2. The White Stripes - Walking With A Ghost
3. The White Stripes - Icky Thump
4. Giant Drag - My Dick Sux
5. Nikka Costa - Like A Feather
6. Gwen Stefani - U Started It
7. Raphael Saadiq - Still Ray
8. Lenny Kravitz - American Woman (Timbaland Remix)
9. Clipse - Young Boy
10. Notorious B.I.G. - Hypnotize
11. Timbaland - Give It To Me (Laff At 'Em) ft. Justin Timberlake & Jay-Z
12. E-40 - Quarterbackin' ft. Clipse
13. Fabolous - Block On Smash ft. Jay-Z & Young Jeezy
14. N.O.R.E. - I'm A G ft. Pharrell
15. M.I.A. - Hit That
16. Gorillaz - Feel Good Inc. (Pollyn Remix)
17. Soft Tigers - Maria (Bumblebeez Remix)
18. Klaxons - Golden Skans (SebastiAn Remix)
19. ZZZ - Lion
Like making cassette mixtapes before it, curating a selection of songs onto a single compact disc is all about working within the limitations of a specific format. CD's are really only of any use these days to people who have cars of an old enough vintage to still have a player in them. And so, again like the cassette mixtape, it is an art form dying out fast. Having to put a lot of thought into your selections, the running order and if you wanted to take it that far, the theme and/or the artwork was all a meticulous process that song selectors won't necessarily have to think about these days or in the future. Giving or being given a tape or a disc by a friend or a significant other (potential or otherwise) meant something back then. It had taken effort and time and consideration. Being given a Spotify playlist or a USB stick is not quite the same thing.
Creating a mix was an exercise restraint. You had 80 minutes. But that's it. Make you're statement, tell your story, take your musical trip. You had to be careful and often merciless when it came to what to finally include and what to cut. Only the essentials could be permitted. Within that time frame though, those 80 mins were your playground. Some people had strict rules like; only one song by any one artist, unless themed around a particular artist or artists (and certainly if an artist was to appear twice the tracks should not be consecutive), or start and end big, or stick to a theme. I usually ignored these rules. Not always, but most of the time.
During the period in which Two Seconds Over was made (probably mid 2007) I was mostly making mixes to be played while on shift behind the bar at The Southern. I liked to fill every minute the disc so it would mean having to go and change CDs less frequently. The title is a reference to the fact that my ideal tracklist for this one ended up being too long to fit on the CD by a minuscule margin, I can imagine this frustrated me greatly. I also rarely used themes, but to be fair, when I did I often made my best mixes. Two Seconds Over is not one of those. It isn't bad, it has some fluidity to it and I've obviously taken some time over the sequencing and has some excellent inclusions but there are also some odd choices on there.
Opening with Ciccone Youth is a nice and nerdy touch. Ciccone Youth is what Sonic Youth called themselves for The Whitey Album, a covers album celebrating (or mocking) 80s pop music. Into The Groovey is their wonderfully scuzzy take on Madonna Ciccone's hit with all its distorted vocals and feedback. It is followed by a more straightforward cover version of Tegan And Sara's Walking With A Ghost by The White Stripes, which doesn't really improve on the already great original but is more or less its equal. Breaking the rules right of the bat; that White Stripes song is followed by another, what would have been their newest single at the time I made the mix, Icky Thump. I loved it back then, I like it fine now but it is far from my favourite song by the band but it works to keep the momentum of the mix going.
The grungy stomp of My Dick Sux by Giant Drag stays in lane with the preceding three songs, dirty riffs and thumping drums were what I required to kick this one off it seems, but then I decided to slow things down a little with the comparatively minimal and quiter Like A Feather by Nikka Costa. I really like this song a lot. I've already discussed it with its inclusion on a previous mix but I will mention here that the live version from the Chris Rock Show was my preferred version for a while. Gwen Stefani slows things down further, as if to take a breather from all the riff-age, with the Neptunes assisted U Started It. The songs they did together for her second album, The Sweet Escape are among the most underrated songs The Neptunes ever did as far as I'm concerned. Lyrics about giving in and admitting fault after an argument with a lover over synthesized strings and typically tight Pharrell drums makes for a lush and catchy smooth RnB pop number.
Smooth RnB pop is Raphael Saadiq's bread and butter. Still Ray is a seductive gem, plinking piano, horns and buttery vocals warm the soul. And then we are back to the riffs. Lenny Kravitz gets a stuttery Timbaland remix treatment for his hit cover of The Guess Who's American Woman. Timbaland brings some weird electronic textures to Kravitz traditional rock arrangement. He keeps the riff intact but cuts up the rhythm and laces in staccato drums and arpeggiated synths. Timbaland greatly improves Kravitz's interpretation.
The mix then follows on from Timbaland's hip hop influence with the bombastic Young Boy by Clipse. With Hugo's horns, Williams' super tight snares and falsetto and the brothers Thornton, Pusha and Malice rapping hard bars about hustling form an early age a very special alchemy is at work. The Neptunes and Clipse went on to record one of my favourite rap records of all time together and this song shows a lot of the early promise that they'd later convert on.
We continue with Hip-Hop standard Hypnotize by the notorious Biggie Smalls which is... well you know... flawless. 'I diddy bop like Diddy back when Biggie cock-eyes/Hypnotized the masses behind Versace glasses' Jay-Z raps on the very next track in the mix, the remix to Timbaland's number 1 single Give It To Me. The orginal version was adequate, not one of Timbo's more interesting, adventurous or catchy beats but having Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake feature on it boosted it's appeal and popularity. For the remix Give It To Me(Laff At Em), Furtado was switched out for Jigga and the whole beat was flipped too, more fun but less poppy. Timberlake is relegated to the hook, which is fine and we could really have done without a Timbaland verse on it at all to be quite honest. He should have just given the whole thing over to Jay and Justin. I still fux wit it though. It never really attracted much attention when it was originally released and that is perhaps a little unfortunate.
Creating a mix was an exercise restraint. You had 80 minutes. But that's it. Make you're statement, tell your story, take your musical trip. You had to be careful and often merciless when it came to what to finally include and what to cut. Only the essentials could be permitted. Within that time frame though, those 80 mins were your playground. Some people had strict rules like; only one song by any one artist, unless themed around a particular artist or artists (and certainly if an artist was to appear twice the tracks should not be consecutive), or start and end big, or stick to a theme. I usually ignored these rules. Not always, but most of the time.
During the period in which Two Seconds Over was made (probably mid 2007) I was mostly making mixes to be played while on shift behind the bar at The Southern. I liked to fill every minute the disc so it would mean having to go and change CDs less frequently. The title is a reference to the fact that my ideal tracklist for this one ended up being too long to fit on the CD by a minuscule margin, I can imagine this frustrated me greatly. I also rarely used themes, but to be fair, when I did I often made my best mixes. Two Seconds Over is not one of those. It isn't bad, it has some fluidity to it and I've obviously taken some time over the sequencing and has some excellent inclusions but there are also some odd choices on there.
Opening with Ciccone Youth is a nice and nerdy touch. Ciccone Youth is what Sonic Youth called themselves for The Whitey Album, a covers album celebrating (or mocking) 80s pop music. Into The Groovey is their wonderfully scuzzy take on Madonna Ciccone's hit with all its distorted vocals and feedback. It is followed by a more straightforward cover version of Tegan And Sara's Walking With A Ghost by The White Stripes, which doesn't really improve on the already great original but is more or less its equal. Breaking the rules right of the bat; that White Stripes song is followed by another, what would have been their newest single at the time I made the mix, Icky Thump. I loved it back then, I like it fine now but it is far from my favourite song by the band but it works to keep the momentum of the mix going.
The grungy stomp of My Dick Sux by Giant Drag stays in lane with the preceding three songs, dirty riffs and thumping drums were what I required to kick this one off it seems, but then I decided to slow things down a little with the comparatively minimal and quiter Like A Feather by Nikka Costa. I really like this song a lot. I've already discussed it with its inclusion on a previous mix but I will mention here that the live version from the Chris Rock Show was my preferred version for a while. Gwen Stefani slows things down further, as if to take a breather from all the riff-age, with the Neptunes assisted U Started It. The songs they did together for her second album, The Sweet Escape are among the most underrated songs The Neptunes ever did as far as I'm concerned. Lyrics about giving in and admitting fault after an argument with a lover over synthesized strings and typically tight Pharrell drums makes for a lush and catchy smooth RnB pop number.
Smooth RnB pop is Raphael Saadiq's bread and butter. Still Ray is a seductive gem, plinking piano, horns and buttery vocals warm the soul. And then we are back to the riffs. Lenny Kravitz gets a stuttery Timbaland remix treatment for his hit cover of The Guess Who's American Woman. Timbaland brings some weird electronic textures to Kravitz traditional rock arrangement. He keeps the riff intact but cuts up the rhythm and laces in staccato drums and arpeggiated synths. Timbaland greatly improves Kravitz's interpretation.
The mix then follows on from Timbaland's hip hop influence with the bombastic Young Boy by Clipse. With Hugo's horns, Williams' super tight snares and falsetto and the brothers Thornton, Pusha and Malice rapping hard bars about hustling form an early age a very special alchemy is at work. The Neptunes and Clipse went on to record one of my favourite rap records of all time together and this song shows a lot of the early promise that they'd later convert on.
We continue with Hip-Hop standard Hypnotize by the notorious Biggie Smalls which is... well you know... flawless. 'I diddy bop like Diddy back when Biggie cock-eyes/Hypnotized the masses behind Versace glasses' Jay-Z raps on the very next track in the mix, the remix to Timbaland's number 1 single Give It To Me. The orginal version was adequate, not one of Timbo's more interesting, adventurous or catchy beats but having Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake feature on it boosted it's appeal and popularity. For the remix Give It To Me(Laff At Em), Furtado was switched out for Jigga and the whole beat was flipped too, more fun but less poppy. Timberlake is relegated to the hook, which is fine and we could really have done without a Timbaland verse on it at all to be quite honest. He should have just given the whole thing over to Jay and Justin. I still fux wit it though. It never really attracted much attention when it was originally released and that is perhaps a little unfortunate.
A similar strain of hip hop is tapped as we get a reprise of the crack slanging verses of Clipse this time as a feature on the single Quarterbackin' by the Bay Area's very own E-40 from his 2003 album Breakin' News. At the time it was a bit of a rarity to hear the Virginia natives rapping on anything other than a Neptunes beat so it was nice to hear that they could take to this one by E-A-Ski & CMT with similar ease. However it is by no means essential and neither is Fabolous' Block On Smash,, a mixtape track with a really fun Just Blaze-esque beat and cobbled together verses from other songs. Jay-Z makes a reappearance and here his verse comes from the Blueprint 2.1 cut Stop 2.1 and the Jeezy verse is from Over Here from Let's Get It: Thug Motivation 101. The thing would have been a great listen if the mixing and mastering on it weren't a shambles.
A disappointing failure in a once fruitful synergy comes next. Until I'm A G, every single time Noreaga got a Neptunes beat magic happened. In fact The Neptunes got their first real break producing Super Thug for him and the fact is each time they gave him a track he bodied it and then... I don't know what happened. He fell off, hard. If they had gone to one of their many other collaborators with this beat they would have done something great with it. A Clipse or a Jay-Z or a Mystikal would have slayed this. Even Snoop or Fabolous. N.O.R.E. instead trips and mumbles his way through it with almost zero flow or memorable lines. In the video they had to put really bad comedy sketches over his verses in the hope you wouldn't notice how bad his rhymes were. It's weird but a few years later they gave him another shot and both he and Lil' Wayne managed to waste that one too. Just bad.
Bangladesh's beat for the unreleased M.I.A. track Hit That keeps with the fairly minimal hip hop style of the N.O.R.E. track and it works pretty well with Maya's vocals. The thing with most of M.I.A.'s music is that at the time of Arular and Kala I found her really fresh and exciting but now I really have to be in the mood to bear it, if I amn't then it is grating beyond belief and this song no different.
Number 16 on the mix is a mash-up/remix of the Gorillaz single Feel Good Inc. by Pollyn. This is the first in a string of three remixes placed back to back at the tail end of this compilation. Pollyn mixes the orignal Gorillaz accapella and some of parts of the original instrumental with a new beat centered around a sample of Daft Punk's seminal Technolgic. It works quite well but doesn't really elevate either song in any real way. The second in the trio is a remix by Australia's Bumblebeez (of whom I was a big fan) of Maria by Soft Tigers (whom I don't remember existing). The original is garbage and the remix less so but still not worth it's 4 minutes and 9 seconds it is afforded on this CD. A real waste of precious space.
Capping off the remix trilogy is the exceptional reinterpritation of Golden Skans (Klaxons single, this was 2007 after all) by French, Ed Banger producer SebastiAn. It knocks real hard. It starts out sounding like Justin Timberlake's My Love and ends up sounding like all the best electronic dance music coming out of Paris in 2007; glitchy, space-y and flowing beautifully between distorted and harsh and clear and gentle. SebastiAn, Justice, DJ Mehdi et al hat this shit locked down for a while there.
For the Big Closer I, in my wisdom, went with Lion by ZZZ. Seeing the name I could not begin to summon anything about the song to mind, it had faded far from my memory, but as soon as it started I recognised it instantly. It sounds like it should be playing over the end credits of an F-Zero-like futuristic race car videogame. I guess that might be why I chose it. Often I would structure mixes as though they were mini scores to unmade films. This would have been a terrible film.
Being pressed for time would be the only excuse I could offer for the creation of such a lukewarm mix. I had clearly started out with good intentions, but somewhere along the way it seems my ideas got muddled, momentum was lost altogether or spoiled in a messy bit of sequencing. Duff tracks were included seemingly just to make up the time. As a result I can't imagine that this one would have been played more than a couple of times in The Southern and then placed in it's sleeve in my CD wallet, never to be taken out again until I came to write about it. It is a fine art making a mix CD. Get it wrong and this is it's fate. Get it right though and the results could be unforgettable. It's a shame that it truly is an art form destined to be lost in the sands of time.
The lost art of making compilation CD's.
