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Mastering the Remix

At its best, music inspires and commands our attention. At its worst, it frustrates and infuriates. And the latter happens because of the ferocity of our love for our aural art form. We love music too much to let harm come to it.

Like uncanny valley, anything slightly off can fill our tastes with rage and alienate that deviant sound from the pleasure centers of our brains. We crave specificity, even in the abstraction music hides in sometimes, and we lust after the sounds we've grown to love, no matter how unapparent those patterns seem in whatever our current flavor-of-the-week track is.

Our taste in music evolves through subtle, slowly changing shifts, slower than the millimeter-per-year crawl of the Earth's tectonic plates (but about as personally powerful and cosmic). So remixes walk a really fucking thin tightrope. We need change, but too much change at once can catch us unprepared. Sometimes, remixes drag us through the mud with whatever god-awful-thing DJ_X has done to them, but sometimes, and somewhat amazingly, they allow us to reconsider tracks in ways we normally never would.

Perspective is everything, and one of the best ways to battle useless conviction to solidified ideas, and this is especially true of art, is to prepare yourself for the inevitable -- that you will change. And change, like remixes, can be a beautiful thing; sometimes, we desperately need it.

Like Mos Def once said, "Everything's got space between it, the planets, trees, your eyes. Your eyes get too close together, it's a whole different world. You can lose perspective." But at risk of trying to pin some personal explanation to Mos Def's words, I won't. I'll just tell you that he's got a good idea. When things get too intertwined, it's hard for us to ever think about unraveling them. We get lost in webs of our own design. With that in mind, I put together a list of my ten favorite remixes of the year. Subjective and beautiful. Don't let my words color you. And don't think of this as a masterpiece; think of this as my perspective. Enjoy. And enjoy wherever your music takes you. --

Favorite Ten Remixes of 2011

10. Pretty Lights - Summertime

9. Sun Glitters - A Dragonfly in the City (Teen Daze Remix)

8. Shangri-Las - Remember (Adventure Club Dubstep Remix)

7. Theophilus London - Why Even Try (RAC Remix)

6. UGK, Outkast & George Michael - International Whisperer's Anthem (Skratch Bastid's Sexy Sax Mix)

5. Mr. Little Jeans - The Suburbs (Arcade Fire Cover)

4. Sia - Breathe Me (Butch Clancy Remix)

3. Birdy - Shelter (Photek Remix)

2. Florence + The Machine - Shake It Out (The Weeknd Remix)

1. The Irrepressibles - In This Shirt (Röyksopp Edit)

The Whispers - And The Beat Goes On (We Like Turtles Remix)

Funk remixes + higher bpm = I don't know what to do with myself.

#music #the whispers #and the beat goes on #we like turtles #remix #funk #disco #high bpm #fun #dance #electronic #retro #revival

Drake - Over My Dead Body (Star Slinger Remix)

Probably the only time you'll ever see me post about Drake. Mostly because Star Slinger brings a near-flawless atmosphere into almost all of his work. And he can make even Drake look good - decorated with the kind of frills that Drake's producers wish they had.

#music #drake #over my dead body #star slinger #remix #r&b?#rap?#mood music #magical #floating

Kaskade - Waste Love (feat. Quadron)

Call this the right way to have up and down parts in a song. Call it gorgeous.

#music #kaskade #waste love #quadron #electronic #dance #fire & ice #electro #trance #disco #gorgeous

Tony Bennett & Lady Gaga - The Lady Is A Tramp

I still can't believe this is a real thing.

#music #tony bennett #lady gaga #duet #this lady is a tramp #video #is this real life #pop #big band #classic #retro

CSS - City Grrrl (MEN Meets GRRRL Remix)

All the attitude of CSS turned club. As fun as listening to Alala for the first time.

#css #city grrrl #MEN #men meets grrrl #remix #music #club #fun #alala #electronic #dance

Marina and the Diamonds - Starring Role

You can just hear her growing with every new track she puts out. Very polished, and pretty powerful, especially with the subtle, but beautiful beginning section following along the underside of most of the song -- up, down - up, down.

#beautiful #growing #marina and the diamonds #music #personal #powerful #starring role #story #singer #electra heart #pop #magical

White Sea - Ladykiller

Because the original belongs anytime surrounding Halloween.

#music #white sea #ladykiller #original #halloween #creepy #indie #alternative #mellow #electronic #crossover

letmypeopleshow

anewsky

letmypeopleshow:

Left My People Go:

MoMa was only two years old when Diego Rivera occupied it for the first time. It was the fall of 1931, during the Depression, and the museum brought the artist from Mexico to New York six weeks before his solo show to create what we now might describe as semi-site-specific works. On blocks of frescoed plaster, slaked lime, and wood, he painted five “portable murals”—some on themes from Mexican history (his famous Agrarian Leader Zapata); others on class inequity, and revolution. After the opening, RIvera added three more murals about social injustice in New York—or, as we might say now, the 99 percent.

That’s the theme of Frozen Assets, shown here, which looks awfully fresh for a 1931 painting. MoMA is reuniting it with other works from the original exhibition in “Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art,” opening November 13. Also featured are designs for Rivera’s Rockefeller Center murals, which were destroyed in 1934 after a scandal over the artist’s “unauthorized” depiction of Lenin.

”Diego Rivera” is but one amazing show on art and politics at an institution built on oil money this fall. At the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, “Greetings from L.A.: Artists and Publics, 1950–1980” chronicles how artists took to the streets—and exploited the mass media— to support social and political movements advocating for feminism, peace, and more. The website documents works like The Peace Tower, a massive 1966 protest against the Vietnam War featuring hundreds of paintings sent from artists from around the world, and the elegiac performance In Mourning and Rage, staged by Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz-Starus in 1978.

How this might impress the Occupy Museums protestors who’ve branched off from Occupy Wall Street to picket MoMA and other museums isn’t clear, since their message seems to have morphed from a critique of cultural elitism to a collective sharing of information and empowerment. In which case they should do a field trip inside the museums too, where they will find (in addition to more Communist art) evidence of the cultural elitism they rightly detect—as well as many programs offering information and empowerment. Sometimes the radicals are on the inside.

Which is to say, there are a lot of ways to occupy museums. At MoMA, Tony Shafrazi spray-painted Picasso’s Guernica in 1974 to get his protest against the Vietnam War on front pages around the world; that was a bad way. Occupy Museums has been deeply controversial in the art world regarding its targets and intentions. But initiating conversations with people outside the museum about cultural elitism, underpaid art handlers, and issues that keep people out of museums? Funny thing—that sounds just like the art inside the museum.