Kung Fu Fighting

Sure, nobody actually needs an album of nothing but remixes of Carl Douglas' cornball classic "Kung Fu Fighting"— but the damn thing exists anyway, and if you don't like the original you're probably denying yourself a whole host of additional guilty pleasures, so why not give in? Here's the deal: Kung Fu Fighting Remixes boasts the Douglas original (which sold about nine million copies worldwide in 1974) as well as 16 different remixes, and yeah, it's overkill — and that's the entire point of a project like this. What's fascinating is just how elastic and adaptable the song proves to be: the remixes are all over the map, from disco to dub, and the names range from little-known DJs to the likes of Adrian Sherwood and Don Letts. And if you think "Kung Fu Fighting" seems a little slight for an endeavor of this scope, maybe that's a good thing — if the song were some kind of sacred text, perhaps no one would summon the courage to rip the thing apart from the inside out. Instead, everyone has as much fun cutting it open as that weird kid at the back of biology class dissecting the lab rat.