Miss Kittin & the Hacker "The Beach"
If you're not headed to the beach this weekend (I am! I am!), here's your chance to live vicariously through two electroclash survivors. When I interviewed Kittin for Bust last year and gushed about this song -- her finest five minutes on tape, for sure -- she downplayed its greatness, telling me it was a little one-off project she and the Hacker did when Hell, the boss of their label, requested they make an Italo disco track. Kittin heard Hacker's beat -- more filterhouse than Italo, despite that cartoon bass drum that punctuates every four bars -- and asked him to put an ocean noise during the break. She wrote the lyrics in a scramble (that's the only way she works) and "The Beach" was born.
Cuter and gentler than anything on The First Album, "The Beach," which eventually appeared on 2002's Whereishere compilation, nonetheless retains some of that set's snark. "I can't remember where I am / It could be Cannes, St. Tropez or Tahiti," she says. Ah, the privilege of a jet-setting lifestyle that leads to all resorts blending into one another. Elsewhere, Kittin plunges her personality into the track. "One more thing," she says introducing the second break, with her patented blunt, accidentally-on-purpose humor. She signs off by thinking ahead to when the sun won't deserve such worship. She returns to her first love: "I hope there is new stuff from Detroit at the record shop when I'm back." Not that the track itself doesn't sparkle with affection for so much dance music came before it, anyway.
Like any great summer song, "The Beach," (also featured on my Mixed Up in the Gay mix) works as reality (I've been listening to it all day in preparation) and fantasy (hola, Antarctica!). The first line says it all: "Sun is shining tonight."
u retarded
Posted by: Skenecia | July 23, 2005 at 10:35 AM
did papa smurf enjoy the lickin'? ;-)
Posted by: Voodoo | July 24, 2005 at 02:32 AM