Tuesday, October 25, 2005


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My man Art from http://www.3rdarm.biz made me hip to the craziness known as "Stars on 45".  He played it for me in Boston and it sounded something 2 Many DJ's without all the dance-punk and "good" music- just hectic medleys of cheese-dick Disco (think Abba).  I recently found a 7" at a Salvation Army and now I'm hooked.  It turns out that these records are from the early 80's and that my 2 Many Dj's notion wasn't too far off, because they were also Dutch.  But these record were released really before the notion of sampling existed- this is all live music, played by studio musicians to replicate the sound of the original songs and tracked onto a continuous Disco beat.  It's all a massive mash-up well before there even existed such a notion.  These records did cause a huge sensation in their time, though, and the trend of the Disco Medley was born (Jay Lawrence just reminded me that there is also a Ramones Disco Medley available as a B-side and maybe rereleased on one of their maybe Greatest Hits CDs).  The 7" I found is the "Beatles" medley, though it also contains sections from the songs "Venus" and "Sugar Sugar" for some reason.  Art has the best one with mad shitty disco songs as well as "Theme from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly" and a bunch of other left-field quotations.  There's more info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars_on_45  And an awesome official page in Dutch, where the only english phrases are shit like "The Funky Beat Kept Grooving!" and the incomprehesible motto "Music, the original way, but played now!" at http://www.stars-on-45.com/. It also seems there's an American outfit claiming to be Stars on 45 who will play a continuous medley AT YOUR WEDDING OR BAR MITZFAH! Dont miss that chance, check their assclown site at http://www.starson45.com/.  But really, you need to get digging and find those 7"s, thats the real fun.

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