House of Pain
Jump Around – Featuring Jason Nevins Remixes (Tommy Boy's Greatest Beats Remix 2) (Tommy Boy 463)

Here's a song I had a lot of hatred for in the early 90s, thanks to consistent overexposure by dorm-floor idiots and the fact that I hated pretty much everything while I was in college.

I was glad to be able to get another bite at the apple with Tommy Boy's 15th anniversary reissue project … a box set of their "greatest beats" (you know a lot of them already: "O.P.P.," "Gangsta's Paradise," "Lean on Me" by Club Nouveau, plus tons more) and a series of remix EPs with current DJs reconstructing their favorite Tommy Boy tracks.

Jason Nevins, whose Run-DMC remix got tons of play a few years back, weighs in with three mixes of House of Pain's "Jump Around." It's weird timing for me to find it, as I'd recently been thinking about this song and some others from that same era that I was totally out of the loop on at the time. But then, perhaps it's cooler to get into stuff almost ten years later, right? Right?

Um, well, so declare me a "Jump Around" fan many years after the fact. It's a great song, and while I still find it a bit threatening in some way, I'm enjoying shakin' my postcollegiate ass to these remixes.

Nevins speeds up the original and takes the abrasiveness out of it, subduing that hideous scream into a percussive effect rather than the siren-like texture it added in the original. The "Jason Nevins 2000" mixes (a 3 minute radio edit and a 6 1/2 minute club mix) are fresh, phat, and other similarly dated words I've only picked up recently.

But regardless of my lack of street cred, Nevins does an awesome job of making "Jump Around" relevant again. The six minute "bump & grind dub" pushes things a bit further, and keeps the disc moving without seeming repetitive. Track four is the original version, which is available to be heard with new ears after the three remixes.

This is how CD singles should all be. Very well done. Now that the guy from House of Pain has reinvented himself as Everlast (and proved that he's a pretty goddamn good songwriter … that's two BIG SONGS in one decade from whatever his name is), I suppose the former is "old school."

Truly, it brings me back to my old school days, but like a good remix I can reinvent the past and imagine a dorm full of interesting, intelligent people with open minds. Oh, and I might as well make myself a foot and a half taller and correct my speech impediment while I'm at it.

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Review by Dillio Jonzun