It’s the biggest tune of the year so far, already bigger than Midnight Request Line and more ubiquitous even than Benga & Coki’s Night. From the grimiest dubstep nights to the cleanest R&B bars, Skream’s remix of La Roux’s In For The Kill is smashing up every kind of dancefloor across the country. The Let’s Get Ravey remix represents everything that is so exhilarating about dubstep. In comparison, the forgotten original sounds like someone’s idea of a bad joke. When you’ve heard the ominous and heavy tones of the remix the original feels like a bad GCSE music project produced on a discount Casio-keyboard. It’s all cheap synths and chirpy snares. This is the great hope of 2009? Synth girls, electro-pop and the 80s revival? When it’s done this badly it makes people re-evaluate, maybe the 80s were a bit shit the first time around… When Annie Mac first played the Let’s Get Ravey remix on Radio 1 even she didn’t recognise exactly what she’d done. How often is dubstep heard on mainstream radio? Let alone the old skool drum and bass that breaks out for the finish. The response she got was completely unexpected. Something about the combination of those incredible vocals with Skream’s impossibly heavy production fostered a real connection with people. Nineties ravers, dubsteppers and drum & bass heads have united with the pop crowd in unanimous affection. The remix has been downloaded from NME’s website alone 700,000 times. It has reverberated through the internet and awakened the raver in all of us.
Skream made the wise decision to remove everything but Elly Jackson’s beautiful voice. Counter to most people’s perceptions of dubstep, the heavy bass doesn’t actually kick in until near the two-minute mark. He lets the tension build. You’re slightly uneasy, haunted by a sadness that’s unrecognisable in the original. Weakened by you’re unease, uncertain of what’s coming next, when the order comes down from the bass-line that it’s time to bounce there is literally nothing else you can do. All who hear it give in to its power. So when Skream lets loose the drum & bass for the last minute, even those in the highest heels can manage at least a half-time sway.
The original in contrast sounds like the theme tune to an 80s Saturday morning cartoon. The beat is just devastatingly light and frothy. It has none of the power or threat that those vocals demand. In for the Kill? Maybe if she’s killing Captain Planet or Optimus Prime.
A remix should always do something new and interesting with a song. It can explore different directions while keeping with the core of the original. A remix is even perfectly within its rights to do much better than the song it’s based on. Last years Crookers remix of Kid Cudi’s Day n Nite was such a beautifully structured piece of dance music that few people who heard it even realised it was a remix. When you go back to the Dot Da Genius produced original, you’re always left pining for Crookers ridiculously bassy wobble. Even though that surpassed the original, and even over-shadowed it, it still didn’t humiliate it. If a remix makes a mockery of its parent track, meaning it’s impossible to listen to without suppressing a giggle at its ineptitude, is that really what the artist would have wanted?
The Let’s Get Ravey remix is inevitably giving La Roux far more exposure than they would have got without it. This with the kind of Rinse FM crowd that wouldn’t previously have got past the weird French name, let alone the Erasure-influenced synth-sounds. That cross-over success is probably good for Elly Jackson’s career at least in the short-term. With an album due out this summer though, the other less visible half of the duo, Ben Langmaid, has some important production decisions to make. If they continue with this faintly ridiculous direction in the face of the overwhelming power of Skream’s remix, they risk a tremendous backlash. If Elly Jackson’s smart, she’ll immediately relinquish her professed love for the 80s. She’ll say she thought Gary Numan was just a Mighty Boosh extra and Erasure were a mistake in need of erasing. She should kindly ask Ben Langmaid to pack his bags. Following that she should march to South London and beg Oliver Jones AKA Skream, to produce her debut album. He claims to have 8000 songs in varying stages of development, how much would it take to throw 10 or 15 her way? An entire album combining Elly Jackson’s stunning voice with Skream’s seemingly limitless musical imagination, surely a prospect music-fans everywhere should pray for.
With hindsight, having the remix as a b-side to the single was a tremendous miscalculation. The juxtaposition of the sublime with the ridiculous is devastating. The idea that dance music needed an injection of the 80s now seems absurd. Dubstep has proven definitively that it is anything but a fad; it is an international movement that is here to stay. It is the sound of the future and with just one remix it has swallowed 80s revivalism whole.
No comments:
Post a Comment