Rhythm is a Panzer: The Use of Stratagem 14 in the Music Industry
British music producer Ian Levine is considered an expert in reviving old soul hits by changing the singers and the pace of songs so that a different audience can benefit from them again (Lewis 2014: Chapter 7: It only takes).
What stratagem did he use?
Number 14: ?Borrow a corpse for the soul's return”. This means literally putting old wine in new wineskins (Senger 1993: 215-232).
Ian Levine once described himself as probably the world's first remix DJ (Unknown author 2013). Whether this is true or not may be open to question. However, the fact is that he knows a lot about long-forgotten soul hits: he once bought American thrift stores to present unknown Motown songs as the latest hits to his English (Midlands) audience (Unknown author 2013; Brewster 2016).
In his role as a producer, he sold more than forty million records (especially in the 1980s and 1990s) (Unknown author 2013), including Barry Manilow's ballad “Could it be magic” as a danceable Take That version (Lewis 2014: Chapter 7: It only takes; ibid. Chapter 8: Number One). Manilow himself had adapted Frédéric Chopin's “Prelude No. 20 in C Minor” for this (Lewis 2014: Chapter 8: Number One).
Levine said about his recipe for success:
'I learned working with those Motown acts that you can't get a 17-year-old shop girl from Sheffield to go out and buy records by a 50-something soul group - she can't relate to it. But if you take the exact same music, that clean-cut soul with high bright harmonies, and lay it on a teenage boys' group, it works' (Lewis 2014: Chapter 7: It only takes).
And it works: Take That revitalized Dan Hartman's “Relight my Fire” in a similar way (Lewis 2014: Chapter 8: Number One), Johnny Cash created a completely new song from Trent Reznor's “Hurt” (Rickly 2004).
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The British pop band 911 used Strategem 14 in a number of ways: 1. they started out as a classic cover band and initially played (almost) exclusively other people's tunes. 2. they released the same song twice as a single after it flopped the first time. On their second attempt, it reached number 2 in the UK singles charts. 3. they released their “Greatest Hits” album in 1999, and 4. in 2022, they entered into a collaboration with Vietnamese singer Duc Phuc to re-release their previously (rather) unsuccessful song “I do” as a Vietnamese version. “Em Dong Y” became an instant hit in Vietnam and has reached more than eighty million views on YouTube alone (Begg 24.03.2024).
Last but not least, there is also the doom metal band SATURNUS, who used the number 14 in a particularly creative way: in 2007, they brought back drummer and founding member Brian Hansen. In 2009, band leader Thomas Jensen then threw out the entire line-up due to artistic differences, brought in two (more) new (old) band mates and released with “Saturn in Ascension” an album in 2012 (Maronde 2013), which all music critics praised as a typical Saturnus record and the pinnacle of their work to date (Leonhardt 20.04.2024).
Conclusion: Strategem 14 is the evergreen with which you can use as starting point for most music analyses: In one form or another, old wine is always put into new wineskins in this business.
As we all know, exceptions prove the rule: one of them is Quentin Guglielmi from the French electro-pop band BLOW. He writes almost all of his songs intuitively from a quasi-meditative state in which he immerses himself in the sounds and “fishes” the words out of them. The only exception he made by now is “Bitter Sweet Symphony“. The Verve's Song was apparently too tempting for him to resist (Leonhardt 19.02.2024).
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