The Beastles

Who would have ever thought that by remixing The Beatles and The Beastie Boys together into a new beast would turn out to actually be good? I sure didn't. I found out about The Beastles remix songs reading Darren's site the other day. Curiously I downloaded one of the songs and listened to it only to realize I wanted to listen to another one... and then another and another until I downloaded them all.

I've never been a huge Beatles fan and have only been a casual Beastie Boys fan, but the sythesizing of these two totally disparate bands together intrigued me. I've often liked remixes because it gives other artists (or the original, in some cases) a change to reinterpret a song the way he or she thinks it should sound. In many cases the remix can eclipse the original or become a wonderful version of an already great song.

I suppose those reasons are the same reasons why I enjoy cover songs. Seeing how a particular band handles another artist's song, adding their own particular style, leads to many wonderful permutations on a similar starting point. Right now I've really come to enjoy A Perfect Circle's cover of John Lennon's "Imagine". APC put their own dark spin on Lennon's bittersweet song. If APC had simply played the song as close to the original as possible, it wouldn't have worked, but since they took the song and molded their sound around it, a hit was made.

Now the Beastles are in no way a hit, but are instead a nice, little diversion--a quirky "what if" of music. I really applaud this guy for putting the remixes together and I hope he goes somewhere in the music industry as he has some pretty decent remixing skills, but the songs themseleves never rose above "huh, that was neat and catchy" to the "wow, this is at least as good as the original" level, but I suppose it would be pretty tough for someone to construct remixes of songs by such classic bands that could eclipse their source material.