G Child's Refix

I supposedly have no time for updating this blog. But I've got to tell you this. I found a brilliant urban music DJ here in UK. His name is G Child.

Every Saturday night (from 10pm to midnight) his radio show on BBC 1Xtra, a DAB digital radio station in UK, features two sets of his 15-minute DJ mix called "the refix". This is not an ordinary DJ mix. G Child mixes vocals and beats from completely different sources. For example, last night, he mixed the vocals of Mary J. Blige - the queen of R&B - with various hiphop and dancehall reggae beats. In his second session last night, UK garage beats were mixed with US hiphop raps and vocals. This was absolutely HEAVY. It made sense a lot. UK garage artists often produce very innovative beats but they tend to be poor singers/rappers. US hiphop artists are much better skilled rappers/singers but the beats they make these days are so predictable and uninteresting. And G Child is very good at making a perfect combination from two different genres of music. I urge you to listen to last night's show online. The Mary J. Blige set begins after around 35 minutes while the UK garage vs US hiphop set starts at around 1 hour 40 minutes.

He needs to be known more widely. More generally, DJs tend to be underrated in public, often accused of their lack in creativity. That's absolute nonsense. True, there are many crappy DJs out there. But some are really making new music by mixing the existing tracks. Ever since I found this in London, probably the capital city of DJ culture, I've stopped buying CDs and begun recording DJ sets broadcast in radio shows instead. Artists can rarely make CD albums full of excellent tunes. CD singles are always coupled with rubbish tracks. Online music stores like iTunes and Napster only sell boring mainstream music while those selling tracks from independent labels online only sell tunes widely unknown because of its rubbish quality. Your music life will become much more interesting if you find good DJs mixing good tunes only in an unexpected way as G Child does.

(It's funny that mix CDs (CDs recording DJ sets) are almost always of poor quality. Maybe DJs lose their concentration when they are aware that their play is being recorded to preserve it in the CD forever.)