The music had been bad, all afternoon. I didn’t feel like listening to anything that my own device was serving up, since it’s in that mood where it thinks I only want chamber music, like it’s Sunday morning at home and I’m buttering a croissant and the music is dialed down low to indicate that we are cultured people who appreciate the finer things, even if they’re an indistinct stream of rote Baroque cliches turned out by the yard by some bewigged guy who was probably dosing his syphillis with mercury. But this meant listening to the execrable pop krep on the gym speakers. And here I thought: this is it, the sign that my brain has gone over, something’s wrong, a wire snapped, a lobe died.
It was Wild Thing by Tone Loc. But it was different. I don’t know how to describe it. The guitar part was . . . wrong somehow, and the fill that followed was correct but thicker. The vocals were meaner. The whole thing was darker and abrasive, like the original, except after five years in jail. When I looked it up I saw that it was indeed Wild Thing, but a re-recorded version.
Whew. If someone had said “say, you have a look of sudden relief,” I would have said “I just realized that Tone Loc’s producer had intentionally fuzzed up the guitar, and that this was not a sign of a stroke.”
We are at a cultural dead-end when people are re-doing those old songs, just playing with the knobs.
The original “Wild Thing,” from 1988, of course sampled Eddie and Alex Van Halen’s guitar and drums from “Jamie’s Crying.” I assume this is the remix that Lileks is referring to:
It’s just sludge, made by slicing up Ton Loc’s “original” version on a DAW, editing the daylights out of the drums, adding some additional synths and percussion, and reprocessing the guitars and vocals through some outboard effects boxes. It’s a tuned-up copy of a copy of a copy; the aural equivalent of the fourth Michael Keaton in 1996’s Multiplicity: