Many months ago, I started up a little contest here called the Sixty Second Song Remix Contest. The idea was simple: compress a "known" song to 60 seconds or less. Choosing a winner wasn't quite so easy, given the 450 submissions I ultimately received, and the incredible range of approaches our creative listeners brought to the task. (My previous contest posts are here, here and here.)
Rather than choosing one winner, I have narrowed down the submissions to 40 entries and now throw it out to you, the WFMU Blog readers and listeners, to do the rest. Follow the jump for links to the 40 finalists and then come back up here to place your vote. Voting ends Wednesday, May 23rd at 10pm, EDT. The top vote getter wins a WFMU messenger bag stuffed with CDs and assorted swag and the next 4 vote getters receive lighter packages of swag. (The e-mail addresses of the top five vote getters must match the address used to send in the original submission.)
Thanks to everybody who submitted remixes to this contest, it was a lot of fun. For the next remix contest, I'm still debating between reducing a feature length movie to four minutes, or extending a know pop song to one hour. Let me know what you think. Now get voting:
UPDATE: The votes are in, and the winner is Russ Johnson, with 78 votes for Rock Around The Clock in 23 Seconds. Here are the next four finishers:
Second: Ronny Waernes - Lauft.. (76 votes)
Third Place: Uncle Bela - O Fortuna (62 votes)
DJ Soft - Yeah (51 votes)
Otis Ball - More Than Half-Off Bird (48 votes)
All these folks should e-mail me at ken at wfmu dot o-r-g. If I don't hear from them, I'll get in touch with them the week of 5/28/07.
Adam Ainsworth - Song 1 (Blur) | Chris Combs - Sixty Second Song (Shel Silverstein)
Chris Larsen - Bolero (Ravel) | Claude Heiland-Allen - Lesson 6 (Jurassic Five)
Craig Mitchell - In Between Hearts Lock3Down (Yeah Yeah Yeahs vs The Cure)
Dad's New Slacks - All One Song (Neil Young) | Daniel Urria - Believer (Robert Wyatt)
Dave Krooshof - Toxic (Britney Spears) | Dave Scarborough - Strobe Light (The B52's)
DJ Soft - Yeah (LCD Soundsystem) | Easy EW - B--thd-y (The Beatles)
Ed Word - Hungarian Dance (Brahms) | Grant Olsen - Bluest Minute (New Order)
H. Grape Minkoff - Time Has Come Today (The Chambers Brothers)
Hans van der Valk - Wind It Up Lonesome Goatherd (Gwen Stefani)
J. Henry Chunko - 1-60 (Charles Bernstein) | Jerod Freitag - Stagger Lee (Nick Cave)
Jim A - Ring of Fire (Johnny Cash) | Jonathan Wall - Right Ontoppa Compton (NWA)
Justin Tripp - Chinese Children (Devendra Banhart) | Lee Rosevere - Nirvana's Nevermind
Lester - Sympathy For The Devil (Blood Sweat and Tears) | Mofobaru - Radiohead's OK Computer
Mickey Mephistopheles - Take One (Dave Brubeck Quartet) | Moonman - Kiss (Prince)
MP3J - Anarchy Generation (The Who vs The Sex Pistols) | N - Hell O n You (Nina Simone)
Nathan DeWitt - No; Nobody (The Human Beinz) | Pflaphpschoen - Eleanor Rigby (Beatles)
Nick Boffo - Star Spangled Haircut | Otis Ball - More Than Half-Off-Bird (Lynyrd Skynyrd)
Quadraspazzed - White Lines (Grandmaster Flash) | Thant Tessman - Super James (James Brown)
Rick McNamara - Anti-Drug PSA Medley | RJ Godin - A Minute On The Beach (Philip Glass)
Ronny Waernes - Lauft... Heisst Das... (Faust) | Stiever - InAGadaDaVida (Iron Butterfly)
Russ Johnson - Rock Around 23 Seconds of the Clock (Bill Haley and The Comets)
Uncle Bela - O Fortuna (Carl Orff / Apotheosis) | You™ - Shook All Up (Elvis)
Ooh, I like the idea of extending a song to an hour.
Posted by: Jonathan Wall | May 16, 2007 at 01:58 PM
wtf? where is the people like us version of 4:33?
Posted by: jtm | May 16, 2007 at 01:59 PM
I'm afraid your voting thing is messed up. I voted only ONCE, and it told me that I've already voted. E-chads, egad!
Posted by: DaveX | May 16, 2007 at 02:28 PM
Thanks Davex, we're still working out the bugs on our new polling gizmo. At least it recorded your vote!
jtm, I should've mentioned: I disqualified all WFMU staff remixes from the final voting. I also wanted to limit the final forty to one per person. A few people submitted many remixes, but for the purposes of the final forty, I limited it to one remix per person.
-ken
Posted by: Station Manager Ken | May 16, 2007 at 02:47 PM
Yes, very upset that peoplelikeus didn't make the cut. And as for the four minute movie or hour long song, I think you should do both.
Posted by: Clayton | May 16, 2007 at 03:20 PM
ghuckleberry "yes maybe" wuz robbed!
Sincerely, not ghuckleberry
(see first listing, update 5)
Posted by: Vic Perry | May 16, 2007 at 04:22 PM
"Take One" is fantastic, but I've gotta give it up to "Right Ontoppa Compton".
Posted by: Martin | May 16, 2007 at 06:21 PM
Choosing from like 5 songs would be a better final.
Posted by: JJZ | May 16, 2007 at 10:45 PM
Did it? It seemed to be treating my first vote as a SECOND. I think I explained that rather poorly above. Anyhow, I'm loving so many of these-- the Elvis one is great, and gets my vote-- but the Iron Butterfly made me laugh pretty hard. Ontoppa Compton = great idea!
Posted by: DaveX | May 17, 2007 at 07:21 AM
Ken - you already hold the trophy for the extended pop-song: it's called "It's My Party (And I'll Cry If I Want To). Hard to beat that one, eh? Love it that I'm finally in the 'puter-age, and getting all the great dj's on your station. Just saw Alex, R.J.Godin, and Irv Girshman out in S.F., at the 2 Stooges shows (I shook Iggy's hand, and mussed his hair!!) Now trying to learn to digitize all the old cbn tapes, and educate the young kids here in C-bus,O. on how things got to be the way they are now. Keep up your great work! You're a great American!
Posted by: Duncan Campbell | May 17, 2007 at 07:43 AM
If there's a one-hour song contest, someone should do a "dance remix" of 4:33 for it. Here's my concept:
Silence for the first few seconds, then a synth bass drum starts, continuing for most of the rest of the hour. Occasionally, samples from pop songs and movies are added, repeat three times, then stop. At a few points, the beat slows down, or disappears entirely, but always comes back.
I originally thought of it as a joke that could be done (by someone with the tools) in less than five minutes, but it would be possible to spend nearly as much time on it as a normal entry.
Posted by: Doctor Ex | May 17, 2007 at 10:56 AM
Thanks Duncan! If I do the one hour thing, I will have to make a 60 minute "It's My Party."
Davex - The problem with the voting mechanism is that it only allows one vote per IP number. If you are on a network, then many people may share the same IP number, and then it disallows anybody from voting except for the first person to hit it. An imperfect system, no doubt, but better than the electoral college.
The only other option we have to prevent repeat voting would be to do it via cookies, but that seems even worst, since many people (myself included) disallow cookies on their 'puters.
-ken
Posted by: Station Manager Ken | May 17, 2007 at 11:39 AM
Wow, it is hard to pick just one, so I made up some ground rules to pick my favorites.
First of all I discounted any mash-ups because it just seems a bit outside the rules. So, Nevermind, a favorite since this started, was removed out of my personal top five - though it is the most brilliant in the series. I want to hear a full version of that one, though. In fact, I think a whole new Stars On competition is in order!
Some of them are too good, as in, the sixty second version has come up on the old iPod (yes, I downloaded all of them and have been flipping through them for a while now) and I didn't even notice it was a shortened version until it ended: Toxic, Strobe Light, and obviously InAGada, though the punch-line ending always cracks me up.
Anything that was serious rave or dance music I removed from the top slots because, well, it's just too easy...sorry. Those things are born to be remixed, and I had to give it up for the songs that were by nature harder to do. Ditto if the song was simply sped-up.
So left me with the ones that either shortened the song by simply removing big chunks (the choppier the better for me), or ones that remixed the whole thing over the top of itself: B--thd-y, Kiss, Ring of Fire, and Hungarian Dance (I love any mix that messes copiously with the lp speeds) all hit my final list.
But there were three battling for the top spot that I really had to fight over, and that I felt really took the cake by not only remixing the song, but reinventing it. Shook All Up is wonderfully frenetic and playful, with a hint of Plunderphonic style. Take One completely reformed the song, made it choppy, and yet still managed to sound like it was meant to be that way.
But my top pick finally ended up being Right Ontoppa Compton because it is not only a brilliant concept, but so totally listenable, turning NWA into a whole new rap group that just shout over each other's lines. I would love to hear a group do that on purpose - it could be the whole new direction hip-hop needs to go in if it wants to make it's next evolutionary step.
I had to write a whole little essay about this, because I've been listening to these too darn much lately, and have acutally been developing music criticism-like thoughts about them. Sheesh. Thanks a lot, Ken.
Posted by: Resident Clinton | May 17, 2007 at 03:53 PM
Regarding the reduction of a movie to four minutes: Around 1991, the television network ARTE (which broadcasts in Germany and France) played three short remixes of The Third Man, King Kong and Citizen Kane. The paradigm for the remixes was to reduce each movie to the length of its original title music. So the theme song played unedited at its normal speed, but each scene in these very familiar classic films was reduced to a few seconds. The most artisically sucessful of the three efforts was The Third Man, because the edits adopted the syncopated rhythm of Third Man Theme and the song itself was so unique (Citizen Kane and King Kong both had typically forgettable Hollywood orchestral scores).
I have searched unsucessfully for years to find out who made these remixes. Does anyone else know about them?
Posted by: David Wilson | May 18, 2007 at 11:01 AM
"Shook All Up" is interesting, among many other reasons, for its resemblance to "Blue Suede" by James Tenney (AKA "Collage #1"), a 1961 musique concrète piece I remember hearing years ago. Hmmm...Helloooo GEMM.
Posted by: Mickey Mephistopheles | May 18, 2007 at 11:53 PM
i wanted to vote for mickey m., but i was sorted out as an second voter. please correct
amma
Posted by: amma | May 21, 2007 at 08:35 AM
MICKEY M's Take One!!! YES! YES!! Fortunata NO! NO!! I can't even begin to believe that with so many great choices Fortunata's so far ahead! No offense Uncle Bela, hell, I'm even discounting my own effort to give a shout out to Mephistopheles!!! Yessir, I've listened to Take One about a billion times and it hasn't even begun to show wear... nice job!
Posted by: Jerod Freitag | May 21, 2007 at 06:22 PM
the fix was in. what some people will do for swag and fame.
Posted by: yragentman | May 24, 2007 at 03:08 PM
for an 111 second remix of all 40 finalists, go here:
http://www.looptvandfilm.com/blog/Remix/111.html
tell 'em nick boffo (a.k.a. krup) sent you...
Posted by: krup | May 25, 2007 at 08:21 PM