Are these the appropriate font sizes? The Yeah Yeah remix's cover
Bodyrox, aka Nick Bridges and Jon Pearn, had one of the biggest so-called "new rave" hits of the year with Yeah Yeah. It's a sleazy little house number, with cheeky riot-grrl vocals a la Peaches, or a more sober Princess Superstar. If you know it, you may also be familiar with the accompanying x-rated video, which decency forbids me linking to here - you can find it with your own dirty paws (cough, MySpace, cough).
To what extent visual rudeness helped its success is another story, for here we concern ourselves with aural matters.
You see, Bodyrox didn't really write the version that charted at number two in the UK top 40. It was remixed by another producer, D Ramirez (Dean Marriott), who in a former guise was responsible for school-disco mainstay Keep On Jumping, under the unwieldy banner of The Lisa Marie Experience Project. For the real anoraks out there, he also remixed Skeewiff's Man Of Constant Sorrow.
Yeah Yeah's original incarnation generated scant attention, so Bridges and Pearn duly turned it over to Marriott and, in all likelihood, thought no more of it. Marriott has not been referred to as "the UK's most bankable remixer" for nothing, and seeing its potential, totally rewrote the backing track, cranked up the vocals, and turned a rather lacklustre offering into a fantastic slice of dirty house.
But Marriott signed a contract for the remix alone, and thus never received proper credit. Read any review of the single and it will duly heap praise upon Bodyrox. In fact, off the back of the tune's success, Bodyrox have signed a fat contract with Notting Hill Music. Marriott has been left with, well, kudos from people who really know the score. And kudos, while hardly unwelcome, won't put milk on your Shreddies.
Apart from obvious legal lessons for Marriott (and for someone who has been in the remixing game so long, this is a cock up of Beckham penalty-kick proportions), it remains to be seen what gems Bridges and Pearn create without his guiding hand. The ultimate irony is that Bodyrox are remixing stalwarts themselves, with one half, Jon Pearn, having done re-fit duties on a number of pop/dance crossovers for the likes of the Sugababes, Christina Milian, J-Lo and Whitney Houston.
Traditionalists often dismiss electronic music as unoriginal in the first place, particularly if all it takes to alter it is twisting samples through a synth and a PC with Acid Pro. On the other hand, one can equally argue that learning these programs is just as complex as learning an instrument. But just how valid is a remix?
If I make Tune A, which you turn into Tune B using elements of A, do you have a brand new tune (with brand new applicable intellectual property rights), or is it a derivative work? This is a moot point if you're J-Lo or Whitney, but if your punching weight is roughly equal, as is the case with artists like Bodyrox and D Ramirez, how do you settle the score - both in terms of financial reward, and artistic merit?
