Remixes Roundtable 01
Welcome to the inaugural Remixes Roundtable!
This will be a semi-regular discussion column on the subject of remixes, featuring a core panel of acerbic gays with opinions joined occasionally by special guests, also with opinions.
Remixes - especially pop ones - are a topic that has been on my mind a lot recently as they have taken the global dancefloor by storm. So much so that in August I did a radio show on the subject with Christa Belle from Bubble World on Refuge Radio - read all about that here.
And in a long-running group message with the aforementioned opinionated gays, the question regularly comes up of whether a newly-unearthed remix (say, a Hex Hector take on Sheryl Crow) is actually any good or should be condemned to obscurity once more.
So, what makes a remix good or bad or merely acceptable? When is it OK to play the remix instead of the original? And isn’t it all just a bit of fun? (The answer is no.)
Let’s get stuck in with Remixes Roundtable 01!
Whitney Houston - So Emotional [David Morales Emotional Club Mix]
What do you think of when you hear ‘So Emotional’? These days many will immediately picture Sasha Velour, flowing wig grasped firmly between two hands as red rose petals cascade out over her bald head. But the first image that comes to my mind is karaoke on the stage at Teatro A Barraca in Santos, Lisbon, circa 2017, when I belted out this song to an audience of film festival goers. Yes, I was very drunk.
The first remix to be put to the Remixes Roundtable test - proposed by my friend Bleimann - is David Morales’s ‘Emotional Club Mix’ of ‘So Emotional’, released in 2000 as part of the The Unreleased Mixes box set alongside other Whitney efforts from usual suspects Junior Vasquez, Clivilles & Cole and, of course, Hex Hector. Should Dave’s version - an epic at 11 minutes - have remained unreleased?
Let’s hear what our panel thinks, beginning with yours truly.
Joe Delon
While the opening moody synths on this remix aren’t very promising, they’re also not exactly awful. But then there’s that ridiculously OTT drum rush into a generic Vasquez-esque (try saying that five times fast) beat and I begin to think the only way David can pull this back is with some stroke of harmonic genius.
Unfortunately, the unresolved organ stabs he tries to weld this unfuckwithable vocal to are NOT a good choice, especially in the bridge and chorus. The chord progressions we know and love so much from the original are replaced with lazy ‘rave’ alternatives that barely scrape by, and in the chorus - especially on the upwards glide at the end of “every time I think of you” - they just sound miserable.
The original’s joyful innocence has been replaced by an unmusical attempt at hedonism that sums up everything I dislike about a lot of the music I hear out today.
Bleimann
I suggested this as our first remix to get stuck into, because it feels almost like a test case for some of the commandments of what is and is not acceptable in a pop remix.
And on that note…
Thou shalt not disregard the tonality of the original track: I’m going to give a HIGHLY QUESTIONABLE pass here. As Joe rightly mentioned, Morales completely switches out the original’s chord progression for something significantly more basic, which kills a lot of Whitney’s melodramatic heft. On the other hand, it is, on a very basic level, in tune. This might sound like a low bar to pass, but it’s one which sadly is not a given.
The main selling point of your remix shall not be unrecognisably cut-up vocals: The idea here is that if you’re cutting up the vocals so much that the original line is lost, you might as well call it an original track with a sample rather than a remix. The EMOTIONAL CLUB MIX has many faults, but this is not one of them: the full Whitney vocal plays out. I almost wish Morales did fail here, though: the best bit of the track is undoubtedly the “work-a work-a work work on me” section around 7:46, which hints at an entirely different track this could have turned into without the pressure of making it a remix rather than a new track.
Thou shalt not depend on the dopamine hit of recognition of something familiar: Joe talked about this on his recent radio show: the way in which a pop remix can sometimes offer nothing more than the cheap thrill of recognising a song you know in an unexpected context. On this point, what I end up thinking about is my own criteria as a DJ. In my mind, there is only one way to play this out: start at the breakdown around 6 minutes, let the chuggy “work on me” section play out, before Whitney just absolutely CRASHES IN at 9:32. It’s a huge, stupid, ridiculous moment of recognition, and it’s probably the kind of thing that only one DJ would be able to pull off, once in their career. It goes against a lot of our beliefs about pop music, it’s the DJing equivalent of downing a tube of sherbert, it’s incredibly dumb. But that DJ will almost definitely be me. Sue me.
Sam Ashton (Pumping Velvet)
Although I have highly specific tastes when it comes to dance music I do sometimes worry that this specificity doesn’t preclude me also being a basic bitch on occasion. Because everything that Joe has to say about this remix is undoubtedly true. There’s a total lack of musicality and the track’s harmonic structure could charitably be described as rote. Yet it somehow still slaps. Perhaps that’s because I’m approaching this assignment from the perspective of a dancer sweating drugs from every pore rather than a DJ?
While I generally agree with Ewan’s (not so) holy remix commandments, I disagree with the third. Sometimes the sugar rush of familiarity is enough to make a remix work, particularly in the context of a set starved of vocals, or where the vocals meaning cuts deep enough that just those words alone are enough to send you wild. Often a track can be so iconic that you’ve never even heard it in a club because most DJs consider it ‘overplayed’ and, over time, the overplayed becomes the never played.
Just hearing ‘So Emotional’ makes me so emotional that I’m already predisposed to enjoy this, especially as Morales makes the key decision to keep the vocal fully intact and let it play out verse, chorus and all. The opening salvo does just enough to ground it in a club context, vividly bringing to mind the Sound Factory dancefloor. Despite the basic rave-by-numbers arrangements I find it curiously engaging. For example, the relentlessness of the organ is reminiscent of the propulsive feel of the original bassline, anchoring the chorus with an endlessly fist pumping moment.
The way the track collapses into the fantastically groovy “work on me” section before the chorus reemerges in full from the ashes of the breakdown makes me recall one of those moments on the Fabric Room 1 dancefloor, when Ricardo would magically smash back in a vocal first heard twenty four minutes prior and you’re left thinking “has this been the same damn tune the whole time?”.
Give me that sherbert, I’m heading out for some hedonism.
That’s it for Remixes Roundtable 01!
So what is your opinion on Morales’s epic or the subject of remixes in general? This table has space for a few more…