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Music Video for Kygo and Whitney Houston’s ‘Higher Love. Taken from Dancing Astronaut.

Many of today’s Electronic Dance Music (EDM) artists reimagine the work of artists from the past, successfully bringing their pieces into the EDM genre with the help of new technologies. “Higher Love”, a song originally recorded by Steve Winwood in 1986 went through a genre transformation. Originally a rock record, the song underwent its first transformation when Whitney Houston covered it in 1990 and brought it into the Rhythm & Blues (R&B) genre. Houston’s acapella solos, rubato singing styles, frequent vocal ornamentation, modulations, intense song climaxes, as well as the cover version’s instrumentation are what brings “Higher Love” into the R&B genre (Rischar, 2004). More recently, in 2019, Norwegian DJ Kygo revitalized the track once more, transforming Houston’s R&B cover into a successful EDM song. Using techniques within digital audio workspace (DAW) technology, such as vocal chopping, splicing, and adding new underlying rhythms and a drop, artists that specialize in EDM, such as Kygo, are able to successfully reimagine and popularize songs of the past, like “Higher Love”, and bring them into the EDM genre.