THE TAMPERER featuring MAYA – "Feel It"

for me, the lyric always evokes the witch crushed beneath Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of OZ – it’s a wonderfully over the top expression of anger that Maya snarls with righteous contempt. The vocal variations also help to enliven the repeated backing samples

Is this the first Handbag #1? It has all the hallmarks: disco backing, battle-ready female singer, thumping 4/4 beat. The “chimney” just adds a little bit of surreality to the whole thing. I’m sure it must be slang for a black eye, but you could imagine a woman’s vengeance strong enough to bring down a whole roof (chimney-stack an’ all) upon her love rival. (8)

Amazingly, ‘Feel It’ manages to be a minute longer than ‘Can you Feel It’ but to have only a third of the vocals: only about 60s total! No matter how fun the ‘Chimney’ line is, it’s spread far too thin for this record to work. As a result FI sounds like an early demo to me; just not finished. One thinks fondly by comparison of the ‘No Limit’ crew dutifully writing raps to bulk out and ‘finish’ their beat-foregrounding and lyrics-light record, to make it hit-worthy, and not *just* a big beat:
4

@lonepilgrim, 2. I too have always free associated from the ‘chimney’ line to The Wizard of Oz scene you mention!

Shite. It was total cheapness right now; If You Buy This Record hit number 3, the Abba-robbing Hammer To The Heart was number 6. The joke hit the top once and never again, because people realised it wasn’t funny.

The latter records only make this one worse, because it establishes the formula of “take another, superior, more famous song entirely and shout crap over it”, the exact same problem I had with I’ll Be Missing You. And at least IBMY’s heart was in the right place. I honestly can’t imagine anybody whose life would be better for buying a record by this mob.

1.

Not quite feeling it. 4/10.

Now if “If You Buy This Record Your Life Will Be Better” had hit #1, that would’ve been funny. The most self-referential record of all time? BTW, I’d never heard “Feel It” until last night, but IYBTRYLWBB did appear on my US radio once or twice back in the day.

I couldn’t remember whether this got to number 1 or not so it’s sprung a surprise on me here just as it did when it suddenly pounced out of nowhere in 1998.
I still kinda like it – sheer unabashed camp that gleefully inverts the one-world vibes of ‘Can You Feel It’ with silly studio gimmicks, an absurdist non-sequitor as it’s second hook and the raunchy charisma of Maya. Exceptional.

Stunning bit of entertainment. Brash, ballsy, in your face, and intensely enjoyable. Quite, quite, fabulous. 9.

(sorry, repeated myself there).

Birmingham City did, and maybe still do, run out onto the pitch to an instrumental mix of this. I have idea what this means for the record or the football team.

For those who really like FI, isn’t the fact that it contains only 1 minute of vocals and then 4 minutes of pure, not especially distinguished backing track any sort of problem?

I actually started listening to this one again around the end of last year, while desperately scrabbling around in my iTunes library for some good songs to exercise to (a tricky balance to strike and a tedious project which normally revolves around me loosely thinking about bpms). Luckily for me, it forced me to remember how ace it is.

It possibly seems as if it has no right to be. Even I’ve always pegged it as being one of the most basic cut-and-paste jobs in dance music, a lucky match between tracks which just happens to work. But sometimes pop music’s like that – The Trashmen came up with “Surfin’ Bird” in almost the length of time it took to record it, and “Feel It” also has a sense of brilliant (and bizarre) effortlessness about it.

This also brings back fond memories for me. A good friend of mine would frequently encourage us all to do aggressive, furious dancing to this track (in the privacy of our own houses after pub hours, not in the local discotheque – in-jokes never work well there). The visual joke can’t be replicated here and probably doesn’t translate at all well outside our social group, but I’ll always have that association of giddy drunkenness with it, as I’m sure other people will for slightly different reasons.

Aside from the bits stolen from elsewhere, this is almost completely without any merit whatsoever. It doesn’t even manage to be properly annoying. THREE.

I don’t mind this but I’ve never LOVED it, probably for the reasons others are identifying – it really does run out of new things to showcase after minute one. The video version wraps it up in 2:26, staggeringly short for this era but absolutely the right choice – leaves you actually kind of interested in sticking around to see if they play it again. Six is too generous IMO – would rate this a 4 probably, 3 maybe more appropriate to its ambitions but a little too cool versus how I feel about the song. Just wish there were more surprises, more of a build, something. Just take it through the Norman Cook mill, even.

This reminds me of Horny by Mousse T, a sort of similar track that got to number 2 about the same time. There are lots of similarities: sample from prior obscure dance track, shadowy producer, eye-catching vocalist, not-much-there verses, killer clever-stupid chorus. I think Horny is a lot better though, and probably much more remembered.

#30 Not much there verses? For me, with this particular record, the verses are memorable in that they tell a story and set up the chorus punchline.

I very nearly gave it a 7, then the final play made it fall a little flat: just that bit better in my memory than when I hear it.

‘Horny’ is one of those songs that exists in two similar but noticeably different mixes, both of which were on the UK CD and it’s probably 50/50 to which one I’ve heard. One is the Boris Dlugosch mix (3:43) and the other is the ‘Horny ’98’ mix (3:07). The Boris mix – first on the CD tracklist – starts with some echoed “I’m horny all night long” vocals before the main riff comes in and generally has more of an upbeat deep house sound to it, while the original goes straight into the riff and has lots of bubble sounds over the chorus which the other removes. Most confusing of all is that both exist in edits opposite to each others timings – both a longer version of the ’98 mix (as used on the video) and a shorter version of the Boris mix exist on various countries’ releases.

Otherwise pretty subtle, Youtube seems almost entirely full of the ’98 mix but here’s one example I found of the Boris mix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMWIoXd5yrE . One of many of the ’98 mix videos can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH8WvayAo1M .

Hot ‘n’ Juicy were trailblazers in various ways. Their TOTP appearance was also the first time I’d seen a woman rocking the underwear-visible-over-trousers look (though MN8 had broken down that barrier for men some three years earlier).

Enter, in earnest, bootleg pop, and the question is immediately raised: when you combine two samples to make something reasonably new, does it have a greater impact, or even sound newer, if you’re utilising elements two thoroughly familiar tracks or balancing the well-known with the obscure? That question is unlikely to be answered properly for a few more Popular years until what may still be the greatest example of the latter technique reaches number one. “Feel It” certainly has no fear on that front; while everyone would immediately recognise the backing track from the Jacksons’ then eighteen-year-old “Can You Feel It?,” albeit beefed up considerably by hard 1998 block beats and a subliminal trace of the Daft Punk drumming-as-game-of-volleyball approach, but few would be able to ascribe the vocal track to its original source, namely “Wanna Drop A House (On That Bitch)” by Urban Discharge featuring She – and yes, I had to look it up.

As with Livin’ Joy, The Tamperer masked an Italian production team with an imported American singer – one Maya Days – to recreate the original bootleg mix; and while the tale of two-timed spleen is initially quite fetching when set against the unforgiving beats, and eventually rather sinister and threatening with the refrain of “What’s she gonna look like with a chimney on her?” – especially in the record’s centre when the vocal is slowed down to a grinding, inhuman sprite – the overall architecture of the track lets it down; while demonstrably great to dance to, it doesn’t fulfil its original promise, or threat. Instead of spreading out like a fearsomely gigantic peregrine falcon to visit apocalypse on pity-free prey, it sets up its stall and then more or less stays there, eventually petering out into a not-very-much-of-anything fade. Subsequent freelance hellraisers would not repeat that mistake.

Like some commenters above I mentally classify this with ‘Horny’ ‘Remember Me’ ‘Sex Bomb’ and ‘Music Sounds Better With You’ as the soundtrack to crap nights in provincial nightclubs, but unlike ‘Remember Me’ I’ve almost come round to it now. Yes, it’s not much more than a vocal laid on top of an obvious sample, but Maya’s vocal easily does enough to sell the concept, and it (the video version at least) doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Just to put this straight, the verse lyrics are DIRECTLY SAMPLED from the Urban Discharge track- they have not been resung.

#47 He’s in a bad mood because he is interacting with someone like you that’s why! A generous 8/10 for The Tamperer from me.