This came out in 2004 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
If you believe P. Diddy, he invented the remix. Funny — I don’t seem to recall seeing his name on all my old 12″ extended dance-mix singles from the ’70s and ’80s. Ah well, maybe Diddy leapfrogged over that era.
If you did too — or, conversely, if you’re a huge fan of endless drum breaks, monotonous repetition and annoying amounts of echo and phasing — you might be interested in one of the odder compilation discs to land in the racks lately: Retro Active. This set collects 13 moldy oldies from the remix vaults for those who just can’t get enough of ’80s new wave and pop classics like A-Ha’s Take On Me, Erasure’s Blue Savannah, Dream Academy’s Life In A Northern Town, Echo And The Bunnymen’s Bring On The Dancing Horses, The Cure’s Boys Don’t Cry and The Screaming Blue Messiahs’ I Wanna Be A Flintstone. In fact, this disc, coupled with some other recent revivals of the 12″ mix — Quentin Tarantino put a 10-minute version of Santa Esmeralda’s Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood on the first Kill Bill soundtrack — could revive the whole genre. Maybe it could even reinvent it, eh Puff?
