Despite radio’s slowly warming acceptance, dance labels have been shutting down. Strictly Rhythm shut its doors in early October, bringing an end to one of the largest independent dance music companies. V2, the label owned by Richard Bronson, recently announced that they are stepping away from dance music and looking more at indie rock. Other labels have pared their staff to a minimal staff. So it might seem odd that now’s the time that a new production company focusing on dance music, and releasing music, might pop up.
But for the principals of Provocative Music, this isn’t anything new. Chris Cox and Jeff Johnson formerly ran Interhit records, which released albums and compilations that fared quite well – they even won the first Grammy for “Best Dance Recording” for a recent Donna Summer effort, “Carry On.” Chris Cox has been one half of the remix team Thunderpuss, which since 1998 has been remixing artists such as Amber, Jennifer Lopez, Enrique Iglesias, and Whitney Houston. And the new label has ties to EMI, who has been responsible for Kylie Minogue’s return to the states, as well as the Dirty Vegas track “Days Go By,” which went from a Mitsubishi ad to a top 40 smash.
According to Johnson, the idea behind Provocative is to give more quality dance music a chance. “Technically, it’s a production company that’s producing compilations for EMI Catalog marketing. We are working together to release some of the overlooked dance music that’s in the EMI system that’s from Europe as well as to produce DJ compilations with all the current hits of the day. We’re including music from EMI’s labels and also from the rest of the labels out there. But, definitely we want to be a part of the resurgence of dance music that’s happening at the radio level right now and we hope to fuel that resurgence.”
Currently, Provocative has released three albums and two singles. Cox mixed two of the albums himself, with different ideas in mind. ” ‘Provocative Trance’ is a collection of the commercial dance stuff that’s crossed over,” he said. “Daft Punk, DJ Sammy. Some of the things have a little bit of an edge, but it’s just strong radio dance hits. We put it together because it’s fun stuff – some are like a guilty pleasure for me.
“The ’12 Inches of Cox’ is pretty much my album,” Cox continued. “It’s the album I feel represents what I’m doing as a DJ as well as a remixer. It’s indicative of what I play – all the songs are what I’ve featured prominently in my sets over the past year. It’s probably to a different audience. ’12 Inches of Cox’ is darker, more edgy, a little more dramatic, where as ‘Trance’ is more uplifting.”
Dave Dresden, of the production team of Gabriel and Dresden, mixed the third disc, Provocative Progressive.
The singles so far consist of Eyes Cream’s “Open Up Your Mind” and Sterbinzsky ‘ Tranzident feat. Jewls’ “Gates of Mind.”
The albums have so far been doing quite well thanks to the timing of the tracks. As Johnson noted: “The song in the new Mitsubishi Outlander commercial appears on Provocative Progressive called “Breathe” by Telepopmusik. They just started banging their heads to it. When I was at the MIDEM conference in January in France I met with the EMI France people for the Provocative launch and they were talking about Telepopmusik. I picked up the single in Cannes and brought it back and played it to Dave and Chris when we were meeting about picking the tracks and it has made it onto Dave’s album. Fortunately for us, Mitsubishi has picked up on this. Sales of Telepopmusik’s album quintupled [in a week]. Sales for Dave’s album went up 100 percent [in a week].”
Being linked to a major label seems to be giving Provocative an edge. “We believe we’re the only one with [‘Breathe’] being privy to the EMI catalog,” Johnson said. “I’m sure you may notice a lot of the tracks on ’12 Inches of Cox’ are big right now. These are tracks that Chris was interested in six months ago. We tried to get ‘Addicted to Bass’ in February before it was signed. It’s paying off being on top of what’s happening in Europe and at street label. [’12 Inches of Cox’] is on the Electronic Albums chart.”
The label is also using singles as a promotion tool, despite major label resistance to do so. “We’re releasing maxi-singles on all of our singles,” Johnson said. “We release our singles on vinyl and CD. We want to see single sales and we don’t want that to disappear.”
Provocative’s goal is to show what good dance music is out there, both here and abroad. “Any great song can be translated into any style,” Cox said. “That’s just the makings of a good song. You can take a Beatles song and make it a ballad, a rock song, a punk song, a polka, whatever. If it’s a good song, it can translate. That’s been one of the biggest problems – the lack of quality songs. That’s why it hasn’t been breaking through. There’s some classic songs within dance that you can play it by yourself at a piano. It just transcends the fact that it’s over a 4-4 beat.”
One of the upcoming tracks was produced in house. Cox had produced a remix of a song by the Happy Clappers called “I Believe” that had been a large hit in Europe a few years back. The song was getting such a positive response that the label has licensed the track and it’s now slated to come out early in 2003.
Ultimately, Cox and Johnson both are looking forward to success with the label, but success doesn’t have to be a huge number of platinum sellers. As Johnson said, “There is business, and there are still hundreds of thousands of dance records being sold. Robbins [Entertainment] is an example of dance records being sold. Hopefully next year we can say similar things, building a brand name. What I’ve learned since the beginning with Interhit – you can have a million seller, a platinum record and lose money. We can sell 25,000 copies and make a profit.”
Cox added, “Nowadays it would be nice just to stay in business. If we can do that, I’m OK with that.”
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