Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - We Invented the Remix Part 2
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Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 25 February 2022
⏱️ 61 minutes
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Summary
Today on Hit Parade, we continue tracing the history of the remix. From Jennifer Lopez to Billie Eilish to Lil Nas X, the remix has become a ubiquitous part of contemporary pop chart battles. In part 2 we continue to story of how the remix became the defacto mode of reviving flagging singles, resulting in some of the most dominant pop songs of all time.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening ad-free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:06.9 | Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine about the hits |
| 0:14.1 | from coast to coast. I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's |
| 0:19.8 | Why Is This Song Number One series. |
| 0:22.3 | On our last episode, I ran down more than three decades of remix history, |
| 0:29.2 | how DJs and producers went from extending tracks for dance floor ecstasy to reinventing them |
| 0:36.8 | from the ground up. |
| 0:38.3 | We are now at the turn of the millennium, |
| 0:41.3 | and a dancer-turned actress-turned-singer |
| 0:45.3 | is about to score a chart-topper so radically rethought |
| 0:50.3 | she will change the rules of the remix. |
| 1:01.0 | From her very first album, |
| 1:03.7 | 1999's On the Six, |
| 1:08.0 | Jennifer Lopez and her team at Sony Music aimed her singles at multiple audiences. For example, waiting for tonight, |
| 1:15.3 | a Latin house banger, was serviced not just to top 40 radio stations, but also Spanish |
| 1:23.0 | language stations in a version called Una Noche Mas, and to club DJs in a remix by house producer Hex Hector |
| 1:32.9 | The X Hector was actually a hit first, topping Billboard's club play chart more than a month before the pop version peaked at number eight on the Hot 100. |
| 1:57.2 | Team Lopez even recut the Waiting for Tonight video with Hector's version to reinforce her club credentials and keep the track fresh. |
| 2:13.2 | All this was child's play compared to the promotional blitz that greeted Jennifer Lopez's second album, 2001's J-Lo. |
| 2:26.8 | By the way, the disc that permanently established that well-known nickname. |
| 2:32.5 | Lopez's management wanted to affirm her as a queen of all media. |
| 2:38.6 | So Sony Music dropped the J-Lo CD the same week Sony Pictures |
... |
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