Remixing Tense and Rhythm on "Rewind (Sporting Life Remix)" by Kelela
Drumming Upstream 15
Welcome back to Drumming Upstream! After a month plus away from my practice space, I have returned to learn how to play on drums each and every song I’ve ever Liked on Spotify. Once I’ve learned them all I will delete my Spotify account in a blaze of glory. Only 465 songs left to go!
Side A
“Rewind (Sporting Life Remix)”
By Kelela
Hallucinogen Remixes
Released on December 25th, 2015
Liked on March 1st, 2016
I don’t plan this series to be timely. I’ve done my best to take on each song in the series in something approaching chronological order. It doesn’t matter to me if the artist is relevant to the present moment, there’s something to be gained from learning the song either way. But as luck would have it, this letter couldn’t have been better timed.
Last week Kelela Mizanekristos, who performs under her first name, released her latest single “Washed Away”. The song is the first original material she’s put out since her debut album Take Me Apart in 2017, and the first material of any kind since the Take Me Apart remix album that followed in 2018. The song arrived with little forewarning. Her social media accounts have remained barren over the last few years. So barren in fact that her last messages on Twitter were apologies for her account being taken over bots that sprung up in her absence. In an era of oversharing, Kelela has remained resolutely private.
Kelela’s privacy and patience between projects make a good deal more sense given that she didn’t enter the public eye until she released her first mixtape Cut 4 Me at age 29. It would be another four years before Kelela followed that mixtape with a full length. During that gap she released two EPs, Hallucinogen and an accompanying collection of remixes, in 2015. In an interview with Complex around the time of Hallucinogen’s release Kelela explained that this late start made her feel like she was “behind”, but with time she accepted that she’s “the type of artist who takes my time to do things properly.” Well, as a listener I had to catch up with Kelela, not the either way around. Cut 4 Me missed my radar despite receiving rave reviews from the same platforms that served me up Hallucinogen a few years later. I'd even missed her short lived collaboration with Animals As Leaders shredder Tosin Abasi1 who she dated for a few years. And as you can tell from this letter's headline, it wasn't even a track from Hallucinogen proper that first cracked my Liked list. Instead it was a remix of the collection’s lead single that broke through.
For all her concern about being behind the curve, Kelela arrived on the scene at exactly the right time. Her mixtape landed in 2013 right when indie music media’s fascination with sleazy, nocturnal R&B (The Weeknd’s mixtapes2, Autre Ne Veut, Rhye, etc) was expanding into a more general appreciation for the genre. Kelela was primed to surf from the “PBR&B” era straight into the high years of poptimism. By 2015 predominantly white publications and institutions were eager to feature acts that weren’t four white guys, not just on their own merits but because it would buy them (and their corporate owners) good will from an increasingly diverse public. By 2017 Kelela saw right through this set up. “Either I’m not included or I’m included in a way that is servicing that institution,” she told The Fader while promoting Take Me Apart, explaining the magazine’s own business model to them, “I become the exception. You can capitalize off my brown skin, and, once you put me on, you are making a political statement.”
Back in 2015 though, Kelela knew exactly who to work with to navigate this situation to her advantage. Kelela tapped Ariel Rechtshaid to executive produce Hallucinogen right after his work with Haim, Vampire Weekend, and Carly Rae Jepsen3 made him the hottest name in indie-adjacent pop. She also brought in a new group of producers to handle the individual tracks including the Venezuelan phenom Arca, fresh off her career-making production on Kanye West’s Yeezus4. Her choice of collaborators wasn’t just about pushing her sound to new extremes however. “This isn’t me trying to be artsy,” Kelela told Complex “I am trying to communicate with as many fucking people as possible.” If that was the goal, then Hallucinogen was an unmitigated success. So, why did it take the remix for me to give her work a green heart?
The obvious answer might lie inside the parentheses. The honor of remixing Hallucinogen’s lead single and, if Spotify’s numbers are to be believed, Kelela’s biggest hit went to the Brazilian Funk ostentação artist MC Bin Laden5 and New York's own Sporting Life. The former's version of "Rewind" doesn't do it for me, but the latter's really does. At the time Sporting Life was one third of Ratking, a rap group that exploded onto the NYC scene in the mid 2010s. A big part of Ratking’s appeal, at least from where I was sitting in Chicago, was Sporting Life's omnivorous approach to production. Sporting Life played footwork drums against grime bass lines in one track and then effortlessly switched to trap hi-hats for the next. Though no one in earshot of rapper Wiki's honk of an accent could ever accuse Ratking of being "post regional", Sporting Life provided him and his co-MC Hak with a backdrop stitched together from material from the whole world over.
With so many styles at his fingertips, Sporting Life could have taken “Rewind” anywhere. But instead of globetrotting, Sporting Life’s remix sends the song somewhere internal. Kelela’s voice remains mostly untouched, but Sporting Life changes her surroundings entirely. The bouncy drums and Miami-inspired bass are gone. In their place are half time drums (more on those soon) and a slow pulse of spectral sounds. The song still grooves but in a way that makes you put your feet up and lay back, not the sort that sends you to the dance floor. By slowing down the tempo, Sporting Life pulls in for a close up on “Rewind”’s lyrics. In the original Kelela’s missed connection scenario still feels alive with possibility. It still lives in the present. Sporting Life’s remix magnifies “Rewind”’s wist. For this rearranged Kelela, the squandered moment of attraction is now firmly in the past. The chorus takes on a bitter irony. The song’s narrator can rewind the memory but she can never act on her feelings, while on the other side of the speakers we can replay the song endlessly to experience her feeling secondhand.
This theme of too-late confessions is something I’m going to keep my eye on in this series. Long time readers might recognize something in similar from “Bobby Jean”. In both cases the singer is speaking asymmetrically. They are searching out their intended destination without a road map. Call me a sap, but I’m a sucker for this kind of thing. It helps that recordings themselves are replicated moments from the past, messages that might take years to arrive to a receptive audience. There’s a marriage of form and content here that I bet we’ll see more of as this series goes on.
Earlier I said that Sporting Life was the obvious answer for why this remix was the first Kelela track to make my Liked list. There is actually an even more obvious answer for who should take the most credit, and I think its a better answer too. I didn’t Like the song because of Sporting Life, I Liked it because of Kelela. Sporting Life put “Rewind” under a different light, but that wouldn’t have mattered if her writing and performance weren’t so good to begin with.
“Rewind (Sporting Life Remix)” didn’t remain the only Kelela song on my Liked list forever. Three years and 250 songs later, I Liked my second Kelela song, none other than “Rewind” the original. It took me months to realize when listening to the playlist on shuffle that I’d doubled up on “Rewind”. But I think it’s a credit to Kelela that the song works so well in both contexts. I wonder how long it will take me to reach the original “Rewind” in Drumming Upstream. What will I have learned by then that I don’t know now? What will I look back on with a pang of missed opportunity? What will I think of my drumming?
Well future Ian, when you inevitably return here to watch this cover as research for your take on “Rewind”, remember to go easy on me. Everyone else in the present, see you on Side B.
Side B
“Rewind (Sporting Life Remix)”
Performed by Sporting Life
68 BPM
Back when I lived in Chicago I had a conversation with a friend of mine, a hip-hop producer, about the then on-the-rise drill sound that was coming out of the city. We were talking about the hi-hats. Chicago drill took the steady click of trap hi-hats and cracked up the speed until they whirred like miniature chainsaws. I pondered aloud about whether a human drummer could ever play a drill beat on an acoustic kit. “No way” my friend said, “it’s too fast”. I silently wasn’t so sure. Like any adolescent drummer with an internet connection and strange ideas about what it meant to be good at something, I’d spent my late teens watching a lot of ridiculously fast drummers. I’ve seen guys chew through blast beats over 200 bpm. I’ve watched drummers recreate drum & bass IRL. You ever watch pre-Dream Theater Mike Mangini set the world record for fastest single stroke roll? This technically still counts as drumming. What I’m saying is, drummers will find a way. Hopefully by 2022 the idea of a drummer playing the buzzing hi-hats of modern hip-hop in the flesh isn’t so hard to imagine. Still, it was never something that I learned to do myself. Even if I believed it to be possible in the mid 2010’s, I’d have to prove it now.
Though I knew the song would be a unique challenge for this project, I had a few suspicions about the drum part that, if true, would make the song easier to learn than it first appeared. I suspected that the hi-hat part followed a specific pattern that repeated. I also suspected that once that pattern was established it would never change for the rest of the song. Both of these suspicions were correct. Sporting Life’s hi-hat pattern turned out to be a two bar phrase that looped for the whole of his remix. Instead of changing the phrase, Sporting Life worked variety into the song by removing the drums entirely at different points in the form. In order to play “Rewind” correctly all I had to do was learn how to play that two bar phrase and then memorize each of those sudden silences.
First, I ignored the hi-hats and focused on the snare and kick pattern. One of my favorite things about this version of “Rewind” is how the kick and snare dance around Kelela’s vocals. The melody taps out a metronomic pulse while the kick and snare pop in on either side of the beat. Once I’d learned the steps of that dance I added a mechanical hi-hat pulse just to get used to song’s central 16th note grid. Finally, I started learning the details. I took it one cluster of notes at time, adding new notes incrementally with each loop that I played. Once I pieced the whole part together, the design behind Sporting Life’s writing came into sharp focus. Sporting Life front loads the first half of the phrase with faster bursts of hats under Kelela’s vocals, and then simplifies his fills when Kelela drops out. The hi-hat and the vocals breath in unison.
It might seem like I had gotten the hard part out of the way, but memorizing the gaps turned out to be the real headache. I would never accuse Sporting Life of being haphazard or careless with his arrangement choices, bur once he starts cutting out the drums in the song’s second half he doesn’t often do it where you’d expect. Judging by the little of his process that I’ve seen from this Rhythm Roulette video, I’d guess that Sporting Life worked out these pauses in the rhythm intuitively. There’s a distinct moment near the end of the song where the vocals re-enter on the “wrong” side of the hi-hat pattern and Sporting Life lets these two sides of the pattern clash against each other before abruptly cutting out the drums so that they can sync up again. Its the kind of clash that makes me suspect that Sporting Life put this track together on the fly and didn’t let himself get caught up on making it mathematically perfect.
I however, tried to learn the song as if it were written this way in stone. My one sin: I threw in an extra flurry of hats where there shouldn’t have been one. But I’ll let you judge for yourself:
Before we move on to the Leaderboard, I’d like to spend a few words talking about my claim that this song was “performed” by Sporting Life. I think a lot of people have a picture of producers punching in beats like an accountant working on an abacus. Sometimes that’s an accurate picture. The previous songs with “fake” drums that I’ve learned (“Body & Blood”, “Delorean Dynamite”, and “Earthmover”) are all mechanical sounding enough to bolster that impression. But judging by the Rhythm Roulette video I linked to above I don’t think that’s the case with Sporting Life. Sporting Life mixes programmed drum machines with samples that he triggers live by bashing the hell out of a drum pad with a drum stick. He even takes a phone call without stopping the recording, as impressive an act of ambidexterity as any of the Vinnie Colaiuta stories you’ve heard. The drums you hear on Sporting Life tracks are as full of human error and human feeling as any drummer recording on a “real” kit. There’s no reason for me to see him as anything other than a fellow drummer.
Now, let’s see how “Rewind” stacks up against the rest of the song’s I’ve learned so far.
DRUMMING UPSTREAM LEADERBOARD
It’s hard to rank “Rewind (Sporting Life Remix)” on its own terms. There has never been a moment where I was aware of its positive qualities without knowing first about the strength of the original. Can the song even say to exist on its own merits? How should I judge the experience of listening it to compared to the other songs on the list aren’t built of another song’s material? The simple answer is that I enjoy listening to the song. I think it sounds cool. I like the way that the remix recontextualizes the lyrics, and how Kelela’s songwriting shines under any context. But if I’m being real this version of the song dips in intensity after the bridge. For the last stretch of the song, Sporting Life lets the beat ride and cuts Kelela’s voice into short clips that he deploys like percussion instruments. It is an ending that prioritizes the vibe over the momentum of the song, and while it is a cool vibe I think it holds the track back from really soaring.
“Rewind (Sporting Life Remix)” by Kelela
I originally planned for the next track to kick off the summer before a broken snare drum sent all of my plans straight into the trashcan. The beginning of fall will have to do instead.
There won’t be any Animals as Leaders songs covered in Drumming Upstream, but there definitely would have been if I’d had a Spotify account in 2009.
The Weeknd will appear in Drumming Upstream.
Carly Rae Jepsen will appear in Drumming Upstream.
Incredible sentence that serves as the whole of his Personal Life section on Wikipedia: “MC Bin Laden is an evangelical christian.”