Anyone who’s talked to me for an extended period of time
about sports knows that I hate the Seattle Seahawks. I’ll take every
opportunity I can to bash them into the ground. But really, I don’t actually
hate the Seahawks. I actually just love hating things my good friends claim are
great. It’s fun to antagonize people you love. Really, why else do you have
friends other than to let out some of the nastiness that gets bent up inside
you? There’s nothing malicious about it, just some fun.
My relationship with electronic music has developed in much
the same way as one of my best friends in the whole wide world has constantly
tried to get me into the genre. It’s fun to resist, fun to push back. It came
to the point where my friend was playing me remixes of classics like the
Beatles, Marvin Gaye and such just because he knew he’d be able to get a
reaction out of me and I was more than willing to oblige with the obligatory, “This
is fucking stupid! Why fuck with classics?! Just let me listen to the
motherfucking song!” But really, I was wrong. The whole time, I was wrong.
I’m a Hip-Hop guy. It’s been the main staple of my listening
diet since I was 9 or 10 years old and got my hands on 36 Chambers and Black Sunday.
So, really, just with that information alone my stance on remixes in electronic
music is completely stupid. Hip-Hop was, and mostly remains, built on sampling.
This is nothing more than a new generation of music obsessives (Something I can
wholly identify with) paying tribute to the things that inspired them on their
artistic path. It’s really no different than my roommate and I sitting in our
living room playing Tom Petty songs on our guitar, except that they’ve created
something new that harkens back to something already established as great.
Like executing a good cover song there’s an art to sampling
correctly, to breathe your own unique vision into something already in existence
and find that delicate balance of paying tribute and not just dick-riding. And
the man who helped me see this, once and for all, was Wick-It the Instigator.
By far the baddest motherfucker I saw at Shambhala, Wick-It has quickly become
my entry into the world of DJs and electronic music. I’m still learning, no
doubt, but I think with Wick-It I’ve found the accelerator to the learning
process. The curve doesn’t seem as steep as it once did…
This mix has been on nearly verbatim since I arrived back
from my journey to the Salmo Ranch where Shambhala takes place each year and if
you have the same problems with electronic music that I have had this might
help. (Being mangled beyond belief in the forest dancing with old and new
friends to it on a giant soundsystem might also help with this as well.)
