And indeed the “It’s Like That” remix was number one across Europe, largely in countries which had never paid much attention to old school rap. Nevins may not be a Europop producer, but it’s a very Europop sensibility.
This record isn’t updating the sound or content of early hip-hop, or even engaging with it at all in any productive sense: it’s simply using it as texture. But taken in tandem with that unbroken beat, it’s revealing. It’s a girls vs boys breakdance battle in a warehouse, and its omnipresence on video channels contributed a lot to the remix’s six-week stay at Number One. The video further lets on what’s happening. Nevins’ beat is the sort of route-one 4/4 thump that has always infuriated and fuelled people who hate house music – there’s a place in my heart for that completely straight-ahead approach (and, if I’m honest, for the way it riles people), but here it sacrifices too much. Nevins’ beat can’t completely smother that, but it doesn’t help either, putting all the weight on the title refrain, making “It’s like that – and that’s the way it is!” a slogan where it once was a payoff.
They may be talking about poverty and economic disaster, but they’re also young men grabbing onto their chance of success, and there’s a grim, cocksure relish in their storytelling. It drowns DMC’s voice in particular, and muffles a lot of the group’s inflections in the process. Its inane additions – the sped-up “Run DMC and Jam Master Jay!” squeaks, for instance – just disrupt the relentless, overlapping forward motion of the original MCs. But it’s far less accomplished and interesting. This remix is, admittedly, loud and effective, almost as brutal in its unrelenting way as the original. Jason Nevins, encountering this bomb-blast of a record, decides it would be improved by a crunching, unflinching house beat. It’s deservedly known as a landmark single, a record that takes the sharp, rhyme-swapping camaraderie of the early hip-hop groups somewhere bigger and harder. Over that crushing sound, Run and DMC shout to be heard, trading and declaiming lines like duelling street preachers. “Won’t you tell me the last time that love bought you clothes?” Talk gets little realer than “It’s Like That”, Run DMC’s debut single mix of fatalism, pragmatism and ultimately optimism, set to a beat like a medicine ball bounced off the walls of some vast concrete bunker.
0 kommentar(er)
