Believe it or not, but there actually was a time in dance music history when new songs came out frequently and were supported. And older records would typically only be remixed when there was a real demand for them to be. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a healthier ecosystem than exists today.
Nowadays? The record labels don’t seem to care about the prospect of eating themselves alive. Hence they cannibalise their own archives at an alarming rate – instead of investing money on creating and promoting quality new music, they prefer to rinse cash cows which proved lucrative decades ago and, it turns out, still are.
Presumably this is the reason why Positiva – which was once one of the great labels in dance music – has commissioned Jamie Jones to do a remix of Soft Cell’s 1981 release “Tainted Love”, which in itself is a cover of a 1965 song by Gloria Jones. I’d like to say that listening to the Jamie Jones remix was a pleasure, but I’d be lying.
This blog struggles to comprehend who could ever have possibly thought the world genuinely needed a bland, cookie cutter tech-house rework of a new wave song from the early 1980s. Honestly, hasn’t the world suffered enough over the past 21 months?