Archive for April 16, 2009
Losing your originality (or over-extending it)
I was having a chat the other day with my buddy DJ Romeo in Kansas City. I always enjoy talking to him about dance music, because he has a different focus and a slightly different set of musical interests than I do, and as such, he’s often got a different point of view that forces me to think about things.
Which was precisely the case the other day. I’ll leave the names out of this because it’s not even relevant, but we were talking about a new song that had come out recently, and I mentioned I’d liked a particular mix by a particular remixer. I’m pretty sure Romeo threw-up in his mouth a little the moment I got the producer’s name out of mine.
He proceeded to explain that the producer I’d named had lost his originality; that all his mixes sounded the same. No sooner than Romeo got that out of his mouth than another new song came on my iPod (I was reviewing new music), from an entirely different remixer, and I was struck immediately that two of the elements were identical—not just similar, but identical—to another popular song the guy had remixed before, as if he had just dropped the vocal stems from the new song into the software project he’d used for the song I was remembering, and then called it done.
The effect is sort of like photographing someone against a particularly stunning backdrop, and then another person wants a really nice photo of themselves, so you just Photoshop them on top of the original photo. The person is different, and the background is perhaps only slightly less beautiful than it was the first time. But it’s disingenuous, in my view, and when I see that same backdrop start to show-up in a remixer’s body of work time and again, it starts to lose its beauty (not to mention sticking out like a sore thumb).
I’m not suggesting that big-name remixer/producers all do this, or that they lack passion. But I can agree with Romeo, as someone who listens to a lot of dance music, that there is both a lot of room for originality in this game, and there are a fair number of remixers out there who seem to have lost their edge and just crank-out mixes through some sort of template.
Of course, there are business realities at play here. Some of the biggest names in the business right now seem to crank-out remixes at a pace that must surely be in the neighborhood of once a week. At what point do you cease being an artist, and start being a music factory? (I don’t know the answer, but there probably is one.) And I also know what most of these guys make to create a remix, and let’s just say it’s not a great way to make a living. If you’re gonna do a lot of remixes, and you’re gonna try and make a living doing it, spending weeks on each one is just not gonna work.
There’s also a fine line in my view between having a style, and using a cookie cutter. I will name one name here: Scotty K. This LA-based DJ/producer stands out in my mind as someone who has managed to find a style, an identifiable sound of his own, without having every single remix sound the same. His projects stand out in my mind as nearly always having a swirling sound that I refer to as “the calliope.” The actual synth patch used for it changes a little song-to-song, but it’s nearly always there, and it’s trademark Scotty K. But at least the tracks I’ve heard from him don’t suffer from sounding like the came from the same formulaic template.
