As the astute reader has already determined, Le Tigre's latest is, in fact, a remix album. Honestly, does anyone really look forward to these things? Ten bucks to hear some of Band X's hit singles given a rhythm transfusion and made twice as long? Sign me up! For years, the phrase 'remix album' has been only slightly less off-putting than 'tribute album,' though at least there are people like Herbert (not Paula Abdul) who occasionally nail the concept of a remix well enough to obscure its fundamental pointlessness. Of course, for every one person like Matt Herbert, there are a dozen others whose wanky retreads do nothing more than inflict economic damage on unwitting consumers.
What's that, Mr. Lady? Le Tigre's Remix isn't designed to simply steal money from all of their loyal fans, but rather as a "vision for a hardcore dance genre infused with radical politics"? I beg to differ! Come on, Remix is just about as standard as remix albums can get-- four songs from Feminist Sweepstakes, one off the From the Desk of Mr. Lady EP, one from the self-titled debut, and all (with one exception) are clearly worse than the originals. That's not too surprising, see, but unlike most bands to fall prey to the remix syndrome, Le Tigre has a lot more to lose-- namely, the message.
Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Le Tigre, Bikini Kill, or her solo outing as Julie Ruin can't miss the fact that Kathleen Hanna has always used her music as medium to broadcast her and her bandmates' neo-feminist viewpoints. Sure, she's traded the aggressive, slash-and-burn mentality of Bikini Kill for the fuzzy drones and lounge-y beats of The Tiger, but her message has always come through loud and clear. The aim of Le Tigre is not to get people dancing to the soothing tones of feminist rhetoric, it's to intellectually challenge people while they're busy getting their groove on. So, if anything, the biggest failure of this record is that, for the most part, it puts the disco before the discussion.
Of course, being a remix record and all, that seems to be the aim here-- even though the original songs are some of the most direct tunes in Le Tigre's catalog. Across the board, the mixes manage to obfuscate the content by either sampling to the point of irrelevance, cutting lyrics, or just submerging them deep within the mix. It's rare for a band to be able to tackle such a wide array of issues with intellect as well as a smirking sense of humor, but the DJs at work here ditch all that. This can potentially be overlooked (especially if the mixes work), but with three wimmin as overtly political as Hanna, Johanna Fateman, and JD Samson, it doesn't seem fair to evaluate the music separately from the politics.
Maybe that what's you're looking for, though. Maybe you want some of that patented, infectious Le Tigre dancecore without all the messy talk about issues. Well, don't hold your breath, because this thing isn't winning any awards on that front, either. Most of the cuts follow the standard remix procedure of just messing with the rhythm track and sampling the original without too much thought to the final product. "Tres Bien (The Nouveau Disco Mix)" from Analog Tara gives its source a decent trance-inspired makeover; Reid Speed's "Aphro-Dykey Mix" of "Dyke March 2001" doesn't change much more than the name of the track. And it actually hurts me on a personal level to think about the DFA's remix of "Deceptacon," which sucks out all of the original's Joy Division-ish bassy goodness in favor of a simplistic funk pattern looped ad nauseam.
The saving grace of this album is Lauren Flax's Flaxdatass mix of "Much Finer"-- it's the only cut that somehow manages to walk the fine line between preserving the feel of the original, and genuinely adding something worthwhile to it. The track is subtly restructured with a more complex underlying rhythm and a keyboard riff that sounds vaguely lifted from "Blue Moon," and frankly, it sounds fantastic. If there were a couple more like this one, Le Tigre's Remix might be rubbing elbows with those few other elite remixes that don't suck. As it stands, its membership card to that club got lost in the mail, along with any point to most of the mixes, and a good reason for even releasing this record. Hopefully the DJs will be able to make more use of it than the average listener.
