Tracy Young and the Madonna Connection
The gotha of dance culture gathered this week in Miami for the annual Winter Music Conference, bringing the spotlight on those talents who gave us such great dancefloor anthems through the years, including – of course – plenty of Madonna hits.
The conference is also a chance to keep track of what’s going on in the world of remixers and producers, and to see if there’s any chance for some great unreleased gems to see the light on day on some official release.
Here’s an excerpt from an article by Daniel Chang on the Miami Herald about DJ Tracy Young, the 34-year-old dee-jay and producers knows for her remixes of Madonna’s Music, Don’t Tell Me, What It Feels Like For A Girl, Nothing Fails as well as for her GHV2 Megamix, the Easy Ride remix to be released soon and her still unreleased take on Over And Over.
“Young’s musical education has indeed been thorough and largely self-made. In the early 1990s, she got her start DJing college parties and hosting a show on a Washington, D.C.-area hip-hop and R&B station. Her credibility established, Young began to spin at nightclubs and celebrity parties and she earned a reputation for her deft musical selections but also because she was something of a novelty – a female DJ.
Luly Casares, a Miami clinical psychologist, remembers meeting Young over a Junior Vasquez record at a party in Washington, D.C., in 1993.
‘I heard something in the way she played that was really different from what everyone else was playing and I thought, ‘How cool’ and she was a woman, which nobody else was doing,” Casares recalls. ‘She was a white woman on a black station, primarily hip-hop and R&B… It was really…interesting and different.”
Casares eventually introduced Young to her sister, Ingrid Casares, then a co-owner of Club Liquid on South Beach and a confidant of Madonna. Casares, a long-time promoter on Miami Beach, and Liquid co-owner Chris Paciello began to bring Young to town to DJ at Liquid and private parties.
Young’s rise, Luly Casares says, was near meteoric.
”The same way that in D.C. everybody fell in love with her,” Luly Casares says, ‘you had Madonna and Lenny Kravitz and that whole crowd… wanting her to DJ parties.”
Then she landed a gig that cemented the direction of her career – Madonna‘s December 2000 wedding to filmmaker Guy Ritchie in Scotland.
The Madonna connection solidified Young’s reputation as a premier dance music DJ and it thrust her into a niche, she says, spinning largely for the circuit parties and gay audiences allied with Madonna.
Young welcomed the fame, and the steady work. But it also limited her creativity.
”Before I worked with Madonna, I kind of did it all,” she said. ‘I had a hip-hop radio show… I did ’80s music. At the time, I did want to play for the gay audience. I love my audience. But now it seems like that’s all I’ve been doing, which is fine, but I would like to kind of get back into the other types of parties and hip-hop is so massive right now that I was doing it before pretty much anybody else was and now everybody’s doing that and I kind of went the opposite direction.”
As our readers well know, Tracy emixed Madonna’s Easy Ride together with Giangi Cappai at his studio in Italy and will include this long-awaited anthem on her upcoming “Dance Culture” CD, out in May.
On the other hand, her version of Over And Over may remain unreleased for a long time. It appears that Tracy remixed this song exclusivly for the upcoming Rugrats movie – our friend Ragdoll reports. Word is that there are no plans on releasing it at all, and nobody knows if it’ll actually be used in the movie – not even Tracy.