guess who?

Sorry, it's been a little while since my last post. Very busy this week with a funeral among other things.

If you followed my old site(s), you probably know I'm a big fan of cut-up hip-hop. In particular, I'm a devoted follower of Double Dee & Steinski (who have a wonderful Bandcamp page up that you should visit!) along with DJ Food/Strictly Kev, Coldcut, DJ Shadow and many more. I love the recontextualization of other people's work to make something new, so all the better known stuff, along with deep divers like John Oswald and Wobbly, tickle my fancy. That said, none of those guys are what got me interested in this kind of music. Oddly enough, it was the C&C Music Factory producers, David Cole and Robert Clivilles, and their work with Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam. They issued the first taste of their collaboration in 1991 with Let the Beat Hit 'Em, an almost entirely sample-based hip-hop track meant for the club as much as "boomin' systems" that doubled as a tribute to fallen king of the tape edits, Chep Nunez. The rest of their collaboration didn't sound anything like this, going more in a street-driven dance vibe that fit their works in the early nineties, but I still enjoyed it all. Nothing beat Let the Beat Hit 'Em though! I bought the cassette maxi-single and bugged-out to the extended remix and instrumental/dub versions constantly until I upgraded to the CD version. It's still a favorite and sits snug on my phone for when I need it.

Let the Beat Hit 'Em seems to be a bit of strange beast outside of my youthful recollections. I remember first hearing it on the Open House Party radio show and seeing the video at least once on MTV, but it never seemed to get much mainstream focus. The b-side of the original single was the so-called "5 Minute House Version" which I thought was dumb and kinda boring as it was basically a completely new track that, apart from the name, featured nothing from the original and was barely a song. Apparently, a further remix of this version became popular in the clubs and overseas. That later remix definitely improved on it, but I still couldn't understand the popularity of this version over the hip-hop track.

Time moves on, C&C Music Factory became a mostly forgotten joke, and Lisa Lisa disappeared, probably not making much money for her label which resulted in her getting dropped. She put out something on an indie label, but I never got to check it out. Still, the BEAT maintained, and while I like all her earlier singles, Let the Beat Hit 'Em is my jam. So when I found a promo 12" on Discogs that was reported to have two otherwise unavailable versions of Let the Beat Hit 'Em, I was intrigued. This wasn't a test-pressing, acetate or internal-use cassette, it was an officially issued promotional 12" that named-checked C&C but didn't announce Lisa and company, listing only Guess Who? and not even the song's name. I eventually purchased a copy and found two significantly different versions of the song, both seemingly earlier mixes with a lot of samples that were dropped from the officially released versions. I posted them on my Soundcloud, figuring they were fair game since they had never been released outside of a non-commercial 12", only to get the first of a three strikes warning. I was done with uploading anything to Soundcloud after that and just sat on my goods. Well, now that I have another site, I figured this was as good a time as any to share this 12" with the world again. You can get them here and here. They're still pretty awesome 28 years later!

I tried reaching out to Robert Clivilles a few times to see if I could get any background on the song and maybe these mixes, but I never heard back. No surprise. Still, this is one of those records I'd love to know more about. In the early days of digital editing, they probably spent a whole day in the studio adjusting the pitch and key of the samples and trying to get things sounding right before assembling the basic track. I can only imagine how long something like that could take and how maddening it could be. So, if anyone knows Robert C or Lisa Lisa and can get me in touch with them, drop me a line, though I'm assuming these are stories I'll probably never hear. :(

Please forgive me for the slightly downer outro note there. Enjoy and have a great weekend!