Cover story - music remixes

ArtForum, Oct, 1994 by Simon Watney

Remix culture is equally inseparable from technological advances in sound and lighting systems. Dance music has to be loud, but volume has widely given way to music of great complexity. The operatic work of Jam and Spoon, for example, is as distinct in its way as the Phil Spector sound of the mid '60s. Remix culture is able to incorporate other forms of music to its priorities, as pop singers such as Alison Moyet "cross over" via remixes into dance and club hits. For several years the Pet Shop Boys have regularly reworked album material into remix singles that develop and expand their original songs as pure dance tracks, with their lyrics often stripped down to a phonetic intensity. Such lyrical condensations, the words known but no longer fully heard, are characteristic of the harder forms of house music. Hard techno music has largely dispensed with lyrics altogether, becoming a highly abstracted musical form in the emergent sounds of junglism.

Remix culture proceeds from the relatively straightforward recognition that a good song contains a multitude of performative possibilities. You get the "original," but you also get another four or five originals, or the 1994 remixes of a 1993 dance-floor favorite or a 1979 classic. The recording establishment and rock culture have always belittled dance music and the club scene. The remix is disco's revenge on the decomposing rock industry, and it is a sweet one.

1. Sheryl Lee Ralph, "In the Evening," A Saturday Night at Heaven, London: Klone Records, 1994.

Simon Watney is director of the Red Hot AIDS Charitable Trust.