Skip to main content

RockerZ RemiXes Vol. 1

Fifty-five tracks of remixes, alternate versions and mixtape cuts. In 1990s R&B and hip-hop, the remix was frequently the better record — and this is the evidence.

When the remix was the point

For roughly a decade, the American single had a peculiar economy: the album version went to radio, and the remix — often an entirely new production with new verses and different guests — went to the clubs, the mixtapes and the video. Frequently the remix was what people actually meant when they named the song.

Puff Daddy built a career on this, and so did a generation of producers who understood that a familiar vocal over an unfamiliar beat is one of the most reliable pleasures in music. This playlist is a working archive of that period.

What to listen for

"I'll Be There For You / You're All I Need To Get By" appears in the Puff Daddy Mix, which is the version everyone knows — built on Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, and one of the great rap-R&B duets. The Razor Sharp Mix by RZA is the harder alternative, and comparing them is an education.

Aaliyah's "At Your Best (You Are Love)" in the Gangstar Child Remix reworks an Isley Brothers song that was already perfect, and somehow finds more in it.

Brandy's "I Wanna Be Down" remix assembles MC Lyte, Queen Latifah and Yo-Yo — a summit of women rappers that would be unthinkable to organise now.

D'Angelo's "Lady" in the DJ Premier mix with AZ is the connoisseur's pick, and A Tribe Called Quest's "Check The Rhime" in Mr. Muhammad's Mix is Q-Tip reworking his own record.

Sade's "By Your Side" in The Neptunes remix is the most transformative thing here — Pharrell and Chad take a hushed acoustic ballad and rebuild it as something entirely different.

"Frontin'" in the club mix, "Pass The Courvoisier Part II," "Best Of Me, Part 2" and "Maria Maria" in the Wyclef remix map the early-2000s end.

Prince's "If I Was Your Girlfriend" live in Utrecht is the outlier and worth the detour.

Go deeper

For the remix as an art form, the two essential figures are Puff Daddy and The Hitmen on the commercial side, and DJ Premier on the purist side — Premier's remixes frequently discard everything but the vocal.

The Bad Boy Remix Project compilations collect a lot of this in one place.

And it is worth noting what has been lost. Streaming economics have largely killed the elaborate official remix; what replaced it is the guest-feature version, which is a much narrower idea. A whole form of creative reinterpretation quietly disappeared.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

GuiltyBeatZ VibeZ

If you have danced to anything out of Accra in the last ten years, you have probably danced to GuiltyBeatz without knowing his name. Forty-seven tracks of a producer's fingerprints — and the fingerprints turn out to be the melody. The Ghanaian producer who made Afrobeats swing Ronald Banful, who records as GuiltyBeatz, is a Ghanaian producer and DJ whose sound sits at the crossroads where Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian Afrobeats, amapiano and UK dance music all meet. He came up producing for Mr Eazi — the Banku Music partnership is where a lot of listeners first heard him — and his breakout as a name in his own right came with "Akwaaba," the 2018 track with Mr Eazi, Patapaa and Pappy Kojo that spawned a dance craze and became one of the defining African club records of its year. His reputation went global when he worked on Beyoncé's The Lion King: The Gift , but the more interesting story is the consistency. A GuiltyBeatz beat is usually ide...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more