Over the next month or so, as part of something I have arbitrarily named Project Alpha, I’ll be bringing you some of my favorite interpretive music. I apply the term “interpretive” broadly, to encompass mashups, remixes, and simple covers. I’ve got my playlist set up in an order that makes a bit of sense to me, but it’s unavoidably choppy. Let’s chalk that up as “character” and keep moving.
I find this stuff fascinating for a lot of reasons–although I would dispute the assertion that there’s anything new about “remix culture”, there’s no doubt that pastiche plays a significant role in how we disseminate and filter our ideas and expression. Rather than try to sum it all up in this mission statement, however, I’ll try to come up with something to say about every song I post in this series. Ultimately, my thoughts will surely prove to be as much of a scattered mess as a lot of the music I’m sharing, but if we’re lucky maybe we’ll get something out of it (other than a pretty disjointed mixtape). I’ll reveal a new song every day, give or take, until we reach our explosive conclusion. With that out of the way, let’s get started.
I want to begin with the song that set off a brief supernova of musical creativity that coincided neatly with the last job that allowed me to spend all day scouring the internet for new stuff to listen to. I’m talking about Freelance Hellraiser’s “Stroke of Genie”. This song, which set Christina Aguilera’s “Genie in a Bottle” against The Strokes’ “Hard to Explain”, actually came out in 2001, but I didn’t discover it for another year or two. The first thing to point out about it is that it’s pretty much a perfect mashup–the two songs mesh seamlessly, and the mix highlights everything good from each. The second thing to point out is that this, the first modern mashup, changed the way we listen to music.
I was going to detail why and how it became such an important, influential composition, but instead I think I’ll let you just read this article from The Guardian, which named it “the song that defined the decade”. For the lazy, here’s an excerpt:
It’s as if the Strokes had heard her line about “hormones racing at the speed of light” and written the music around it. Just before the chorus, her “oh-oh-oh”s swoon into the oncoming embrace of the rising guitars, and the pampered pop princess hooks up with the scruffy hipster from the wrong side of the tracks (never mind that Casablancas was definitely born on the right side: this is pop fantasy, not reality). The combination is so perfect that both original songs, excellent in their own right, suddenly sound incomplete, like two works in progress needing someone to complete them: two genies in different bottles waiting to be rubbed the right way. “Come, come, come and let me out.”
As three minutes and 36 seconds of endlessly listenable and danceable pop brilliance, A Stroke of Genius is up there with OutKast’s Hey Ya! in the 00s hall of fame (in fact, the two songs can be mixed together with ease) but it also says a lot about what has happened to pop over the past decade. First, there’s the means of distribution. A few hundred one-sided seven-inches of Stroke of Genius were independently released, which was enough to provoke a cease-and-desist order from RCA, home to both Aguilera and the Strokes, but almost everyone who heard and acquired the song did so online. Ten years earlier, Kerr’s creation would have been a samizdat artefact and you’d probably only have heard it via a tape of a tape of a tape, like copyright-flaunting records by Steinski or the JAMMs, but in 2001 it coincided with an explosion in MP3 blogs and filesharing software. Kerr got a career out of A Stroke of Genius, becoming Paul McCartney’s tour DJ and remixer for, among others, Aguilera, but after that initial vinyl run, it didn’t directly earn him a penny. Its gratis nature was part of its charm. It showed that illegal downloading could be an outlet for creativity and not just a means of taking for free music that already existed.
There’s a lot more to it than that, but I’m hoping that over the course of this little experiment, listening to how artists reimagined preexisting music over the last 10 years, you’ll get an idea of how this song echoed across the decade.
Oh, and one more thing. If anybody out there knows of any easy WordPress plugin/html trick for mp3 playback on these posts, please let me know. In the meantime, you’ll have to settle for a link to the mp3.
Here’s the song: Stroke of Genie.
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