Listening to this mix album by Bob Sinclair of Marc Cerrone’s classic work, several notions become easily verifiable. For one, in hearing an unadulterated original Cerrone album from start to finish, it’s apparent that Cerrone is an artist (albeit an extremely coked up, white boy, afro-havin’ one), and Bob Sinclair is not. It’s way too easy to see why disco was so popular when you hear the entire 17-minute long “Cerrone’s Paradise” or the gnarly “Supernature.” It’s equally easy to see why house music, for which people like Cerrone were largely responsible, is so horribly banal, especially when trying to stand at attention for all of Sinclair’s Cerrone mix. The perpetual 4/4 beats and mild electronic effects that bumble along without a care, which Sinclair’s ilk obviously loves, suck the living soul out of Cerrone’s classic tracks. Modern house producers aren’t even in the same league as Cerrone was (even current Cerrone fails to live up to his past). Not that point-and-click production isn’t without its merits, it’s just that house producers often tend to merely rehash and hack at concepts with a mouse that people like Cerrone actually played some 30 years ago. Funky disco house has no fresh ideas -- the entire genre rests on grave digging from the creative powerhouses of the past. Suffice it to say, Cerrone recalls a time when the sexuality of disco was vibrant and raunchy, instead of today’s sterile, bland and empty gyrations.
