The Bridge: On the Wheels of Steel
S1: Everybody, this is Chris Molanphy, host of Hit Parade Slate’s podcast of pop chart history. Welcome to the bridge!
S2: Got. Crashed my car into the bridge.
S1: This is Swedish electro duo Icona Pop with their smash hit. I love it featuring English singer songwriter Charlie S-E-X. Only what you’re hearing here is not the version that went to number seven on the Hot 100 in May 2013. This is the remix by Cobra Starship, the now defunct alt rock and electro pop band led by Gabe supportA. They added thunderous stadium shaking digital percussion to the already pretty explosive Icona Pop track. That line about crashing a car into a bridge hits even harder in Cobra Starships remix. Thanks in part to this mix. A week after the original version of I Love It peaked on the Hot 100, the song reached number one on Billboard’s Dance Mix Show AirPlay chart spins of the remix on radio dance mix shows contributed to the track’s Hot 100 chart position, helping make. I Love It one of the most ubiquitous songs of the summer of 2013. And these mini episodes bridge our full length monthly episodes give us a chance to expand on those episode topics and enjoy some trivia. This month, I’m thrilled to have an expert who may not have invented the remix, but has chronicled it better than just about anyone. Michaelangelo Matos is a critic and author based in St. Paul, Minnesota. For the 33 and a third series, Michaelangelo wrote the installment on Prince’s Sign of the Times album. Most recently, he published the widely acclaimed Can’t Slow Down How 1984 Became Pop’s Blockbuster Year My Favorite Book of 2020. In between, Michelangelo’s writing has appeared all over from the New Yorker to mix mag Rolling Stone to Resident Advisor NPRMusic to GQ, for the record. Michaelangelo and I met back in the late aughts when we were both writing for the music blog I deliver. Most relevant to our discussion today is Michelangelo’s definitive 2015 book The Underground Is Massive How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America Michaelangelo Matos Welcome to the bridge! Thanks for having me. Oh, thanks for joining us! So let’s talk about this slippery term, the remix. You had a very funny and apt comment. When I posted this hit parade episode on social media a couple of weeks ago, you said something like, Oh God. People are still confused about what constitutes a remix, so I’ll bite. What is a remix to you? And just as important, what is it not?
S3: It’s less that it’s not something and more that it is a lot of things. I mean, a remix can be all sorts of things, as your episode pointed out. It can mean, you know, pumping the drums up. It can mean re-editing it. It can mean bringing in guest vocalists. It can mean completely throwing the music out and constructing an entire new track over the vocal. What I often see, what I was specifically responding to in my mind, not necessarily on your wall, is the idea that a remix should or can only be one thing and the people you often see saying that or the people who just hate the idea of the remix it all because everything should be original or whatever. You know, they’re usually talking about rock, which is about the most derivative music ever made. You know you’re on pretty thin ice thinking that way. Anyway, the idea that there is that there can only be one kind of remix that’s usually coming from somebody for whom they they need there to be only one kind of remix because they don’t have enough bandwidth in their head to accommodate more than one kind of idea of a remix.
S1: Sure. So let’s talk about remix history. One of the hardest parts of this show was giving my listeners a pocket guide to how the remix even came to be in the first place. My take over summarize it was basically it goes from Jamaica to people like Tom Moulton and then guys like Walter Gibbons and Patrick Cowley. But what would you add to that timeline?
S3: Hip hop, I’d add Kool Herc. He invented the live remix in that sense. He was the first person to play one section of a record over and over again on two turntables and completely deconstruct a record that way and turn it into something else for other people to perform over. In that sense, you might want to think of something like The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious five.
S1: The trouble is full time. Come on, girls, let’s rock daddy.
S3: It’s not a remix of a song. It’s a mega mix of a bunch of songs and that is slightly different and that has its own history. But it also introduced the idea that a record was a fungible item, that there was no one definitive version of a beat or a rock or a rhythm. So that’s very important where you know where that becomes a very standard unit of measurement is how many remixes a track gets officially or unofficially.
S1: So going back to the 70s briefly and speaking of Tom Moulton, I loved your interview with him for NPR Music back in 2013. What were the big revelations for you from the discussion you had with Molson, who really is like, seminal to a lot of things we take for granted and remixing?
S3: I think what I was surprised by and I shouldn’t have been was that he’s been using that he had at that point. You’ve been using pro tools for years. I had this sort of romantic idea that he was still cutting tape. But of course, not nobody does that anymore, except people who are doing it to sort of make a point. You know, the the rise in digital recording has contributed enormously to the remix. You know, a remix used to be in the 80s in particular. A remix would be literally cutting tape. So you have somebody like Shep Pettibone who was making these edits of things and he was cutting tape.
S2: Kuwait seized on 15.
S3: He was like marking it with a grease pencil on those on the spot where it would need to be cut. That stuff was very time consuming. And when digital recording came in, it became far, far, far less time consuming. So a record like, let’s say, the Avalanches since I left you an album like that which is entirely made out of Stanford. Those records would have taken many, many, many years to do as they were before the rise of sampling and the rise of digital recording technology.
S1: It’s inconceivable that you can do that kind of work before digital recording becomes commonplace in, I guess, democratized to a certain extent, right?
S3: A certain extent. Because that technology got cheaper, it became cheaper and easier to even afford that equipment. You know, digital digital samplers were thousands of dollars until the late 80s, and then suddenly you could buy a Casio keyboard at Target for under $200. That had a pretty good sampler on it. That’s sort of a story unto itself. But yeah, the the it Became easier to make remixes to take the multi-track and monkey with it. And as the 80s progressed, and that’s when you really start to see remixes come about as their own thing. I remember buying it used to be really standard to buy a 12 inch single in the late 80s and early 90s that would have six different tracks on it. They would be as long as albums. It would just be five, five or six different versions of the same record. Go, good night. They would all be aimed at different sorts of dance floors or different sorts of DJs styles, so you might have a house to record with or even a pop record actually with a hip house remix. When that was a big thing and a, you know, a dub mix with, you know, the vocals fuzzed out or whatever. So they would all be aimed at different sorts of nightclub programming or MCs show programming that was very commonplace for a long time. And that was true of mainstream pop artists as well, because masters at work. Louie Vega and Kenny Dope Gonzalez. Those guys made their name by remixing pop artists for underground dance floors. They were making, like Debbie Gibson, records into underground house music hits. Yeah, yeah.
S1: So I’m curious about your personal history because you’re touching on it just now. Like it was late 80s, early 90s kind of your ground zero for your interest in the remix. Is that the moment where it kind of caught for you?
S3: Yeah. I mean, it was just I was interested in music and I was interested, particularly in dance music. So of course, you know, that’s the period when the remix becomes standardized, when it becomes a regular part of any 12 inch version. And certain people were making lots and lots of them and making lots of money doing it. I think there were, you know, there would have had to be people that were doing so many remixes that were they were not making their own records. There’s a demarcation here. You think of somebody like Shep Pettibone Shep Pettibone was not a deejay. He was an engineer who became a sought after remix because he had good ideas. You know, I think you talk in that episode about bizarre love triangle. That’s sort of the ultimate remix in that sense, because he took the original song, which is already a good song, and he just threw all these things into it that just made it better. And it wasn’t just that it was novel or exciting, he actually it what he did to that record actually turned the song into something more powerful every time I
S2: drove you up to this guy. Kool is,
S3: you know, the sort of roiling emotions of that Song are enacted by the remix, by all of the cuts and the stops and weird little effects. So there’s that. And then the first real remixer of note was Jelly Bean Benitez, and he was the first superstar DJ in the mid 80s. I wrote about that and can’t slow down. He was, of course, he was well known, in part because he was dating Madonna and Madonna was becoming a global superstar. But he also had been, you know, his ministrations on these already existing records, including the stuff on the first Madonna album. Those are all those all become the hits. Reggie Lucas, who had produced the first Madonna album, you know, and you see this with a lot of people in the pop realm and the and the artistic realm who see that these remixes where they’re taking an original song that has a short intro and then, you know, singing and a song, and they’re turning it into a four minutes of instrumentals before the vocal comes in. And in some cases, the vocal barely comes in. The vocal is just used sparingly, getting very salty about the credit that the remixer is getting because their version is the hit. And it’s like, What about us? What about our contribution to this thing? The remixer had nothing to do with that. We made the record. They just did stuff to it. And that’s a, you know, that’s fair as far as it goes. But it’s also by the late 80s. What’s starting to happen? More and more are people taking just the vocal or just a part of the record and turning it into something something of its own and using those as the building block and discarding most of what was recorded? The first real example of that? Like the first serious example of that is the We Pop a girl rappers Kevin Saunderson, who is one of the earliest techno producers. He is one of what is called the Bellville three. These three guys, the other two being one atkin’s and Derek May from suburban Detroit. They were the people who are most heavily associated with early techno because they were the first three producers who identified themselves as such. And he took a wee pop of girl rappers record, and he took everything out of it except the vocal and built an entire new track around it. And that kind of started that whole era agreements.
S2: Yeah, it’s like, it’s like that. Yes.
S3: Eighty eight is definitely the year that the remix busts out, in a sense, like a lot of records, we’re starting to get remixes. That’s when house music really takes root in clubs. It has already been big in Britain, but it becomes a national craze thanks to the Acid House explosion that year in London. I actually wrote about for Rolling Stone. I did an oral history of Shoe the nightclub in London that basically ushered in the acid house craze, which kicked off what was considered then rave culture and what we’ll just consider now. Global dance culture, where you know the deejay is the star and the tracks are the DJs tools as opposed to, you know, a DJ is playing records. But we think of them as records rather than as links in a chain in Britain. And I think this is very important. You think of something like loaded by finesse. That is not really it’s not really a Song. One reason people were really mourning into the loss of Andrew Weatherall a couple of years ago is because he helped break down the wall between indie guitar, music and Acid House, which is DJs music. He took this old primal scream song called I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have. And he took like almost everything out of it and rebuilt the damn thing from the ground up. The only thing the only vocal in it that belongs to the original record or that belongs to Bobby Gillespie, the singer of Primal Scream, is an oh yeah, that happens about six minutes into the seven minute song, and everything else is built from the ground up. And it wasn’t released as a remake, but it was released as a primal scream Song called Loaded.
S1: That’s interesting.
S3: Well, that often happens, though this sort of Pavel’s that I was making fun of earlier tend to like quiet down a lot. When you just when you don’t put the word remix in the subtitle of a song, they just think it’s an original song.
S1: And so loaded goes down in history, particularly with Primal Scream, which have this, you know, pivotal role in that period of British post rave culture. They go down as this rock band that released a single called Loaded but loaded is fundamentally a remix and, you know, a complete reboot of something else, right? Yes. Yeah. And then there’s this whole other wave of remixes in the 2010s that I talked about. And, you know, I claim that, you know, Katy Perry kind of weaponized this wave of remixes where very little is changing at all. All there we’re doing is adding a rapper or a guest vocalist to a pre-existing track. Hello, look my own now.
S3: Remember how I got home, but Friday night? All nice. Last Friday night,
S1: where do you place them in the remix lineage? I mean, I guess they qualify as remixes because they are taking the original recording, but they’re not terribly imaginative.
S3: Sure, but but in many cases, remixes were added to by the original vocalist. Frankie Knuckles talked about this. He would do remixes for Michael Jackson. He would do remixes for all these big pop stars. Mariah Carey and Mariah Carey is the ultimate example of that because she would just go in and redo the vocals on. Those producers would often talk about how like flattered they were and not surprised they were that they were working with these big stars who would just go in and give it their all like, Let’s do it. You want me to redo the vocal. You want me to do it differently. Let’s do it. So that has a long lineage. The guest vocalist thing that has, I think, a little more to do historically with Jamaica, where they would have one track and then everybody they could get would do a new version of it. You have things like rhythm albums that Greensleeves put out Avalanches horrible mouth like. Yeah.
S4: Do you mind
S3: box with just one thing, one track with a lot of different vocalists on it? So that’s a little bit that’s a little bit more to do with it. The producer end of it, I think
S1: that’s a really interesting analogy, and it frankly accords a tiny bit of respect on a form of remix that I’m a little scornful of. Where I may. I may think that the Missy Elliott remix of Last Friday night by Katy Perry is a little phoned in and unimaginative. But to your point, if you take it back to Jamaican history, it’s actually got quite a long lineage. And there’s something I guess respectable about that form of remix.
S3: Or I mean, you can still make fun of it. You can still find it lazy. I do, but there is. But the gist there is the history. That’s all.
S1: Yeah, no. Agreed. So remixes and the charts, do you wish Billboard tracked more remixes separately? Or is it perversely better off for remix culture if they are seen as essential to the same songs rise? Do you know what I mean?
S3: I know what you mean, but I will say I don’t think there is any such thing as one remix culture. Remix thing is as variegated as songwriting. There’s blues, songwriting, writing and there’s pop songwriting. And those are different things. And there’s all kinds of songwriting styles. Different styles of songwriting are, you know, have different demarcations, and it’s exactly the same as the remix. That’s why I make fun of the idea that there’s only one kind of remix that’s like saying there’s only one kind of songwriting. There are many.
S1: Well, we can talk about this stuff all day Michaelangelo. But I’m going to sign off for now and thank you so, so much for taking the time to walk us through all this history. Thank you. You’ve always got to know seriously, you’ve always got a number of projects percolating. What’s the best way for folks to keep up with you?
S3: I do write show previews and I write short record reviews every week and goings on about town in The New Yorker, so that is the easiest place to read me.
S1: Fantastic. Well, Michaelangelo Matos, thanks so much for joining us on Hit Parade The Bridge.
S3: Thank you.
S2: It’s like, Yeah, it’s like that. So. It’s like that. Yes, just like that.
S1: So now comes the time in hit parade, the bridge where we do some trivia. And joining me from Minneapolis is Chris. Same name as me will call him Chris, each with the.
S4: Yes. Yes, yes. Well, we’ll keep my last name anonymous, but I will be blasting this out on Twitter when I appear so we won’t keep my identity a secret for too long.
S1: Fair enough. How are you, Chris?
S4: I’m doing well, Chris. It’s an honor to be on here and listen to this podcast for years as a chart nerd. Growing up, I often felt like I was alone in the universe, in my in my obsession with the Billboard charts and and hit parade and the little community that we found around. This has made me feel like there were people just as equally crazy as me out there.
S1: It’s nice to know you’re not the only crazy one, right? That has been my writing this podcast. The last dozen years of my writing has been all about making other other fellow chart nerds feel like we are a community and we’re not alone. Your twin faves, if I have this right among big chart acts are Carole King and Mariah Carey. And it sounds like you actually came at them in reverse order.
S4: I did, yes. So the first time I ever became aware of like the Billboard charts and what they were was when I was eight years old and Mariah’s fantasy hit number one. And so I always, from the time I became a fan of hers, was tracking which songs of hers were going to number one. How are they doing on the charts? And that’s what really got me hooked into the whole Billboard chart culture was was that moment in time, really?
S1: That’s not a valid entry point, right? I mean, because Mariah’s got the most, the most number one singles of any soloist.
S4: It’s been fun over the years. You know, a few years ago, when all I want for Christmas is you was challenging for number one, I felt like I was like 12 years old. Again, it was a great feeling to like, see it go up to number one. Carole King came a little later in my life. That was about 15 when I discovered Tapestry.
S2: I feel the Earth move under my feet.
S4: It’s too and I became like obsessed with piano playing and songwriting, I play piano a little bit myself and and of course, I quickly found out that she’s like one of the most important songwriters in the history of rock and roll. And so I was just fascinated by that and like, how come nobody talks about her the same way we talk about like Bob Dylan or Paul McCartney or John Lennon because I feel like she’s right up there in terms of how important of a songwriter she is. And so she came along a little later in my life, and I love them both equally.
S1: Well, that’s a good pair right there. And before we get this trivia round started, I’ll thank you as I do every month for being a Slate Plus subscriber. It’s why you’re here. We only open our trivia rounds to plus members. So if you Slate Plus member would like to be a trivia contestant, visit Slate.com slash hit parade. Sign up! All right. Chris H. I think you know how this works. We’re going to do three questions. The first is going to be a callback to our most recent episode of Hit Parade, and the next two are going to be a preview of our forthcoming episode of Hit Parade. And at the end, I’m going to give you an opportunity to turn the tables and ask me a question Are you ready for some trivia?
S4: I feel like my whole life has been building up to this moment. Let’s do it.
S1: Wow, no pressure. All right, here goes Question one. In our last episode, I talked about a British band who released a Greatest Hits album containing all 12 inch mixes, not the original album cuts. It remains their top selling album and one of their highest charting in America. What was that band? A Duran Duran B Wham! C New Order, or D? Everything but the girl who?
S4: That is a tough one. What I’m really after racking my brain from, I hear that clock in my head taking. I’m going to say new order.
S1: And that is correct. The correct answer is C New Order. Their 1987 compilation substance filled with remixes, was their first album to crack the Top 40 on the U.S. album chart, and it has since been certified platinum. All right, you’re one for one. Are you ready for some preview trivia?
S4: Let’s do it.
S1: All right. Question two at the Grammy Awards. Who was the first artist in history to win the record of the year prize two years in a row? A Carole King, B Stevie Wonder, C Roberta Flack or D. Paul Simon.
S4: Well, I know it’s not Carole King. I can tell you that you would know, right? I would know, right? I would know it’s not Carole King. I will say Roberta Flack.
S1: And you would be correct. The correct answer is Roberta Flack in 1973. Her recording the first time ever I saw your face took the top prize, and one year later, so did her classic, killing me softly with his song Killing Me Softly
S2: with his song Killing Me Softly.
S1: When she was the first woman to win the prize twice for the record, Carole King won it only once. Paul Simon won it three times between Simon and Garfunkel and his solo career, but never in consecutive years. And oddly, Stevie Wonder, who won Album of the Year several times, never took record of the year at all.
S4: Carol Carol that year she won Record of the Year, became the first person to win Record and Song of the Year in the same year for different songs, which I believe only Bruno Mars has replicated since then.
S1: That’s a great bit of trivia. So wait, let’s complete the trivia. So she won Song further. You’ve got a friend.
S4: I’m guessing you’ve got a friend. Yep, in record of the year for it’s too late. Too late, right?
S1: That’s great trivia. Oh, I’m getting bonus trivia
S4: at Sisi and Bruno Mars a few years ago was the only one that I think is the only one that’s replicated that with. That’s what I like and 24 karat magic, which won record of the year. That’s quite, well, well-played.
S1: Yes, they did. All right. We’ve still got one more question for me to ask you. So here goes Question three. Which of these pairs of acts scored number one hot 100 hits in both 1974 and 1986? A Peter Sitara and Steve Wynn would be Boston and Genesis S. Hart and foreigner Audie Dionne Warwick and Patti LaBelle.
S4: Oh. 74. Huh? That’s that’s a tough one. This is this is before my time, before my my obsession with the charts began. I was born in 86.
S1: So you’ve got that part of it, but you were a baby.
S4: Right, right. Exactly. Oh, man. All right. Let’s go with something tells me I shouldn’t pick against Dionne Warwick and Patti LaBelle, so I’m going to say that.
S1: And that was a good guess because you are correct.
S4: Yes. All right.
S1: So Dionne Warwick and the spinners took their 1974 hit. Then came you to number one.
S2: I never Became you.
S1: Thank you. Twelve years later, Dion was back on top with her friends, with that’s what friends are for. In early 1975, I cheated this a little bit. The group La Belle took their 1974 recording Lady Marmalade to number one, and over 11 years later, the solo Patti LaBelle took on my own, a duet with Michael McDonald.
S2: It’s a no, no no.
S1: One, by the way. That’s what friends are for, and on my own were the number one and number four hits for all of 1986. So you had three for three, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. A deep chart nerd like you,
S4: I have now validated my my credentials as a chart nerd. I feel like right here. So, so thank you for that.
S1: Well, and now you can compound your victory. You can compound your victory by asking me a trivia question and seeing if you can stop me. Do you have a question for me?
S4: I do have a question for you. I don’t know if it’s going to stop you, but we’ll see. So in honor of the last episode remixes in Mariah’s fantasy remix, ODB Old Dirty Bastard references a number of places as being in the house or asking if they are in the house. Which of the following places does he not shout out in the beginning of the song? A Chicago, B Atlanta, C Sacramento or D Japan? Wow.
S1: Oh, man, of course, I’m playing back that wacky phone call. Yeah, you’re probably going to stump me here. This is tough. All right. Give me the four again.
S4: Chicago A Chicago, B Atlanta, C Sacramento, D Japan. So it’s not really a sharp question, so if I stump you, you know, I feel like I feel like you’re so good.
S1: Yeah, it’s all right. It’s all right. I’ll take, I’ll take it on anyway. Just going with what I could picture ODB shouting out in that woozy voice of his. I’m going to go with a Chicago.
S4: That is correct. A Chicago. For some reason, Sacramento made the cut. Sacramento downtown Atlanta, Georgia on the West Coast. Now I believe the story goes that they he originally said, like New York or Brooklyn at the beginning of the Song and then Sony, like, wanted him to add more cities. So he took a whole session fee, went back into the studio for basically double the money and recorded like a bunch of other cities, including Atlanta, Sacramento and Japan, because Mariah was was very big in Japan as well, so they wanted to make sure Japan got a shout out in the beginning of that song.
S1: Yeah, you know, something told me Sacramento sounds like exactly the sort of loopy thing that ODB would add, and Japan sounded like the sort of thing that he would either he or Mariah would want in there. So I eliminated those two right away. It was a question of whether or not it was it was going to be. What were the first to Chicago and
S4: Chicago in Atlanta, in
S1: Atlanta? And somebody told me in 1995 96, You’re not going to not shout out Atlanta, sir.
S4: Yeah, yeah, that was fun.
S1: I mean, I’m happy I got it. That was frankly a total guess. But but I learned something today, so I learned several things today. So Chris, thank you so much for joining us on hip, period. The Bridge.
S4: Thank you so much for having me, Chris.
S1: I like. So as those last two trivia questions indicate, our next episode of Hit Parade will be about what I call the overlooked
S2: R&B queens, felt the.
S1: Listeners told me that they enjoyed my unusual show last fall, juxtaposing the careers of 80s pop rock titans Cyndi Lauper, the Bangles and Aimee Mann. Well, we’re going back a decade and doing it again, this time with a triumvirate of R&B queens whose work has been taken for granted, and we’re maybe going to throw in a fourth one for good measure. Roberta Flack, Dionne Warwick and Patti LaBelle were pop and R&B chart toppers in the first half of the 70s. But more than that, they were helping to set the agenda for pop in general. The early 70s was a good time for the black female pop artisan. Why? We’ll consider how, in the wake of Aretha Franklin’s success, a wave of crafts women were helping to reshape soul. Arguably, black women wouldn’t have it that good on the charts again for a couple of decades. Flack, in particular, was one of the top recording artists period of her generation. Folks forget how huge she was. Both she and Warwick brought a new sophistication to soul and pop. LaBelle is now remembered as the rafter raising R&B diva of her era. But she came up alongside glam rock and was quirkier than her reputation might suggest. None of these three has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Only Dionne Warwick has been nominated and only in the last two years. And speaking of The Rock Hall, a fourth artist from this period, Miz Chaka Khan, has been nominated for the hall more than half a dozen times. Still to no avail. Khan came up through a different route, singing with and eventually fronting a rock and soul band. She, too, was seminal to the sound soul would take in the transition from the 60s through to the 80s. We’ll talk about her as well. Of course, black women have shaped the sound of pop for generations. What made the mini era of Roberta Dionne and Patti exceptional was how huge they got and how much that hugeness is overlooked now. Well, not on our watch. So that’s our next hit parade coming up in a couple of weeks. This episode of Hit Parade, the bridge was produced by Benjamin Frisch. Huge thanks to Ben for pinch hitting for us this month. And I’m Chris Molanphy. Keep on marching on.
