Remixes ROCK!!. Review on Remixes Vs The Original

Hi All, Was reading thru the reviews. What I cold gather is that most of us think some remixes are good while the others are pathetic. And also, We still believe Old is Gold. Having said this, here is my view point about this higly debatable topic Remixes or Original. Now this Topic itself should be reworded like this in my opinion.

Among the remixed songs which is better Original or Remix? The answer is REMIX all the way. Here I am not talking about somebody going and picking up songs like chandan sa badan or nainon mein badra chhaaye and add some rave/trance loop to it and call it a remix.

I personally believe that the remix artistes have been quite rational in the way they have chosen the tracks they plan to remix. I am not very informed about the legal procedures and the copyright issues, all I am interested is in the music. It is quite sad to see people calling Remixes as Plagiarism/theft. Blieve me Remixing is an extremely creative and toug process and some exposure to a sequencing software / workstation is NOT going to take you anywhere.

In the current remix scenarion you can see the maximum songs are R D Burman tracks. Pancham da was a man of great vision and he composed music for future. Packaging his new songs in the remixed format is such a blast! Blieve me, If you listen to the path breaking hip hop version of Piya tu. I would personally want to believe I never heard the noisy, clumsy and congo orchextrated piya tu original from carvan.

The time when Pancham da composed that song, he never had the current sophisticated infrastructure to compose the song in the remixed mode. and thats the case with any old song. the orchestration of songs like om shanti om pisses me off. its too noisy, cluttered and to add to the agony its recorded in an analog format.

Listen to Dil kya kare remixed by instant karma. for that matter hum bewafa, meri soni. all of them are par ahead in quality of orchestration and recording clarity. Long live songs like that. another one song which I have to mention here is the Noorie remixed by Bally sagoo. Now, more recently, the yeh wada raha remix. I feel like throwing up when I hear the stupid dholak playing in the original of the song. DJ Aqeel, one of the path breaking DJs came up with the remix which still remains one of the classic remixes ever made. Now, how many of us have heard Kaliyon ka chaman original? Bappi lahiri himself did not remember having composed the song, till harry anand came up with an ABSOLUTELY awesome remix.

Now whats the big fuss about importing sound loops? if u can flaunt using a korg or Kurzweil key board module to produce'ORIGINAL' indian loops, then why not use an indian make music workstation?(there'snt one! thats y!) theres nothing wrong if u get good quality loops even if they are imported! For instance, forget the remixes .even all those original songs use bulit in sound samples from sequencer workstations. any body who has heard Breathless by shankar mahadevan, the initial trance/ rave kind of sound that u hear is a bulit in mode of KORG TRITON and its called motion raver. it becomes a big fuss when some body uses the same mode for a remixed song.

I personally believe Kaanta laga ROCKS! How much ever the critics and the safe guarders of the pseudo indian morality go on lambasting this guy's efforts, he will emerge a winner. he already has. I have asked atleast 20-30 people of my generation if they have heard the song kaanta laga. 97% of them said the'd never heard the song before the remix came in! U wouldnt want to hear the original anyways. it sounds abso pathetic! Chadti jawaani is another awesome remix! At this point I cnnot forget to mention another pioneer. bombay vikings. His current track'chhod do aanchal.' is an absolute treat! Especially the scale change towards the end/. he turned a monotonous old song(no one can deny it is a great tune. also no one can dny that the old one has a very pathetic orchestration.) to a chart topper. Now the next point of argument.

I personally feel the music Video has nothing to do with the overall quality of the remix album. All the people who go and pick up an album just because it has/had a raunchy video, I would say they havent still started taking music seriously. I went and picked up the aur ek hasina thi album just becoz I thought the chadti jawaani audio track was astounding. It indeed is! I also love the jhumka gira re remix track.

All tjose folks crying to kill remixes just look at Asha ji. she is such a great musician and she herself is pioineering the remix of her own songs., remixes are here to stay and it is the future of music which will keep alive the old time songs. thank god this time those great tunes are packaged in a much better fashion! Therez no argument that the old time songs are great and have great tunes. As I have tried to explain in my revu. its not the tune, its the orchestration that requires a face lift. thats precisely where remixes come in!

Now, one last word about the Old is gold statement. this is a very relative phenomena. if I ask my dad, he will tell me that what he heard when he was 7 years old wast he best music he has heard. if u ask me, I will say it wasthe music that I heard when I was a kid which is golden. if U ask my child what is golden, he/she will say. . Piya tu hip hop remix.:) so the idea of whats old and whats gold changes as time moves on. If u keep crying about retaining the originnal, what the next genaration would get to hear will be a hissing, croaking audio tape with an eastman color cassette cover(if the cover is still there.) with an indifferently dressed man on the cover(incidently that person would be amitabh bachan or aamir khan.) Promote remixes. kill the cliche OLD is GOLD.

One after word: Remixes does not necessarily mean fast drum and rave loops. U can pickup a melody by madan mohan, rip the original voice out, play some exotic piano / thick matrix backing, add a great bassline and some great digital recording. It will be a treat to the coming generation rather than forcing te coming generation to try hard and listen to the poor quality recordings of 60's and 70's. they might not even relate to a harmonium that time., .

I personally feel, its a crime not to pick up from where all those great maestros left off and add value to the evergreen tunes they composed. No song is ever complete. they will keep evolving and what we should do is keep experimenting on them to add more value to it. some may give bad results, some may be good. but then it took 8000 experiments before edison invented the light bulb. going by OLD IS GOLD, If we had thought what charles babbage invented as a computer as the best one. all of us would still have a mammoth 500 sq ft device sitting in ur drawing room! Change is constant. promote it for good!

Please do post ur comments.

Always, Vodka.