In so many words and in so many ways, House Music has been about fucking over the vocalist. It’s tradition. It’s old school to fuck over the vocalist. It’s the Italian production team behind “Ride On Time” dressing up a French model to lipsync Loleatta Holloway’s voice, then getting sued and redoing the track with Heather Small’s voice. And not crediting Heather Small, either, but at least paying her.
Not everyone is this way, but most of us are. Nobody sets out to create a trend but a trend is set anyway through a thousand independent but cumulative actions.
Miguel Campbell’s 2011 single “Something Special” was a sensation, and it was a sensation based almost entirely on the performance of the vocalist. She was uncredited; in an interview about the track for Mixmag, Campbell identified her only as “one my mate’s girlfriends.” Nice.
In truth her name is Alex Mills, and curiously almost every reference to her and “Something Special” has been progressively “un-published” from the internet, from an acoustic performance of the song taken off YouTube due to copyright complaints to comments on various articles, including the aforementioned one.
It’s nice to see Alex Mills get some shine on Attack The Dancefloor Volume 6, a four track EP collecting some recently released material from Joey Negro’s Z Records. Originally dropped in April, “Everybody Wants Something” pushes Mills’ vocals up to the front – it’s a fairly basic formula, though the difficulty in mastering it explains both why so much mediocre Soulful House is out there and at the same time why the genre has been so resilient despite that. Other tracks collected here are Spiritchaser’s remix of The Sunburst Band’s “I’ll Be There 4 U (Garden of Love)” (a track that first surfaced something like 15 years ago), Timmy Vegas’ “Get Yourself Together” and DJ Fudge & Kiko Navarro’s “So Tight” from the Boogie Thieves EP.
