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I shouldn't have to tell you how amped I was when I first saw this pre-order pop up online. Black Pegasus was finally(!) releasing a real, vintage unreleased Ultramagnetic MCs recording on vinyl Limited to just 200 copies, this is a never-heard-before Paul C mix and edit of the great "Ain't It Good To You." As you can see, it comes in a nice looking picture cover, it has the instrumental on the flip, and at $35 a piece, sold out pretty quickly through Black Pegasus's bigcartel store.
So this is a new mix and edit; but there's a reason it's being phrased like that. This isn't a "remix" in the popular sense people think of remixes today, where it's been given a whole new instrumental with different samples and instrumentation. It's just been mixed differently. The biggest difference you'll notice instantly is that a very subtle percussion line on the album version (that rapidly and repeatedly goes "thudda thudda DUM!") has been super deepened. It's now like a big phat bassline. It also has a new intro, playing in with more of the softer sounds from the original sample's context. And the other elements have been pieced together a little differently. For instance, there's a part now on Ced's verse where all the music cuts out except for that one "DUM!" down beat at the end of each bar, like a Miami bass mega-drop, giving a cool emphasis to his delivery.
And just to be clear, this is not at all the "Ain't It Good To You" remix that was included as the B-side to "Simple Metaphor" on that mysterious bootleg release. That version is totally different.
Unfortunately, this release loses a lot of its luster once you actually put it on your turntable and get to listening. Not that I dislike this version, not at all. This new mix is dope, however the sound quality is pretty poor. The bass is all broken up. You know when you turn the bass up on your stereo to where the meters are in the red and everything sounds staticy and fuzzy? That's this. It sounds better if you turn your bass down so it doesn't totally blow out; but even then it's still not great because it's blown out in the recording itself. But if you don't lessen it, it blows out a lot worse.
More problematic still, the record plays too fast. It's a 45, but when you bump it up from 33, it's too much of a jump forward. The good thing is that you can correct this if you have a turntable with pitch control. I found somewhere around 4.5% to be the sweet spot to take it down to. I mean, you might be tempted to argue that it's meant to be a faster remix - in their description, Black Pegasus writes that this mix is sped up as if that's a good, intention thing - but you'd only say that if you hadn't actually heard the record. It's just off, the vocals sound rushed and trashy; and once you slow it down, it sounds good and natural. That's the silver lining here. If you do have a turntable with pitch control (and many don't), you can correct this problem to the point where it's not a problem at all.
Unfortunately, that still leaves you with the muddy sound from the previous paragraph. And yes, the instrumental has the same issues.
I'm not really sure what the deal is here. The label credits "additional edits" to DJ Ves 120, who's down with Black Pegasus. So is this just some contemporary reworking of the original? Ves 120 couldn't have been working with Paul back in 1988, right? Is this another faux-vintage thing? Or perhaps they did find a vintage re-edit, but because they thought it might not be different enough to capture fans' interest, they decided to mess with it more to distance it from the original? Or maybe the speed-up is a result of Paul just experimenting with the track for fun, never intending for audiences to hear his tinkering. But then that steal leaves open the question of what Ves 120's additional edits actually are. ...Either way, I'm not mad at this edit (minus the fixable speed up); I just wish it was a better quality master of it.
So, anyway, this record is supposedly the first in an "Ultra 7" series from Black Pegasus. $35 was already excessively pricey for a 7" before we knew what the quality was like, and now I'm really wary of what the future volumes will be like. As it is, I can't recommend this to anybody except those of you who read all of this and are thinking "I don't care, I need it anyway!" I see you out there; I feel you guys. Hell, I might still pick up the next one. But I have to stress that, unlike some other records I write about here that more casual listeners might want to try dipping their toes into, this is for very seriously hooked Ultra collector fans only. Everybody else can just feel relieved that they're not missing out on much at all this time.
