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Beatz by Lord Finesse: Motown State of Mind

Five remixes, officially licensed by Motown, in which a Bronx hip-hop producer takes the most famous catalogue in American music apart and puts it back together his own way.

Lord Finesse: Motown State of Mind

This is a rarer object than it appears. Lord Finesse — a founding figure of the D.I.T.C. collective, one of the great New York producers, and the man behind Notorious B.I.G.'s "Suicidal Thoughts" — was given official access to Motown's masters and released the results through Motown/UMe in June 2020 as a box of seven-inch singles.

Hip-hop has been remixing Motown unofficially for forty years. Getting the label's blessing and the original multitracks is another matter entirely, and it means these are not mashups over the finished records: they are rebuilt from the stems.

Finesse's approach is reverent in an unexpected way. He does not modernise. He applies the specific drum weight and low-end of early-nineties New York hip-hop to songs recorded in Detroit thirty years earlier, and the two eras turn out to fit.

What to listen for

Michael Jackson's "I Wanna Be Where You Are" in the Underboss Remix is the standout — the eleven-year-old vocal placed over drums with genuine bottom, which makes the performance sound less like a novelty and more like what it actually was.

Marvin Gaye's "I Want You" is the most delicate job here. The original is already a masterpiece of texture, so Finesse mostly gets out of the way and simply firms up the floor underneath it.

DeBarge's "I Like It" in the Soul Synopsis Mix is the one that will surprise people — a record usually treated as lightweight, given real weight.

Switch's "There'll Never Be" in the Solidified Soul Mix is the deep cut for the crate-diggers.

The Jackson 5 Tribute Medley closes it by running "I Want You Back", "ABC" and "The Love You Save" together, which is exactly the sort of thing a DJ would do and a label would normally refuse to license.

Go deeper

Finesse's own Funky Technician (1990) and The Awakening (1995) are the albums, and D.I.T.C. as a whole — Diamond D, Showbiz & A.G., Big L, Buckwild — is one of the most consistently excellent production crews the music has produced.

For the wider genre of officially sanctioned catalogue remixing, look for Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad's work with veteran artists and the Verve Remixed series.

Listening note: play each remix against the original and the method becomes obvious. Finesse barely touches the vocals or the harmony; what changes is the weight and the placement of the drums, and that single alteration is enough to move a record from one era to another without losing anything of the first.

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