Loneliness is a cloak you wear

As I was doing dishes tonight, I was listening to my iPod and a Cher song I had completely forgotten about played. Taken from what is probably my favorite Cher album, It's A Man's World, "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore" is one of those Cher songs that, when you think about it, is perfect for Cher. Made famous in 1966 by The Walker Brothers, it's a melancholy song that makes great use Cher's lower register. It was used to great effect in The X-Files episode "The Post-Modern Prometheus," an episode in which Cher (as well as Roseanne Barr) was asked to appear, but she declined. Cher later regretted that decision, although probably not as much as she regretted the Lori Davis informercials.

As I said, the song has a melancholy streak a half a mile wide, and it is very autumnal. As my friend Steve said, I am over this summer shit. I want cold bones and moods and rain. This song fits in very well alongside other such autumnal hits of Dan like October Project and Madonna's Erotica album. The first line alone gets me "Loneliness is a cloak you wear/A deep shade of blue is always there." Let's have a listen. This version is clearly not live, which is a shame because Cher really can sing live.



Not one to forget where her bread is buttered, Cher also commissioned a couple of dance remixes for the clubs. I have a few remixes of this song in my iTunes library, but I don't know that any of them are official remixes. They are a bit hit and miss, which is par for the course with Cher remixes. For every "Believe (Almighty Definitive Mix)" you get at least two completely unlistenable remixes. These aren't bad, but they kind of wreck the melancholy of the song, even though sometimes melancholy mixed with a driving dance beat works much better than you might imagine.

While I was listening to this song, I got to thinking about all the other people that have recorded it. Of course, you have the Walker Brothers original. Another worthy version is by Keane, who usually can nail melodic melancholy pop. They do a pretty good job on this one.



It's not quite Cher, but really, what can be? The only other version of this song I have "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore" is the high-nrg version by Quantize from the Gay Classics series which puts together a bunch of songs that really don't go all that well together if you think about it . Anyway, I'm pretty sure I snagged this song off of Audioscrobbler back in the day. I'm not sure this works any better than Cher's attempts to rework this for the gay clubs, but you certainly can't fault them for trying. And besides, I have kind of a soft spot for those high-nrg covers of popular songs by unknown artists.



Still, for my money, Cher has the best version. Why? Because, as is pointed out on Twitter nearly daily, she's fucking Cher.

Related posts: Cher's It's A Man's World album revisited, as well as my post on "The Post-Modern Prometheus" episode of The X-Files.

Remixology: My 10 Favorite Madonna Remixes, Part 1

Back in February, P.Viktor and I made lists of Madonna songs that should have been singles, and we had such a good time that as soon as we finished that post we were already trying to figure out what our next joint post would be. We tossed around several ideas - many of which we will probably get to as the year goes on - but a Twitter conversation about the Orbital remix of "Bedtime Story" made us realize that the next post had to be about Madonna's remixes. I used to be all about remixes, but as I've gotten older, they pack a significantly smaller punch than they used to, especially considering the sheer volume of crappy fan-made ones. But trying to narrow it down to five choices proved impossible, so we went with 10 each. I'm going to post mine in two parts to diminish the chances that people will see a long post and just skip it. P.Viktor did his as a podcast, which you can find here. And now, here's my first five in no particular order (title hyperlinks are to YouTube videos when I could find them):

1) Secret (Junior's Luscious Club Mix)
Up until the mid 90s, most of Madonna's remixes (and most remixes in general) were nothing more than extended album versions, only occasionally shaking the song up and adding in previously unheard bits. In virtually no instance did the song completely transform before your eyes. This changed with the Junior Vasquez remixes of the kick-off single from 1994's mostly-meh Bedtime Stories, "Secret." The urban R&B groove is stripped away, and seconds after the 90s club piano starts, you know that this is most definitely not the album version. The tempo is kicked into high gear and Junior patented hand claps are all over the place. While the song is definitely ready for the dance floor in this form, it has a good dose of respect for the original version of the song, which is still one of my favorite Madonna songs. Even though it uses Madonna's original vocal, it is so much more than the album version with a generic beat box thrown behind it.

2) The Beast Within (A!O Words of the Prophecy Mix)
"The Beast Within" is itself a remix of sorts. The last track on the "Justify My Love" CD maxi-single, it's an interesting and somewhat self-indulgent track which alternates between Madonna reading from the book of Revelation and the chorus of "Justify My Love." It was always a bit of a head scratcher for me, but it intrigued me because I love Madonna's speaking voice on it. Madonna apparently also really likes it because it's been featured on two of her tours. While researching this post, I realized that I had completely forgotten about the "Synagogue of Satan" mini-controversy that blew up around "The Beast Within." So many controversies, so little time.

This fan remix completely omits any "Justify My Love" mention and instead, samples in the 45 second song that Madonna submitted as the theme for the extremely short-lived TV series "Wonderland." The sample is nothing but Madonna humming (which puts me in heaven) and the effortless juxtaposition of the two unrelated songs never ceases to amaze me.

3) Don't Cry For Me Argentina (Miami Mix)
Released back in the days prior to the massive fan sharing of leaked tracks, these remixes were so heavily sought after by me that when I did finally find the import CD single in an Iowa City record store, I almost didn't believe I had found them. Perhaps knowing that it would be required by law for her to record a dance version of the best known song from Evita, an 8-months pregnant Madonna went back into the studio to completely rerecord the vocals and what resulted was something that I can't really imagine dancing to but is amazing nonetheless. Accentuated with a heavy Latin beat and and the cries of the descamisados chanting "Evita! Evita! Evita!" it was instantly campy yet utterly fantastic. These remixes were the buzz of the fan board I was on back in early 1997, but were only available on import discs. By the time Warner Bros. got around to releasing them here in the U.S., most fans had already snapped them up and sales were not that great. Still, it managed to eke out #8 hit on the Hot 100 which is not too shabby considering it got pretty much zero radio airplay.

4) Music (The Young Collective Club Mix)
The remixes of "Music" are really a puzzle for me. Between the 9 official remixes of "Music" and the 10 zillion fan made ones, you could easily listen to "Music" all day every day for at least a good couple of months. The trouble is, most of the remixes of what is a very important song in her career are not that good. I think that most of them suffer because the original song is so perfect - perfectly simple and short, one of her latter-day classics worthy of the canon. But the Young Collective Club Mix from the Music CD maxi-single rises to the top of the pile for me. At a nearly interminable 13:18, it tries even my patience. Yes, it gets more than a little thump-thump-thump than I think I would have liked, but it's one of the few remixes of "Music" that I felt like really respected the original song, using most of the lyrics rather than ignoring the verses in favor of the chorus. Other remixes did more original things with the instrumentation, but at the end of the day, it's this straight forward club mix that is the definitive remix of "Music" although the "Music Inferno" mash-up really gives it a run for its money.

5) Give It 2 Me (Paul Oakenfold Remix Edit)
I think it's funny how what I perceive to be Madonna's worst albums (Bedtime Stories, Hard Candy) have produced some of the best remixes, whereas her best work has translated very poorly into remixes (see pretty much all the Confessions remixes.) Nowhere is this more apparent than with the Oakenfold remix edit of "Give It 2 Me" which was available with the pre-order of Hard Candy on iTunes. As I have said before, this remix turns a somewhat clunky attempt at R&B into the dance song it should have always been. It also removes the horrific "get stupid get stupid get stupid" bridge. This version of "Give It 2 Me" was an essential song when Heidi was writing Double Blind (which is released on April 9th!) so now even Anna knows it. It's remixes like these that really make me think about what could have been with Hard Candy if she had decided to stick with her more traditional dance/pop route rather than do what she did. Based on this remix, it would have been heaven.

Part two coming tomorrow...

A neanderthal thrust

I tweeted this a couple days ago, but I have recently rediscovered the Trouser Enthusiasts remix of Gloria Estefan's "Heaven's What I Feel", lovingly and very oddly named the "Neanderthal Thrust Mix."

On first listen, it should be everything I hate about remixes. It is over 10 minutes long, uses very little of the original vocal, and has a thumping beat specifically designed to give you a headache. But for some reason, it is one of my all time favorite remixes. It is not available for purchase anywhere that I can locate, and can only be found on the discontinued "Heaven's What I Feel" CD maxi-single.(although apparently you can still buy that for little or nothing.) As I recall, it was the ONLY good remix on the CD, even though I remember saying that this was the way to do remix singles - as in pack them full of remixes rather than going skimpy. Alas, in the never ending battle between quality and quantity, quality frequently suffers at the hand of quantity.

This song came from what is still my favorite Gloria Estefan album, gloria!, a statement that makes me wonder if it's okay for a 37 year old guy to have a "favorite Gloria Estefan album." What I loved about gloria! was how it forced her out of her interchangeable ballad mode and kicked her into more uptempo songs. Really, songs like "Can't Stay Away From You", "Anything For You", "Don't Wanna Lose You", and "Coming Out of the Dark" are really all the same song. So disillusioned was I with Gloria Estefan that my sister and I changed the lyric to Laura Branigan's "Gloria" from "feel your innocence slipping away/Don't believe it's coming back soon" to "originality slipping away/don't believe it's coming back soon." Gloria! functions well as a non-stop dance album, even though there are still a couple songs I could live without.

But the Trouser Enthusiasts Neanderthal Thrust Mix of "Heaven's What I Feel" REALLY took the album to the clubs. When I listen to it, I see one of two things. I see driving into a large city at late at night but not feeling the least bit tired. I also see it in the setting of a dance club where the strobe lights are so intense everyone's seizure threshold has been dangerously lowered. For me, the definition of a good remix is that it takes an already good song, being respectful to the original all the while steering it in a bold new direction. This remix does exactly that. How I wish they had gotten their hands on some of Madonna's songs. We could have been spared the repetitive hand claps of Junior Vasquez (be honest, every remix of his after "Secret" just turned the song into "Secret") and we might have actually gotten a good remix of "Nothing Really Matters."

Anyway, listen and enjoy.



(and yes, I just successfully turned a tweet into a blog post)

Gollum's sugar is raw

I don't know about anyone else, but we're getting TONS of mileage out of Madonna and "Candy Shop" and the "My sugar is raw!" line. Heidi still can't really stomach the song, but she does appreciate the campiness of Madonna whispering in her best Dita, "My sugar is raw!"

But you know, would someone PLEASE do a remix of "Candy Shop" that incorporates Gollum from The Two Towers. I mean, the song is begging for it. I can just hear it now..."dance, dance...stick, sticky and sweet...my sugar is raw" at which point Gollum is sampled over Madonna. With the stroke of a sample, Madonna's sugar is no longer just raw, but also wriggling!

I got a stern look over the glasses from Heidi when I suggested this, but she has since seen the light. Come on amateur remixers! Are you up to the challenge?