Mix Muddle

I got up this morning and found myself once again blessedly without a pain. Well, that's not quite right. I had a mild headache, which demonstrates that my pain receptors and processors are working, but that there is simply no real pain input from my body. It's still too soon to celebrate, but can I be permitted a moment of hopefulness that the chemotherapy has done something good for me?

So I thought this being New Year's Day and all, I'd listen to "New Year's Day" from U2. Normally I'm not a huge fan of U2, though in the sense of "I don't listen to much of their stuff" rather than "I can't stand the poser bastards." Once you become roaming ambassadors to the United Nations and are presumably powerful enough you've gained the Sinatra-like power to have anyone silenced with a mere telephone call, you are sufficiently elevated above the hoi polloi that their cries of "Poser knuckleheads!" or "fruity artistic blowhards!" are meaningless.

But I do like "New Year's Day", a song I've never evaluated in terms of lyrics, but I do like the way it sounds. Or sounded. Because in the world of iTunes, odd things have happened to this song. There are about ten different mixes, and none of them sound like the one I'm used to. They bear relatively unhelpful labels like "War remix" and "Kevorkian Remix", neither of which sound aupicious to me, and when sampled, none of them sound right. All of them seem to have screwed with Edge's guitar work on the side. They all have the evocative piano doodle and the bass track, but why must they always step on Edge and squash his guitar like a stinkbug? In some, it's gone entirely; on others its been made mushy and indistinct. And unless I'm greatly mistaken, none of them are an improvement.

Maybe that's the curse of being successful. You find yourself having to remix your existing music to suit a variety of powerful but niche audiences, and you find yourself with enough money and spare time that all that remixing becomes fiscally rewarding, or at least painless. This leaves your casual fans scratching their heads and saying "How come I can't find the radio version of New Year's Day on iTunes?" But since I'm not liable to sink more than 99 cents into U2 over my lifetime anyway, maybe I'm a market segment that can be safety ignored.

But it does make you (me, anyway) wonder if one of the reasons death and black metal tends not to be remixed is because black and death metal bands never have enough time and money to screw with the existing oeurve. One imagines the conversation taking place in the Bunker-like confines of the basement beneath the Norwegian Mother Record Store:

"Dude, we should remix the song Funeral Fog."
"What?"
"We should remix Funeral Fog. Pop it up a little, maybe get some play on AOR stations."
"We're going to have to pawn your boots for food money as it is; how do you propose we buy the studio time to remix anything?"
"I could sell a kidney..."

So what I'm saying is that I've bought two various mixes of "New Year's Day" and neither of them is the version I'm used to, so I'm calling this U2 expedition off before it turns crazy.

But, for whatever it's worth coming from my U2-impaired world, Happy New Year!