The first inklings of this story came from fans of Ms.Parton’s earlier hit single ‘Jolene’. Pretender (based on ‘The Great Pretender’ written by Buck Ram) features the opportunity for a dramatic gender change, suggesting a hypothesis concerning the singer, Ms.Parton, perhaps worthy of headlines in the National Enquirer. This is from Oswald’s liner notes on the Plunderphonics EP: Track 2 of the Plunderphonics EP is “Pretender,” in which Dolly Parton’s rendition of “The Great Pretender” is manipulated to sound more like a man’s voice. Tracks 1, 3, and 4 mess with Igor Stravinsky, Count Basie, and Elvis Presley, respectively. The Plunderphonics EP has four tracks, each of which aggressively reworks a famous bit of music. (Oswald generally avoided charging money for his reconstituted works in the hopes of avoiding copyright infringement suits, but also withdrew and destroyed existing stock in the face of legal challenges.) In 1989 he distributed the Plunderphonics EP with four tracks to media outlets and radio stations. Oswald was a self-proclaimed “Plunderphonic” who argued for the necessity of (basically) fucking with famous pieces of music. It’s unclear whether “goodlittlebuddy” knew this or not, but either way Oswald deserves some of the credit here. Not a lot of people discussing “Slow Ass Jolene” took the opportunity to credit John Oswald for the insight about “Jolene”-but Oswald realized the exact same thing as early as 1988 (to be fair, a sprinkling of YouTube users did make the connection). The main YouTube video, originally uploaded by YouTube user “goodlittlebuddy” in April 2012, has now been viewed 1.75 million times. Many, many listeners expressed astonishment that Dolly’s phrasing and even vibrato were so finely expressed that hardly any flaws showed up, even at such a slow speed. The premise was that if you played that single not at the correct 45-rpm speed but at the 33-rpm speed, a reduction of about 25%, the resultant version was quite startling, as if “a soulful male ballad singer” ( The New Yorker) were covering it (and, incidentally, fucking with the gender dynamics of the song). Slowing these songs down can be a fun exercise in trying to figure out how James composes a song, or otherwise just a new way to appreciate his music.Last month a slowed-down video of Dolly Parton’s classic song “Jolene” made the rounds on the Internet. Instead of 33 minutes, you actually get 45, you understand? And there you have it, an album of standard length.” (Source)Īphex Twin records are incredibly complex, multi-layered, rule-breaking and mind-shattering and slowing them down not only changes the feel of the song, it actually allows your brain to more easily pick out and process each layer. That’s also the real reason why my album ended up so short. If they go for too long, then they don’t fit onto the vinyl-and then you can’t play them slower. That’s also why my pieces are so short: you can only press them onto maxi singles if they are short at 45 rpm. “Many of my tracks are better if you play them at 33 rpm. James explained in an interview that a lot of his music is meant to be played slower than it appears on his records. And to make things even weirder, she kind of sounds just like Jay-Z.īack in ’96, Richard D. It seems ridiculous at first but some of these tunes are actually really intricately crafted pop/electronic songs, and slowing them down helps to distinguish all the layers within them. Seriously, don’t be so quick to skip this one. At any moment I could drop into a different level of time.” (Source) So I could slip into half-time I could slip into a third of a time. “All the music in the score is subdivisions and multiplications of the tempo of the Édith Piaf track. Playing off the concept of time-dilation used in the film, Zimmer explained how he constructed the score in an interview with The New York Times:
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