Wednesday, January 20, 2010

The "We'll Fix it in Post" Post

I'm not a huge fan of remixes.

Why stretch a perfectly good 3-minute pop song out to 8 or 9 minutes with a bunch of extraneous beats and sound effects?

Don't get me wrong -- I lived through the 1980s, so I've heard my share of dance mixes, extended mixes, remixes, and DJ Scratch mixes.

For the most part, they leave me cold.

But every once in a while, you hear something that is so much better than the original that it's hard to listen to the original again.

I was done with U2 by the time "Desire" was on the radio. To me, it sounded too much like every other U2 song and not interesting enough that I'd want to here it again. But then a radio station started playing this:


And that was something I wanted to hear again and again. The sirens, the wailing female vocalist, the newscasters talking authoritatively about something you can't quite understand, the way the band phases in and out and Bono keeps getting pushed into the background -- for me all these things are what make the song. So I did what I'd done so many times before. I hunted the record down. I think it's the only record I'd ever bought specifically to get a remix of a song.

Another radio station I used to love (which sadly switched to ranchero music years ago) used to play a "mashup of the day" every afternoon.

And while I like both Green Day and Oasis, I absolutely love this:


By the way, in case you haven't heard, it's rained an insane amount in Southern California in the past three days. We've been socked with three storms in a row and a fourth is coming. (And maybe a fifth.)

So we've had periods of heavy rain that's overpowered the storm drains and flooded streets and buildings. We've had tornadoes. There've been rainbows and astonishing clouds pushed across the sky by fierce winds.

An amazing mixture, awesome and beautiful, tiptoeing up to the edge of being too much and then boldly striding right over that edge.

But don't worry -- this is Hollywood; we'll fix it in post.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I haven't heard that U2 remix in 20 years! Thanks for posting it

March2theSea said...

I agree..most "remixes" are brutal. U2 has been the kings of this as of late w/entire cd "singles' having 8-9 "remixes" that are so freaking dull. Desire was always a great one. I stumbled upon a 12 inch vinyl years ago that was a U2 mash up..its pretty awesome. I need to dig it out and post it to my blog.

Great read..