What do you get when you combine the world's most pretentious style of music with the world's most emotionally empty style of music. You get the next disc on the Odyssey.
Disc 190 is...Verve Remixed
Artist: Various
Year of Release: 2002
What’s Up With The Cover?: Two turntables and a grammaphone? My, that seems pretentiously arty - will it be a harbinger of what we should expect musically? Let's continue!
How I Came To Know It: Sheila bought this album. I'm not sure how she came to know it, but it was pretty damned ubiquitous back in the early oughts. More on that later. Anyway, I came to know it in my car the last two days like a prisoner comes to know his captor, minus any traces of Stockholm Syndrome.
How It Stacks Up: We only have one 'Verve Remixed' record, although we used to have a 'volume 2'. Mercifully that one was sold. Sadistically, this one remains.
Rating: 1 star.
If you've been paying keen attention, you may have already guessed I am not a fan of this record. Ostensibly, the goal here was for Verve records to take a bunch of their classical jazz recordings from yesteryear (Dinah Washington, Nina Simone, Shirley Horn, Billie Holliday) and fuse them with remixes done by modern electronica artists (Thievery Corporation, MJ Cole, Richard Dorfmeister).
The result is an unholy chimera combining the worst elements that jazz has to offer (pretentious, emotionally unreachable noodling) with the worst electronica has to offer (artificial, emotionally empty moronic thumping).
Enter the soulless record exec, retorting thusly: "Yeah, but it made lots of money!" And indeed it did. In fact, in the early oughts it was as dismally everpresent as Yellow Label Wolfblass. Most cocktail parties I remember from the period featured both.
There was even a hit single of Dinah Washington's version of "Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby?" (itself a remake of the 1944 Louis Porter song).
I'm currently reading a collection of William Safire essays on language, so you'll forgive me if I stop to ponder the title of this song, which really ought to read, "Are You, Or Are You Not, My Baby?" or even more directly put: "Are You My Baby or Not?"
Of course the words are chosen by the writer specifically to capture the down-in-the-soul frustration of confused emotion. Emotions aren't grammatically correct - they're messy, dirty things that are hard to express, and the way the song is titled helps us see that mess gloriously exposed.
Despite these auspicious beginnings, by the time "Rae and Christian" are finished remixing it for this album, the song should've been retitled, "r u my baby - y/n?" to better match the emotional content still remaining in the song.
Shockingly, I've just been discussing one of the better songs on the album. How then did it manage to earn even the single star?
The sordid truth is that a couple of times I found my finger tapping to the beat of some of these songs, which in places was catchy. As soon as I realized that this beat wasn't going to advance beyond repeating itself ad nauseum for the next four to ten minutes I stopped tapping. But I'm not going to pretend it didn't happen and so - here's your star, verve record exec.
Best tracks: Um...no
Disc 190 is...Verve Remixed
Artist: VariousYear of Release: 2002
What’s Up With The Cover?: Two turntables and a grammaphone? My, that seems pretentiously arty - will it be a harbinger of what we should expect musically? Let's continue!
How I Came To Know It: Sheila bought this album. I'm not sure how she came to know it, but it was pretty damned ubiquitous back in the early oughts. More on that later. Anyway, I came to know it in my car the last two days like a prisoner comes to know his captor, minus any traces of Stockholm Syndrome.
How It Stacks Up: We only have one 'Verve Remixed' record, although we used to have a 'volume 2'. Mercifully that one was sold. Sadistically, this one remains.
Rating: 1 star.
If you've been paying keen attention, you may have already guessed I am not a fan of this record. Ostensibly, the goal here was for Verve records to take a bunch of their classical jazz recordings from yesteryear (Dinah Washington, Nina Simone, Shirley Horn, Billie Holliday) and fuse them with remixes done by modern electronica artists (Thievery Corporation, MJ Cole, Richard Dorfmeister).
The result is an unholy chimera combining the worst elements that jazz has to offer (pretentious, emotionally unreachable noodling) with the worst electronica has to offer (artificial, emotionally empty moronic thumping).
Enter the soulless record exec, retorting thusly: "Yeah, but it made lots of money!" And indeed it did. In fact, in the early oughts it was as dismally everpresent as Yellow Label Wolfblass. Most cocktail parties I remember from the period featured both.
There was even a hit single of Dinah Washington's version of "Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby?" (itself a remake of the 1944 Louis Porter song).
I'm currently reading a collection of William Safire essays on language, so you'll forgive me if I stop to ponder the title of this song, which really ought to read, "Are You, Or Are You Not, My Baby?" or even more directly put: "Are You My Baby or Not?"
Of course the words are chosen by the writer specifically to capture the down-in-the-soul frustration of confused emotion. Emotions aren't grammatically correct - they're messy, dirty things that are hard to express, and the way the song is titled helps us see that mess gloriously exposed.
Despite these auspicious beginnings, by the time "Rae and Christian" are finished remixing it for this album, the song should've been retitled, "r u my baby - y/n?" to better match the emotional content still remaining in the song.
Shockingly, I've just been discussing one of the better songs on the album. How then did it manage to earn even the single star?
The sordid truth is that a couple of times I found my finger tapping to the beat of some of these songs, which in places was catchy. As soon as I realized that this beat wasn't going to advance beyond repeating itself ad nauseum for the next four to ten minutes I stopped tapping. But I'm not going to pretend it didn't happen and so - here's your star, verve record exec.
Best tracks: Um...no
2 comments:
I was really hoping that this review would end in a 'two dogs' rating...
r u my baby - y/n
awesome
I still love "Is You Is" - it's a great song!
I'm keeping this album, just for that song. So there.
Post a Comment