of which have been mentioned on this thread) would never have been made or, more accurately, re-made (and the same can be said about that other staple of dance music: sampling). Furthermore, there are spin-offs from the rise of remixing that may not have happened if no-one had ever had the idea of giving someone who was not involved in the recording process access to master tapes of recordings and asking them to create a different mix of a track. If remixing hadn't taken off would Primal Scream have made an album in the way that they and other people too numerous to mention made Screamadelica (and before anyone points it out, I know Primal Scream got into the wider club culture but some of the people involved in making Screamadelica were remixers as well as DJs and they and the band approached recording and producing in the same way that remixers approach remixing)? Would there have been so many exciting collaborations between different types of artists if remixing hadn't opened their ears to the creative possibilities that working with other people created? Would some great tracks have been forgotten or have passed the general public by if a well-judged remix hadn't brought it back to the dance floor or the airwaves? If remixing, sampling and the 12" vinyl single had never been invented the music scene would be smaller and much less diverse than it is.

However, for every great remix there are many more passable or poor ones and one reason for this is that remixing tracks has become an end in itself rather than the means to the end of getting a track played in a different context (such as the Fire Island mix of NO's "Regret"), creating a new piece of music loosely based on an existing track (which is what the Chemical Brothers sometimes do when they remix something) or improving a track that could have been better (such as Norman Cook's "Brimful Of Asha" remix). Furthermore, remixing has become an industry, career and market of its own. Back in the early 1990's I read a comedy item on the Thrills/Talk Talk Talk page in the NME/Melody Maker (I can't remember which of the two it was) listing fictional new singles and who had done the remixes and it went like this: new single by Underworld featuring remixes by Bandulu, Jam & Spoon and Moby, new single by Bandulu featuring remixes by Jam & Spoon, Moby and Underworld, new single by Jam & Spoon featuring remixes by Moby, Underworld and Bandulu, new single by Moby with no remixes - Underworld, Bandulu and Jam & Spoon get together, get in touch with Moby and ask him why he hasn't asked them to do remixes of his single, he said he didn't want any remixes of it and they said "Well, we paid you to remix us so you should pay us to remix you", called himself a selfish bastard and kicked him out of the remixers' union. If that was what the music scene was like in the early 1990's (and the piece was very funny because it was a spot-on parody of the dance scene at the time) it's probably a lot worse than that now.

There are too many remixers producing too many remixes to fill too many versions of singles and too many remix albums and quality control only becomes an issue if a record company is willing to spend enough money to pay the fees charged by the best remixers or deliberately commissions more remixes than it can release and chooses between them. However, the remix bandwagon hasn't crashed yet and that's mainly because some people buy a copy of every format of every single by their favourite act without listening to the remixes first to decide if they're worth bothering with (and I confess that I'm one of those people, albeit one who limits themselves to CDs and DVDs) and because some people buy remixes after listening to them because they're DJs in a club-cum-meat market or a fun pub and think that they may be able to fit it into their set (because it's the right tempo, it's got an intro and a fade out that make it easy to mix and it's been remixed in the style that is fashionable) and some drunks or club/pub owners may ask them to play it. Maybe the remix bandwagon will crash just as the superclub, mix album and dance music magazine bandwagons have and if it did happen it wouldn't be such a bad thing. However, if record companies tried to try to slow down or stop the remix bandwagon, stopped releasing so many versions of singles or made their acts write and record new songs to put on singles rather than fill them with remixes of questionable value perhaps they may sell more singles.

I know this is a very obvious point but New Order - of all people - should never have allowed their records to be issued in the 2CD (pointless remixes aplenty) format. This was obviously a reaction either to - or in spite of - the prevailing propensity for multi-formatting that had started to take off in the early 90s with a vengeance.

Of course, NO did this with their 12" singles in the late 80s (Two 12"s of "True Faith", "Fine Time" and "Round & Round" to name but three examples). And way before even they were remixing themselves by enlisting the services of other famed knob-twiddlers, their contemporaries Depeche Mode - of all people - had all but effectively started the ball rolling for successful "alternative" bands issuing pioneering - and radically different - remixes in the mid-80s. I believe Adrian Sherwood did quite a bit with them back then. Well - that's what I read anyway....

fingers, you really know your stuff!

but like hubert, i've always been a little suspicious about remixes. they usually water down the song, do weird stuff with the vocals etc, or just be damn unoriginal with it. i remember peter hook was complaining that his basslines are always left-out of remixes. he actually sent a tape with a post it note asking for his bassline to be featured in a remix and the remixer didn't do it.

i always preferred the Brothers In Rhythm mix of World. Reunited In A Day is good too.