mixtape maestro (2.0)

Call us losers, but since “Meet Me Halfway” started getting endless spins through our earbuds, we’ve been scouring the World Wide Web daily hoping to come across some amazing remix that’ll only deepen our undying adoration towards the Black Eyed Peas single.

There haven’t been many to emerge (which is strange, seeing as though “Boom Boom Pow” and “I Gotta Feeling” inspired what felt like a million revamps between them both), but we did come across a couple that earned at least a couple repeat listens:

Rokuro’s Tidy Club Mix:

Helmed by Japan’s DJ Rokuro, this one follows a relatively simple remixing formula, accenting the original track with some catchy synths while giving that vocoder-assisted bridge (the track’s best non-Fergie moment) a well-appreciated repeat spin.

DL: “Meet Me Halfway (Rokuro’s Tidy Club Mix)” (alt)

Anna & Ruby’s Intergalactic Booty-Shaker Remix:

This second (and sadly, MP3 link-less) one was created by the same girls who delivered that cutesy acoustic cover of Drake’s “Best I Ever Had”. And like that treat, this one is equally impressive in a lo-fi, “let’s throw something together during a sleepover” kind of way, replacing Fergie’s laborious wails with a surprisingly effective Cassie-like featherweight vocal while it’s beat bypasses state-of-the-art Y3K-aiming production complexity for a simple electro throb.

Damn the Hot 100, you know you’ve got a bonafide pop hit when there’s a slew of teenagers and twenty-somethings posting bedroom-set, acoustic cover versions of your song all over YouTube.

These guitar-clutching hopefuls’ latest obsession: Drake’s inescapable “Best I Ever Had” of course, and while most do a good job recreating Drizzy’s smash into a strum-a-long puppy love lullabye, our top favorite would have to be the version delivered by the young trio of Donna, Anna & Ruby. Part Beach Boys surf ballad, part late ’90′s teen pop confection (anybody else get a lil’ LFO “Summer Girls” vibe from the rap verses?), we could see this precocious cover become a hit on it’s own easily.

To quote their best (added) line: They had us “like The Roots and Erykah Ba-du” from the first guitar pluck.

DL: “Best I Ever Had (Drake Cover)” (alt)

As an added treat, check out this nicely keyboard-bedazzled remix of the original “Best I Ever Had” by French producers The Twins:

DL: “Best I Ever Had (The Twins Remix)” (alt)