In Which For Once I Gamely Attempt To Steal From Mr. Show Instead Of Chuck Klosterman

Unfortunately, my well-laid plans to post Wednesday and Thursday kinda fell through, consigning the following tracks to the Island of Misfit Posts (or, for the benefit of those of y'all not actually taking part in the MP3 blogging GAME!!! call it, "Friday"). However, ain't nothin' gonna break my stride; we shall instead turn this into the Green Pea-Ness LOST EPISODE SPECTACULAR-AR-AR-Ar-ar-ar

Diana Ross, "I'm Comin' Out" (Chic version)
Diana Ross, "Lovin', Livin', and Givin'" (LP mix)

Oh, deluxe editions - why in the world did I ever give you so much power over the part of my brain to which I've turned over all music-buying decisions? How did I attach so much significance to the sensation of sliding one of those double-thick digipaks out of the plastic slipcover for the first time that I've come to a point in my adult life where I'm seriously considering buying a motherfucking Gin Blossoms album (not to mention one that doesn't even have "Follow You Down" on it)? What possible agent could be lightly coating the surface of your liner-note booklets as to make them more appealing purchases than nine-tenths of Dave Eggers' published output (okay, bad example)? I mean, sweet Jesus, did I actually manage to buy all those Criterion DVDs and learn absolutely nothing?

*buys the Deluxe Edition of Diana Ross' diana*

OH NO, I TAKE IT ALL BACK.

Obviously, I'm being at least a little facetious here (just a little) for effect, but you get my drift; if you've never bought a Deluxe Edition before, this is absolutely the one you'll want to buy. Equally obviously, of course, this necessity is predicated on a few factors - one's tolerance for arch pop-disco, for instance, or perhaps one's capacity to ignore the peals of laughter certain to wind their way from your friends' lungs to your gun closet - but none moreso than the idea of thoroughness; as an artifact, diana simply feels complete in a way that no other Deluxe Edition - and keep in mind that I'm including my no-joke favorite album ever in that group - can possibly hope to match. I mean, there's an excellent chance that after I rip the - what? - ten or eleven songs from both these discs that I actually enjoy to my iPod, I'll never pick it up again, but that's far less the point of purchasing the album in the first place than simply having access to this exact experience for the rest of time; it was a transaction governed by the same part of my brain that buys seven-hundred-page histories of Nazi doctors or collections of theoretical writings about movies.

diana, it must be said, isn't a great album - hell, depending on who you talk to, it's not even necessarily a good one. But one thing that it most immutably is, however, is an album produced by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards for the motherfucking Chic Foundation, and as a result it's inarguably worth any attention you might decide to throw its way. I don't mean to come off as One Of Those Chic Dogmatists, of course - even the band's greatest hits compilation wasn't compelling enough to stay in my CD racks for more than a few months - but that's mostly because, as with most artists actually able to clearly carry out their vision without outside obstruction (or at least without outside obstruction obscuring the way I consume the final product), I tend to lose interest once I get the point (also known as the Law of Acclaimed German Directors). But the records they produce for other people, on the other hand, might as well come with a needle and a spoon, if only to hear just how exactly they manage to go about making Chic records for someone else, because lord knows Sister Sledge and "Let's Dance" and, yes, diana are all immutably "Chic Records", and I'll be goddamned if any of them are going to be seeing the business end of a used rack anytime soon on my account. Creative tension, even when put forth in as collaborative a spirit as Rodgers and Edwards always manage to put it forward, remains perpetually undervalued just in simple terms of getting you to actually listen to a record; by this point I'm so sold on its seductive powers that I'd buy a fucking My Chemical Romance album if it were produced by Jacques Lu Cont.

BUT: Up until I became aware of the deluxe edition of diana, I didn't even know to think of it as a Chic record, although to be fair, its lasting reputation as such really only seems to have gained traction in the wake of the aforementioned edition's release. The story goes that Diana, in concert with her record label, didn't like the way that Chic 's original mix essentially made her into an afterthought on her own record (yeah, perish the thought of that ever happening to one of the Supremes) and coerced them to remix the album to put her at the forefront, resulting in an album that wholly appropriately lay dormant until one S. Combs decided to pilfer it for sample material. The deluxe edition, however, includes Chic's entire mix as a "bonus", and I doubt it'll be topped as such unless a there's a reissue of Meat Is Murder coming which includes a coupon allowing the bearer to kick Morrissey right in the dick, because as you can imagine, it's more than a little awesome. I mean, seriously: it's motherfucking Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers going "Hey, let's try and make something catchy enough to hook all the Midwestern secretaries who buy Diana Ross records, and let's do it on Motown's dime" - how much do I really need to say? It's not even that the music's all that radically different, simply that there's both more of it and less of the starmaking that dragged so many of the released mix of diana down. Take "I'm Comin' Out", for example - aside from dragging some segments out a little longer than the album mix, it's fundamentally the same song; it's just that since "I'm Comin' Out" happens to stride across pop-music plains with a colossus' gait, "more" really is "more", especially when it pertains to Rodgers' immortally immaculate rhythm guitar (seriously, aside from Can, has there ever been a more compelling rhythm guitarist?). Well, now multiply that by eight and you've got the Chic version of diana - even if they're not all as good as "I'm Comin' Out" (and why even make the comparison? Are you going to compare my rambling bullshit to David Foster Wallace next), they're all good like that. And THAT is worth a purchase on its own.

In that spirit, then, the second disc of diana's Deluxe Edition actually serves as a for-real "bonus disc", with the caveat being that unlike %99.9999999999999 of all bonus discs ever, it's actually a whole pantload of fun to listen to. The premise for the disc, you see, is just "So you like Diana Ross dance music, huh? Well, have a metric ton of extended mixes of kickass disco cuts she was doing around that time too"; there are people out there in the world who would probably buy a CD full of songs like that even if it weren't attached to such a spectacular artifact as had been preserved on the first disc, and with an artist whose catalogue is as packed with stuff waiting around to be preserved for posterity as Ross', they wouldn't necessarily be wrong. As an avid aficionado of that slumping schaeffel beat, my favorite discovery is almost inarguably "Lovin', Livin', and Givin'" (arguably the finest approximation of the rhythm in American pop-dance history, depending on how much you like Amii Stewart's "Knock On Wood"), but it's hardly the only gem to be found here - there's a ten-minute mega-mix of "Love Hangover", a DISCO MEDLY~~~! of "No One Gets The Prize" mixed with "The Boss", and like ten other songs on top of that. It's just a fantastic package, the kind of thing that really leaves you feeling like you've learned something.

And that, ultimately, is why you buy the Deluxe Editions in the first place - for that sensation of transferred knowledge. A few days before I bought diana, I happened to bite the bullet and pick up the three-disc Lee "Scratch" Perry set I Am The Upsetter (well, it's actually four discs, but even my life isn't rich enough in free time to listen to instrumental dub reggae), and, as it was sold to me, I found it to be an adequate overview of Perry's creative life and times which had an articulate thesis about the man's work recounted clearly and with an elegantly concise timeline. But as good a set as it is, I'm finding that it leaves something to be desired at its most fundamental level, namely shedding some light onto the context in which people wanted to hear the music in the first place. diana, of course, is hardly as thorough, but it sure doesn't feel like that - if you can actually give the whole package a fair shot and not walk away with an appreciation for why people might want to listen to this record, or a Diana Ross record, or a Chic record, or a Diana Ross record produced by Chic, or a disco record, or or or - well, you should probably start wondering if the problem might not lie somewhere other than the material. I mean, this is it right here, folks - it's the original record, plus an exhaustive document of reasons why the record existed in the first place, and if it ain't the Platonic ideal of Deluxe Edition CDs as a whole, at the very least it's the peak on which Rachel Stevens' Come And Get It ought to set its sites in a few decades. (Click here to buy the Deluxe Edition of diana from Amazon.com)

Home Video, "Penguin" (The Loving Hand remix by Tim Goldsworthy) - While it's perfectly within the DFA's rights to demand that MP3 bloggers take their music down, I really do hope that this particular upload happens to sneak through the cracks, if only because I can't possibly imagine a better loss leader for LCD Soundsystem's recently-released 45:33, a release which incontestably ranks either among the ten best albums or two-or-three best singles I've come across this year. Still, though, it's been a hell of a long time since I ran across a piece of music that turned me into a raving Jungian archetype for an extended period of time as 45:33 simply by forcing me to decide whether or not I was going to buy it, and while I'd like to pass myself off as someone with one of them newfangled "social consciences", the depressing reality was that I was just having a motherfucker of a time getting past the idea of buying something digitally that the label had all but confirmed a physical release date once contractual obligations expired. Well, fortunately for me, I'm an idiot, specifically one with far too much "disposable" income for stupid shit like music, because as mentioned above, 45:33 is kinda really great. But the more I listen to it, the more I have to wonder why this would have been a surprise; the DFA might as well be one of those oracular sages from before the birth of Christ, placed on this earth to illuminate one truth to all its less-enlightened citizens, that truth being the value of extremely drawn-out music - what, was a 45-minute dance song from their quarters going to suck or something?

Well, in case you had any doubts, recent weeks have also seen the release of a few remixes carried out by Tim Goldsworthy (the non-James Murphy half of the DFA creative team). Needless to say, they're all more than a little outstanding; I'd imagine that the LH mix of Radio 4's "Packing Things Up On The Scene" would probably even have an easier time finding an audience than Goldsworthy's mix of Home Video's "Penguin", but that's more due to Radio 4 having already established something of an on-glommable persona onto which THEE KIDZZZ can latch. It's certainly not because of anything musical, however, because the ten-minute tour of disco duty Goldsworthy managed to weave for Home Video is damn near unimpeachable; it's certainly not alone among DFA-related remixes when it comes to its structure ("Hey kids! Wanna do the verse-chorus-verse thing for a while before taking a sharp left turn into cosmic disco freakout territory?"), but it's been a looooooong time since a DFA track has taken such a sharp left turn into such high-contrast psychedelic abstraction with such unimpeachable grace - it just sounds so motherfucking effortless. And, more to the point, it sounds so motherfucking effortless in precisely the way that 45:33 sounds effortless - it's just something that exists with the sole purpose of encouraging you to invest some time to moving in sync with it (not to mention all the OMG OMG OMG CHICAGO HOUSE PIANO OMG). If you like this track, I cannot reccomend that you immediately buy 45:33 strenuously enough - you'll probably end up buying it twice, but you'll do so with a smile on your face both times. (Click here to buy the single for "Penguin" from Juno, or click here to buy 45:33 from iTunes)