I love music, so I think it’s only fair that I share with you what’s catching my attention.
First up is a project that’s part of Nashville-based rapper, producer and turntablist Amerigo Gazaway’s Soul Mates series that celebrate musical collaborations that never were. His first remix/mashup was Fela Soul, which mixed the vocals of Fela over the music of De La Soul. That was followed by the Bizarre Tribe: A Quest To The Pharcyde, that layered Pharcyde vocals over reorchestrated samples from A Tribe Called Quest. Unfortunately, that project is no longer available.
Here’s how the Yasiin Gaye project is described:
[T]he producer unites Brooklyn rapper Yasiin Bey (Formerly Mos Def) and soul legend Marvin Gaye for a dream collaboration aptly titled “Yasiin Gaye”. Building the album’s foundation from deconstructed samples of Gaye’s Motown classics, Gazaway re-orchestrates the instrumentation into new productions within a similar framework. Carefully weaving Bey’s dense raps and Gaye’ soulful vocals over his new arrangements, the producer delivers a quality far closer to Gaye’s famous duets than that of a “mashup” album.
UPDATE: Amerigo was hit with a takedown order from the Recording Academy, so the track is no longer available.
Take a listen:
And check out the teaser video:
If you like what you hear, you can download the single (plus the instrumental) here. The full project drops February 25.
Also worth noting that this follows in a long line of great remix projects such as the Fela/Michael Jackson mashup by Rich Medina and The Marksmen, The King Meets The President In Africa (2010) or the Wu-Tang Clan-meets-classic-jazz of DJ 2Tone Jones’s Shaolin Jazz Project (2011), just to name a few recent ones. Further to what I’m reading about in Holt & Cameron’s Cultural Strategy: Cultural innovation relies on the familiar to create what’s new, otherwise people have no context for what they’re experiencing.
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