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After all, it was the speeded-up remix of 'Beautiful Liar', her song with Shakira, which really set pulses racing and ensured massive chart succcess, so it's not like remixers just throw together a load of random dance chuff, and then loop one cymbal smash from the original, so's to justify taking the money. Well, not ALL remixers...

There's a legendary tale from 15 or so years ago, when wayward dance nutbag the Aphex Twin was offered the chance to remix a song by a then-popular indie band called the Lemonheads. "Sure", says Mr Twin, taking the tape (and hefty fee) and going back to his home studio.

Some time later, the Lemonheads' record company get in touch to ask if their remix is ready. Having decided not to bother doing it, Twinner just grabs a half-finished song he'd been working on and sends it over. Literally everyone is happy, and the Aphex Twin just got paid more money than the Lemonheads for getting his song on their CD-single. Sweet!

Fast-forward to now, and you've got studio boffins like Mark Ronson remaking entire songs as if they were old soul tracks from the '60s, you've got bedroom musos taking the vocals off modern pop songs and putting them over the music to really old pop songs (and vice versa), you've got indie bands remixing other indie bands, and you've STILL got Aphex-equivalents sending tracks back which bear no resemblance to the original.

But up until now, it's far more likely to be the original artist who gets the credit, and the remixer who gets relegated to those brackets after the title. Notable exceptions to this include adding the term 'vs' to the title, to try and make it look like the remixer is more of a modern-day Robin Hood - robbing from the melody rich pop song, to feed to the sampled, looped, over-cooked and tune-starving dance fraternity.

Another exception is where everything is turned on its head, and the remixer gets the credit, and the original artist gets knocked down to 'featuring' status, like Captain Knobtweaky ft. The Lord God Himself. This is clearly humiliating, and only really applies where the song is little more than a two-bar loop of some old '80s hit. However, there's a certain amount of push-pull around what to call the song, and what to call the people who made it. Such are the problems of working with toxic alchemicals.

Enter Hilary Duff, and her new song 'Stranger', which has been put back to August 20th, so that the remix of it can percolate up through the clubs. Now, this is a grand idea, especially when the song in question has been remixed so comprehensively that the person whose song it is - that's Hilary - has been reduced to a mere bit part in her own production. In fact, she's beyond bit-part status. As things currently stand, the remix is being sold as 'Stranger' by Wawa vs Smax & Gold ft Hilary Duff*. Listen, here it is...

First of all, Wawa vs Smax & Gold ft Hilary Duff is not the name of a musical act, that's a fight in a pub car park with a Hollywood film star watching in horror.

Secondly, if these remix names get any longer, every song you download will have to come with its own searchable database of all the people who can lay claim to having been involved in making it.

And thirdly, why do all this work to make a drab song interesting, when you're only going to release the original (which is just credited to Hilary Duff, by the way) in its drab form, and bewilder everyone as to why the song is popular in the first place?

Did NO-ONE learn the lessons from Beyonce and Shakira? No? Bah!

Read the original review of 'Stranger'
Hilary Duff does fuzzy felt for ChartBlog...

*Name credits were correct at the time of writing. Who knows who will have been added or taken away by the time the song hits the virtual shops? Whole MINUTES have passed, and you know what an unstable beast the music business can be.