Smash Hunter aka DJ Smash recently wrote a lenghty comment to my rather short mention of the Motown Remixed album.
I think the issue of remixing vs cover versions vs originals is a good topic for discussing. So instead of hiding my answer to Smash’s comment in the old posting I rather answer with this posting and encourage you to tell us your opinion in a comment.

Hi Smash,

Thanks for the detailled comment. Yes, I’m a thief. I’ve stolen the name of this website. Actually I wanted to have something with jazz in the url when I started discovering the internet but I was years too late so every simple url like jazz.xxx or jazzman.xxx was already taken. So I came up with jazz-not-jazz which also was a term sometime ago to describe a musical genre. But I also have an old Eightball compilation with a Jazz-Not-Jazz track on it.
Of course my comment is a little bit pointed but if you have a closer look at the reviews written here you’ll find out that this isn’t a method to recruit new readers. In fact there are only a few records that get blasted here (Verve Remixed 3 or Mayfield : Remixed being the exceptions). To some extent they are also influenced by the way the major labels these days act and try to re-sell old stuff instead of discovering and investing in new artists. In the end there will be no evolution in music if musicians don’t come up with original compositions.
You’re right about Motown songs being redone within the Motown circle. Though for me these versions are still cover versions where you have more creative input with another singer singing a song (hopefully) differently and maybe giving it a totally new meaning. That of course describes the best way to do a cover version. We both know that this doesn’t happen too often. But they are out there. For example Was (Not Was) released a decent cover of Papa Was A Rolling Stone years ago, Regina Carter did the same with Cassandra Wilson on vocals in 2000.

I doubt that each remixer of the songs on Motown Remixed or the other compilations came up with the idea “Oh, I wanna remix Papa Was A Rolling Stone (or song XY)” for themselves and then asked Motown what they think of it. I’m sure it was the label that brought this idea to the remixers.
I haven’t heard the Motown Remixed album, but I’ve heard the Mayfield : Remixed and Verve Remixed 3 and for my ears they both were just terrible (with the only exceptions of Ashley Beedle’s and Louie Vega’s remixes) and sound like the remixers just took the cash offered by Rhino/Warner and Universal and put some dancebeats under the original vocal track.

Don’t get me wrong I do like a good remix of a song. If you could see the endless shelves of records (mainly 12″ singles) here, you’d know what I mean.
And as I’ve mentioned in the Mayfield review releasing just a 12″ with one or two good remixes of a classic may be fine. But a whole album? If A&R people can’t come up with new musicians they come up with the remix idea.
This may be a way to bring yesterday’s music to today’s young audience and to hope they will be curious about the originals and discover Motown’s back catalogue (and maybe that’s what the original artists and songwriter hope too) but therefore the label has to re-release every album ). But I doubt that it will work. For me decent cover versions always did a much better job discovering music from the past. Ruby Turner for example was the artist from whom I’ve first heard Signed Sealed Delivered I’m Yours. Yes, I’ve heard of Stevie Wonder before but didn’t know at that time that he wrote and recorded this song many years ago.
If you advertize a record with remixes from the “hottest music producers and remixers in the world” you state at the same time that it’s just about selling the record. And the best way to do that is using the big names? If it were all about the music Motown should have come up with a contest giving the vocal tracks away and selecting the best results from people who really love the songs. But to do that we need a change of paradigms in the music business. Because of file sharing major record labels avoid giving away something like the plague. Major labels will never win their self-declared war against peer-to-peer networks or filesharing. Pandora’s box has been opened and they better start re-thinking their business model or they will be extinct like an old dinosaur. If you give something you will get something back. Certainly not from the geek that copies everything like there’s no tomorrow but he won’t ever find the time to really listen to music and discover its beauty anyway.