It's almost 3am on Saturday morning and it occurs to me that some of you not down with the dirty South, might like to Walk It Out Gay Club Banger stee-lo
A-Trak uses a Gossip sample here. Listen till the end if you can't figure it out.
You know you want to Walk It Out.
I'm Walking It Out in my PJs.
Now, we walk it out some more.
Melissa dropped some Fela a few days ago and, it should be known, how much I enjoyed Red Hot + Riot
So, Anna called and asked, "Who sings that song 'take me take me to the water/ summertime, summertime'" and I couldn't remember. She reminded me that it was an 80s song but the original had been supplanted by this re-imagining on a Mos Def mixtape...
So, the original is by Nocera from 1986 and I'm sure I have it on a tape in a box somewhere but not in a digital format so you'll just have to reminisce. Mos Def is a pretty fair substitute, though.
Melissa posted Carl Craig's re-imagining of Donald Byrd's "Think Twice" which is my favorite Donald Byrd track off my favorite Donald Byrd album, Stepping Into Tomorrow. Byrd is working with the Mizells at this point in his career (which is also during the same period when he was mentoring my dad as a member of The Blackbyrds).
Two of my absolute favorite artists in the world have covered it with quite different outcomes:
As Melissa noted earlier today, we're all about this Mark De Clive-Lowe remix of Watley's Midnight Lounge. The rest of The Makeover is pretty great as well. It features remixes and re-imaginings of some Watley classics and some of her favorite songs (she does a particularly interesting rendition of Madonna's Borderline).
This one, however, is of special interest to me:
First of all, y'all know how I love 4Hero. Watley says of 4Hero (The Makeover Liner Notes):
I discovered the music of 4Hero in 1998 - the record was "Two Pages". I was at a apoint in my career where I really felt like giving up. I'd had a huge disappointment with a brief sting at Atlantic Records...I was soured on the music business. When I heard "Two Pages," I was blown away. It reminded me about why I was an artist and what music should be about. My thoughts were - WOW, there are people making music LIKE THIS! This is where I want to be. Being a pop star is one thing - to be an artist is another. It was a dream come true when they asked me to collaborate on this piece. I'm so proud of this song. I kept looking for that one last piece - this was it! The spoken word takes me back to Junior High - Nikki Giovanni was a childhood heroine. This song feels like a defining moment each time I listen to it.
If I was a good music voxer, I would post "Two Pages" but instead I'll post the two songs that "A Bed of Roses" immediately reminded me of.
So, yesterday we hit Melissa with a counter-measure to "You Don't Know My Name" by Alicia Keys. Today, let's look at some remixes.
I'm not sure how I feel about this one:
It's passable but doesn't really do much with the original beat except flip it and speed it up a bit which isn't really necessary because the Kanye West production is so tight already. No, if you're going to work with this track, you need to go a completely different direction: