In praise of Armand van Helden and his house hit machine
Plus US jungle, remixing, Anaiis and more
When Philip Sherburne and I did our list of the best house records of the 90s for Pitchfork, the most vocal criticism we received was that the list contained no records by Boston-turned-NYC house mainstay Armand van Helden. I stick by that decision - I mean, what would we take out? - but I still feel slightly conflicted about it, because van Helden is, pretty much anyway you want to look at it, one of the best and most overlooked house producers of the last 30 years.
Overlooked critically, that is, not commercially. Because van Helden is one of those brilliantly sticky producers who, ever few years, pops up with yet another chart-topping hit. In the 90s he had The Witch Doktor, a NY tribal house classic; his remix of Tori Amos’s Professional Widow, which hit number one in the UK; his Dark Garage take on Sneaker Pimps’ Spin Spin Sugar, which was a London anthem and helped invent UK Garage; and You Don’t Know Me, a French Touch-tinged global hit.* Not bad for one decade. And it brought him considerable reward: so famous was van Helden in the UK in the 90s that Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G character was rumoured to be based on him, at least partially. That kind of famous.
But van Helden continued going. His post-millennium work has been less to my tastes but it has yielded a steady drip of hits: in 2004 he released My My My, another huge UK hit; in 2009 we had Bonkers, his filthily-basslined collaboration with Dizzee Rascal; and a year later Barbra Streisand, a stupidly addictive song from his Duck Sauce duo with A-Track. The 2020s have been slower for van Helden but he has just released a new single with FFRR - the UK pseudo major label that released You Don’t Know Me - called I Won’t Stop, which combines US freestyle sounds with strafing rave energy. And it would be no surprise to see it, too, hit the charts.
This varied stylistic run of house hits shows van Helden’s variety as well as his consistency. The songs may be different in sound - from Witch Doktor’s vast, panic-y walls of sound to My My My’s neatly clipped house vocal - but they are held together by the US producer’s unbelievable ear for a hook, which must be almost unrivalled in the business.
Van Helden is renowned as something of a braggart - wouldn’t you be, with three UK number ones under your belt? - but he also has a certain humility. What this means, essentially, is that he knows what he does and doesn’t do well. I remember reading an interview with him in the 90s - and I can’t find it so I hope you can accept it on faith - where he explained that he wasn’t the best producer at creating melodies or drums but what he had was an ear for that moment: the one, small section in a three-minute song where the bass player decides to vamp it up for a second, creating a lick that can be looped and pumped into infinity. If memory serves, he was talking about his Tori Amos remix at the time, which must be one of the finest examples in recorded history of a remixer taking that one, tiny, loopable moment in a song and running with it to heaven.
“Professional Widow, the original song, is a slow, really not moving song,” van Helden told Michaelangelo Matos for the Red Bull Music Academy in 2015. “It’s nothing like the dance remix. It was me going through the parts on DAT and fast forwarding to the bass, taking one little part and thinking, ‘Oh, that’s cool.’ So three-and-a-half minutes in off the bass stem, I just grabbed one little bar.”
You can hear this clarity of sample-based vision in so many of the best van Helden songs, from the cut up Plastic Dreams drums on You Don’t Know Me, to his epochal remix of NuYorican Soul’s Runaway to his sprawling take on Daft Punk’s Da Funk (which the Parisian duo used extensively in their Alive 97 shows). This, arguably, is one of the most underrated skills in musical production, despite it being absolutely fundamental to any sample-based music. You hear producers being praised all the time for their sense of melody or the swing of their drums. But their ear for a hook? Not so much.
Of course, this has also served can Helden well whenever he turns his arm to remixing. At his peak, in the late 90s, van Helden put his remix fee up to $75,000 (or so I think, I don’t exactly remember), figuring that no one would bite at that price and he could get on with the rest of his career. And yet still the offers came, with major labels praying for some of that Professional Widow magic.
There’s no mystique around van Helden, which sometimes doesn’t sit well with the music press, but there’s no false modesty either. He’s just some bloke who happens to be very good at a few saleable dance music skills; someone who manages to create a couple of globe-straddling hits every decade or so. He is also one of the few producers to be happy with a formula, quite content to churn out French House knock offs (see: You Don’t Know Me, which he admitted is a filter house copy); or bass-y house gems (see: Spin Spin Sugar and his remix of CJ Bolland’s Sugar Daddy) while the audience is there. Witness, for example, the gleeful charm with which he ripped off his own track, The Funk Phenomena, for Ultrafunkula.
In a similar vein, I love the way in which van Helden would once remix basically anyone who stumped up the cash. If you look back at this remix career, it includes takes on everyone from Rednex to 2 Unlimited, which, arguably, puts him well ahead of the whole pop edit / Cotton Eyed Joe at Berghain debate. For van Helden, remixing is a job; and if you pay him the correct fee he will do it and do it well, which is the kind of no-shits-given approach to dance music mores I find incredibly refreshing. Lesser producers may worry about their reputations going to waste; but van Helden knows he has more than enough of that in the bank.
His openness to pop is not the only way in which van Helden sits very snugly among the trends of 2023 dance music. He was also WAY ahead of the curve in his love for jungle, with his 1996 single Ain’t Armand still probably the best US drum & bass track I have ever heard (although shout out to Todd Terry’s Blackout, as well.) And van Helden was always a hip hop lover, working with scratch DJ Mr Len on Rock Da Spot, rapper Common on Full Moon and making lots of party-starting rap beats. Hell, his 1997 album, Sampleslaya: Enter The Meatmarket, is basically a hip hop record, which is pretty admirable for someone then at a peak of his house fame, post Tori Amos.
Todd Terry aside, you could make an argument for van Helden being the one producer who did most to bring hip hop and house together, post hip house, at a time when most hip hop heads were very disdainful of house music. You can hear this on the classic van Helden song The Funk Phenomena, which lands slap bang in between hip hop, house and disco, riding a Method Man vocal sample, disco drums and filtered samples to extremely funky extremes.
Should we, then, have put van Helden on our 90s house list after all? Possibly. But I am sure we will get more chances to laud him: I Won’t Stop is an admirable addition to the van Helden cannon, all vocal hooks, freestyle hits and summery energy, and if he carries on like this, van Helden could make the 2000s, 2010s and 2020s Pitchfork house lists, without breaking a finely-bearded sweat.
****
While I am at it, I remain fascinated by remixes. In the 90s, when I used to read dance music magazine like Muzik and Mixmag, they always named their best remixes of the year, in a ritual I found fascinating. I tried to do the same for myself in 2022 and came up blank, a vast musical hole I put down to a lack of general attention around remixes, more than a lack or remixing talent. So who are the best remixers out there today? (In the 90s, my favourites were van Helden, Carl Craig and 4 Hero, each of which have a number of genuine classics to their names.)
I am also fascinated by bad remixes. There are a number of excellent dance music artists - and Basement Jaxx, I am afraid I am looking at you here - who couldn’t remix their way out of a wet paper bag; and a number of artists whose catalogue remains frustratingly un-remixable. Daft Punk post Homework are one of these: there are a number of excellent Homework-era remixes; after that, the quality dips so alarmingly, it is like an optical illusion. (And Basement Jaxx’s remix of Phoenix is particularly painful for this.)
Why? I have no idea. It is a subject I tried to tackle in my Daft Punk book; and in an article for Vice, many years ago. And yet, I am still not sure of the answer….
And I haven’t even mentioned The Funk Phenomena, Flowers, Psychic Bounty Killers and his Sugar Is Sweeter remix! There really is so much to van Helden.
I found it hard to recommend one particular van Helden album - 2 Future 4 U is the best but it doesn’t get close to his full scope. So I made a playlist of the best of van Helden. And, yes, it includes Barbra Streisand and if you don’t like it, then you don’t like fun.
Some listening
Anaiis - Transcending (Karen Nyame KG remix)
I’ve been up in the Catalan mountains this week, which means tranquility, shooting stars and incredible views, filtered through scorching dry heat. And if you can think of a better soundtrack to that than Karen Nyame’s sublime, reggae touched, amapiano-ish remix of Anaiis’ Transcending, then you are a better person than me. Karen Nyame KG: making the transcendent transcend.
I don’t know what I expected from a limited-edition hook up between Pavel Milyakov (Buttechno) and Aleksandra Zakharenko (Perila) but it certainly wasn’t this: a guitar-y, shoegaze-y, jazz-y, spoken word mini album of desert pop that stinks of arid dustiness and the seclusion of a lonely, shade-giving tree, like a desiccated Mazzy Star.
Kofi Flexx - By Now (Accused of Magic)
By Now is released by Native Rebel Recordings, which perhaps shouldn’t matter, were it not for the fact that this is the label of UK jazz lynchpin / all-round don Shabaka Hutchings, a man who has fewer missteps in his recorded catalogue than I have kilts in my wardrobe (which is to say, one. Kind of.) Sure enough, By Now, which features the vocal of Trinidad-born London-based poet Anthony Joseph over a collective of some of the UK’s best jazz musicians, is a gem, its rolling double bass line as lithe and alive as a burrowed worm colony.
Things other people wrote
A Conversation With The Instagram Scammer Who’s Pretending To Be Me - Tom Breihan
A music journalist writing about a scammer pretending to be him because they’re pissed off about a review he wrote years ago is a little inside baseball, maybe, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, with just a side order oh-Christ-please-don’t-let-it-happen-to-me. (Actually, right at the start of Twitter, there was a fake “realBenCardew” account on twitter, for God only knows what purpose. But they never appeared to do anything maleficent with it.)
It’s my playlist of the best new things. I just added a new song to it this very morning! I am trying to get the ratio of likes to tracks down to about 1:100 and, as I’m not about to stop adding tracks, that means you have to do some lifting. So give it a like and a listen here.
great article, that's Redman being sample in The Funk Phenomena by the way....not Method Man.