There's a brilliant Dorian Lynskey piece on Guardian Online about Freelance Hellraiser's genre (and it seems, era) defining bootleg/mash up "A Stroke Of Genius"
In the autumn of 2001, a British producer called Roy Kerr, aka the Freelance Hellraiser, spliced together the music from the Strokes' Hard to Explain with the vocal from Christina Aguilera's Genie in a Bottle and named it A Stroke of Genius – even the title seemed magically serendipitous...
Fittingly, the record plays out like a seduction. In her original song, Aguilera is coquettish and controlled, keeping her sexuality on a tight leash until the right guy comes along, and the music reinforces her restraint by maintaining a slow simmer. "My body's saying let's go," she breathes. "But my heart is saying no." In Julian Casablancas's vocal on Hard to Explain there's another inner battle ("I say the right thing/ But act the wrong way") but, stripped of their singer's hesitancy, the band's itchy sexual energy becomes a "let's go" too strong to resist and Aguilera sounds like she's being swept towards a rendezvous that's both dangerous and delicious.
Go and read the whole piece. It's fantastic.
And listen to this truly awesome track while you do so.
Come, come, come on and let me out.
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