Art & Creativity Quote by Deborah Cox

Deborah Cox is quietly arguing for a borderless pop world, and she does it with the calm authority of someone who has lived inside the remix economy rather than merely benefited from it. The line "music is music" isn’t wide-eyed idealism; it’s a practical dismissal of genre gatekeeping, the kind that treats dance remixes as glossy add-ons while granting hip-hop remixes artistic legitimacy. Cox flattens that hierarchy with one move: she reframes remixing as interpretation, not decoration.

The key word is "truth". In dance culture, remixes are often caricatured as speed-and-sparkle operations built for clubs and radio. Cox insists on intent instead: if the remixer is honest about what the song is trying to do - its mood, its emotional center - then changing the tempo or the drums isn’t a betrayal, it’s translation. She’s defending craft, but also defending audience. The subtext is that listeners who find the song on a dance floor aren’t consuming a lesser version; they’re encountering a parallel text.

There’s context here, too: Cox’s career sits at the intersection of R&B vocal tradition and the ’90s/2000s club pipeline, where dance remixes could extend a song’s life, widen its demographic, and sometimes eclipse the original. Her statement reads like a refusal to apologize for that pathway. A remix, she argues, isn’t a compromise with commerce. It’s a different version of the same emotional argument.