Sound And Vision: Director's Cuts — From Lady Gaga to Kate Bush, the Mixed Results of Tampering with Your Own Songs

posted in: Pop

I’ll never forget the day Basia lied to me. Twice. I was interviewing the Polish singer (best known for her 1988 hit “Time and Tide”) shortly before the release of her 1994 album, The Sweetest Illusion, which was coming five years after her previous album, London Warsaw New York. That day, she promised me two things: First, she would never again make me wait so long for new music. Second, she’d never release a run-of-the-mill greatest hits album featuring, well, her greatest hits. She felt that at the very least, artists owed it to their fans to reprise their hits as brand-new tunes, not just repackage the same old songs.

Her next studio album, It’s That Girl Again, wouldn’t arrive until 2009, nine years after she had released Clear Horizon”The Best of Basia, one of those run-of-the-mill greatest hits albums featuring, well, her greatest hits.

The morals of this story: 1) You can’t rush inspiration. 2) The first cut isn’t only the deepest”sometimes it’s the best, too. That’s a lesson Mariah Carey may have learned last year when she scrapped plans to release Angels Advocate, a remixed version of her Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel album, after a new version of “Up Out My Face” (Memoirs‘ best song) featuring Nicki Minaj limped onto Billboard’s Hot 100 at No. 100 and refused to go any further.

But apparently, Lady Gaga, the reigning queen of remix albums and EPs, still hasn’t received the memo. When she released Born This Way back in May, she put out a special edition that included a separate disc with remixes of five of the album’s songs. (Bryan Ferry did a similar thing with last year’s Olympia.) Divine inspiration or clever marketing ploy? Perhaps a little of both, but “Born This Way”-with-a-twang never would have spent six weeks at No. 1. The “Country Road Version” makes for an interesting one-time listen, but I never need to hear it again.

Though tacked-on remix EPs at least offer a bit more bang for fans’ bucks on album-release day, I’m still not sure why the world needed recent stand-alone remix albums like Lady Gaga’s seventeen-track The Remix, Justin Bieber‘s Never Say Never: The Remixes”one of the few to hit No. 1 and go platinum”and Ke$ha’s ridiculously titled I Am the Dance Commander + I Command You to Dance: The Remix Album, a chart flop. It’s not like “Tik Tok” and “We R Who We R” were all that great to begin with. Why make them worse?

Britney Spears’ “Till the World Ends,” on the other hand, was her best single since 2007’s “Gimme More,” until Minaj and Ke$ha cluttered up the musical proceedings on a remix that recently lifted the single to No. 3 on Billboard’s Hot 100 while ruining the song. As the destruction of perfectly decent music goes, it’s right up there with Extraordinary Machine. The Mike Elizondo/Brian Kehew-produced version that Fiona Apple released in 2005 is not the album that remains in heavy rotation on my iPod. That would be Apple’s scrapped but far superior sessions with Jon Brion. I’m hoping that she’ll revisit his riveting carnival-of-horrors wall of sound on her in-the-works upcoming fourth studio album.

At least we can be pretty sure that it won’t be a remix collection. Those, along with “Unplugged” albums (of which Nirvana‘s MTV Unplugged in New York is the standout, mostly because its centerpieces, “About a Girl” and a cover of David Bowie‘s “The Man Who Sold the World,” weren’t overly familiar Nirvana hits), and dance remixes of hit singles have cluttered the musical landscape since the ’80s, a decade whose mid-point brought us remake lows in the form of Chicago’s brash cover of its own 1970 hit “25 Or 6 to 4” and the Police’s dreary “Don’t Stand So Close to Me ’86.”

Both non-hits (they peaked at 46 and 48, respectively, in 1986) may have been in the name of art (misguidedly, as it were), but the recent spate of last-minute remixes of current hits” Rihanna‘s “S&M” featuring Britney Spears, Spears’ aforementioned “Till the World Ends” with Ke$ha and Minaj and Katy Perry‘s “T.G.I.F. (Last Friday Night)” with Missy Elliott”have had less to do with creative impulses than commercial ones. It’s one of the best ways to give a stalled single a shot at No. 1. At least the presence of Ludacris on the Top 10 remix of Jason Aldean‘s “Dirt Road Anthem” had true social value, bending the two artists’ disparate genres (rap and country) while binding them, too.

Sometimes remixes aim to ensure eternal life as a club classic. On Bangkok dancefloors in recent weeks, my ears have been assaulted with strobelight-friendly remixes of Jennifer Lopez‘s “I’m Into You,” Selena Gomez‘s “Love You Like a Love Song” and every Katy Perry hit under the sun, as well as former No. 1 pop songs like Adele‘s “Rolling in the Deep” and Bruno Mars‘ “Grenade.” The latter downplays the cloying quality that mars most of Mars’ music, giving it a much-needed kick and ultimately improving on the source material, but Adele needs a dance remix about as much as she needs a guest rapper on one of her songs. Speaking of rappers ruining great songs, Jay-Z did it twice. First, Colplay‘s “Lost!” and then Sade‘s “The Moon and the Sky,” whose Jay Z-costarring remix appeared on the band’s The Ultimate Collection, released May 3.

Two weeks later, Kate Bush committed some sacrilege of her own with Director’s Cut, a re-imagining of eleven key tracks from her 1989 album The Sensual World and 1993’s The Red Shoes. Diehard fans were torn, falling on both sides of that thin line between love and hate. Though the album, which included new vocals and instrumentation, has some intriguing moments, by accentuating the ragged and raw in both the production and the vocals, the re-recordings lack that ethereal diva-from-another-planet quality of Bush’s best music, that combination of pristine, passionate voice and complex, multi-layered music. I wish she had put her creative energy toward making an album of new songs, which she is supposedly now doing.

Joni Mitchell‘s classic “Both Sides Now” may have fared better as a jazz remake at the dawn of the century, but I can’t imagine that anyone would prefer to hear any version of that song more than the one that appeared on her 1969 album Clouds. Sting’s Symphonicities from 2010 seemed even more unnecessary. Either give us new classical compositions from scratch, as Elvis Costello, Paul McCartney and Billy Joel have done, or… better yet, don’t. Leave the classical magic to old dead pros like Mozart and Beethoven.

But I suppose, if we must hear pop songs redone as chamber music, I’d take a Sting string symphony over Lady Gaga and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra murdering “The Edge of Glory” any day. Haven’t heard that one yet? I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s coming soon on her next remix album.