Playing with Beats and Playing with Cats: Meow the Jewels, Remixes, and Reinterpretations

In a remix, I take the pool, I keep the swimmer . . . but I change the water in the pool to a different color. It's like cooking. You change one ingredient, and the whole track sounds entirely different. (Manabe 2009, 309)[1.1] In the quote above, DJ Krush (Hideaki Ishi) captures the power of a remix: in creating a new musical accompaniment for pre-recorded vocals, a producer can wholly recontextualize the lyrics, in effect creating a completely new song. Although it is a fairly recent addition to Western compositional practice, remixing in fact has a long and significant historical precedent.(1) In addition to its obvious relationship with contemporary practices like arranging, one can even identify parallels in the centuries-old practice of composing different musical settings of the same poem.(2) The difference with remixes is that the producer must work to complement an existing musical setting of the lyrics, in which the rhythms, and often the pitches, are predetermined. This necessarily imposes some compositional constraints: unlike a song composer setting lyrics, the remix producer must in principle adhere to the tonal and metrical structure of the original vocals.[1.2] At the same time, remixing a song affords producers a different kind of creativity--the ability to modify the context of the lyrics, and thereby to highlight or reinterpret some of their salient features. The purpose of this article is to explore some of these modifications in Meow the Jewels (2015), an album of remixes of tracks by the hip-hop duo Run the Jewels, whose nonsensical title belies the high degree of artistry that went into its creation. I will offer several tracks from the album as case studies in the ways that hip-hop producers can manipulate our hearing by reconfiguring aspects of the beat.[1.3] Meow the Jewels should not even exist. The idea started out as a joke: after announcing the imminent release of their second album, Run the Jewels 2, producer El-P (Jaime Meline)--who makes up the duo with rapper Killer Mike (Michael Render)--glibly informed fans that for $40,000, they could purchase a complete remix of the album using only sampled cat sounds. Meline hardly expected to be taken seriously, but he underestimated the internet. Fans immediately started a Kickstarter campaign, quickly reached and surpassed the required dollar amount, and the duo, as promised, recruited some of popular music's most celebrated producers to remake the album using only meows, growls, purrs, and hisses over electronic drumbeats.(3) Meline also underestimated the zeal with which hip-hop producers approach their craft, for the resulting album contains some truly inspired remixes. Even though they were working with unorthodox "musical" material, the remix producers convincingly demonstrated that lyrics delivered in a predetermined rhythm and meter can still be treated with a remarkable amount of elasticity.Rappers, Producers, and Creativity[2.1] The relative contributions of rappers and producers to the affective qualities of a song have been the subject of some recent scholarly discussion. In a 2008 article, I gave rappers exclusive credit for any musical correspondences between beat and flow. The article painted a picture in which the beat is presented in finished form to the rapper, who then composes lyrics in rhythms and groupings that complement those found in the beat. I also claimed, among other things, that "the accompaniment in rap music typically consists of a single 2- to 4-bar segment that repeats continuously throughout the song" (par. 2) and that "in rap, the music is composed and recorded before the text is written" (par. 5). Although these statements may represent hip-hop practice some of the time, both Justin Williams and Noriko Manabe correctly pointed out that my conception was incomplete.[2.2] Taking exception to the first of these claims, Williams noted that "the idea of a completely fixed loop is largely fictitious. …