Hannah Montana Hits Remixed
Artist: Miley Cyrus 
Label: Walt Disney
 
This may be the most dubious of musical tie-ins to the Disney Channel show which launched Mylie Cyrus as a media darling, _Hannah Montana_. Soundtrack albums? Certainly. Karaoke CD's? Sure. A long EP (or short album?) of songs from those soundtracks remixed in various dance/rhythmic styles but with not structured for nor lengthy enough for club use? Here it is anyway. 

Peculiar though it is, _Hanna Montana Hits Remixed_ serves as a reasonably interesting curio on a couple of accounts. Firstly, it serves to showcase  Cyrus' vocal maturation from the relatively brief time between the first HM soundtrack and the second. The songs themselves, as I've argued elsewhere in these pages, aren't much. She does, however, exhibit a greater vocal depth from the four songs taken from the second soundtrack compared to the four taken from the first. As I've likewise argued elsewhere in TPT, she implements that maturation to generally better effect on the material  she records under her own name. My guess is that, as Mariah Carey and other singers whose pop careers seqgue into club culture sometimes do, Cyrus didn't re-record vocals for these remixes. Radio Disney surely would likely have mentioned as much. 

Secondly, however, when at their best, remixers Simone Sello and Marco Marinangeli connect the possible retro-pop tastes of parents and their HM-loving kids. What they do with "The Other Side of Me" resembles Giant Steps' 1988 lite electro-pop hit "Another Lover," whereas Sello and Mariinangeli  sound to be copping from Bruce Springsteen's rockabilly-ish "Pink Cadillac" for what they do with "Who Said" (like Cyrus needs any more trouble with anything smacking of sexual innuendo, eh?). Taking "We Got The Party" and "Nobody's Perfect" into soft Soul II Soul-meets-trip-hop territory doesn't work nigh as well, though bringing a house/Latin freestyle foundation to "The Best of Both Worlds" works reasonably better. 

That the above are clubby sounding but not long enough to use very well club-wise may not matter to 'tweens lacking context in dance music culture. Why those kids would want to hear songs they've already enjoyed-and maybe sung to death themselves-in styles more or less from the days of their 'rents is something more to ponder. 

Whatever might inspire Cyrus to deepen the Christianity she publicly professes and keep her out of the celebrity gossip magazines and/or becoming the next LiLo or Amy Winehouse, not that these trifles will necessarily, I'm all for it. 

Jamie Lee Rake