Edits aka Me Me Me!

Disco Edits currently take little to no talent to do. It is safe to say that because I’ve done them, and I have little to no talent. Back in the day, it was a pretty serious process, where you’d have to record the track to a reel to reel, then physically cut out the sections of the track that you wanted to use, and tape it to the other cut out sections in the order that you prefer. Anytime you wanted to loop or repeat a section, you'd have to re-record from the master and cut it out. When you are done, you'd just record your doctored tape reel and you have your edit. Understandably there were a lot of really crummy edits from the late 70s and 80s, partially due to the headaches of having to physically cut and arrange all that tape. There was no “Ctrl Z” to redo any of your mistakes, and I’m assuming it would be easy to spend all night in a coffee fueled haze, cutting and taping shit up repeatedly, only to find out that it doesn’t sound sonically believable or make sense in context to the rest of the song, or that some of your cuts are a couple milliseconds off, making it sound dodgy and amateur.

I think that they do serve a good purpose though; which is to make tracks more dynamic on the dance floor, and to remove the bits that the editor deems unsuited for the crowd or their own personal tastes. Basically juice up all the best parts with Gatorade and re-arrange them sensibly in the cliched dance-track format. Often times edits just make tracks mixable for djs, by just giving them a quantized intro and outro, and leave the meat of the track relatively unfazed. I get that, as I have a few cuts that are literally un-mixable, and therefore I pretty much would never play them. A lot of times the edits are totally pointless and do nothing but loop a couple sections and rearrange a few things with no regard to the impact that these changes will have on a listener, and the original basically takes a shit on its imitator.

In a recent interview, Juan Maclean deems disco edits to follow in suit with an “undercurrent of homophobia in the dance music scene”, and that the songs are then “de-gayed” and just the tough parts are left in. The edit that I'm putting up today is definitely de-gayed to a certain extent, but I left some of the gay in, as I wanted it to appeal to all sexual orientations, and I wanted some of the lyrical character of the song to remain for those that have heard the original. There is a certain type of threshold that I have with disco and club songs, where I can take a certain level of campy-ness, but once it eclipses that point (and it’s not that I no longer like the song) I just can’t really play it for people with a straight face. If that is considered musical homophobia, then I plead guilty. Maybe to make up for it, I should make two versions of any edit: do the version that I’d normally do, which would probably be about 50% as gay as the original (if the original is gay, which is not always the case), and then do another version that only uses only the gayest parts and make a “Megay-mix”. So posted below is the edit I did of Infatuation by Up Front. ME!!!!!! Ups to the drummer from Jonas Reinhardt (Damon, I think) who told me what it was when I heard it at a club, to any of the folks that have blogs that posted up high quality copies of the original so I could get it for free, Loose Shus/AmyWhoa for mastering help, and to Ebay for letting me score a copy for $6 so I didn't feel like a total fraud.

Also I put up a cool edit done by Danny Krivit of Dance to the Music by Sly and The Family Stone. It would be hard to say that this edit de-gays the original as the original isn't exactly gay, (its a funk track, not disco, not that funk can't be gay, but... I posted another Krivit edit of You Got Me Running by Lenny Williams a few posts back and you can test the de-gayed theory on that one). This is one of those impressive old school razor-blade edits which, when done properly, deserves much more kudos than anything done in Pro Tools.
Up Front - Infatuation (Hotthobo Loooooong Edit)
Sly and The Family Stone - Dance To the Music (Medley)