Cram Sampling Rebels Without a Pause: A Classic Age in Hiphop Music

"Watching the dancers get down every night [in the mid-1970s], [DJ Kool] Herc saw that their limbs were loosest during the 'breaks,' or isolated drum parts, when the band pulled out and gave the drummer some. He wondered: Could you prolong the break? Could you make an endless break? By cutting the record back and forth between two records during the critical drum solo, Herc inadvertantly invented the "breakbeat"-- two seconds of feverish climax looped eternally, the point where Steve Miller turns into Steve Reich, a limitless pulse to make B-boys go ga-ga night after night. This became the foundation of Hip hop music."  

Christopher R. Weingarten, It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back (2010) : This book in the 33 1/3 series posits that the album in the title, the 1988 Hiphop album qua album breakthrough, along with De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising and the Beastie Boys Paul's Boutique (both 1989), represent an album aesthetic peak, a triumvirate, in Hiphop history. One particular relatively early culmination of what DJ Kool Herc started. And, crucially, a brief window of creative cultural opportunity. New relatively cheap sampling technology emerges in the mid-1980s and falls into the hands of urban B-boys like Hank Shocklee, "sound master" in the Bomb Squad; competing and hustling against a bunch of other sound system collectives operating out of the boroughs of NYC since Sugar Hill's "Rapper's Delight" (1979). Increasingly Wild Style sampling experiments like the album classics above ensue. It Takes a Nation crams dozens of samples into a single song, over a hundred samples synthesizing Black soul music into BLM before BLM; a monumentally hard rock funky epic Black Power statement and soundtrack. Performative as a sensationalized "Black CNN." Game changer. Then in '89 the Turtles sued De La Soul for copyright infringement. And, more conclusively, in '91 Gilbert O'Sullivan sued Biz Markie for ripping off his pop hit "Alone Again (Naturally)" and overnight making albums like It Takes a Nation or 3 Fee High or Paul's Boutique became prohibitively expensive and so practically impossible. It's a good story. Maybe not the whole story in that experimental electronic music based on sampling continues, Wu-Tang, Trip Hop, DJ Shadow, The Avalanches, etc, but cram sampling never has the same populist Black pop chart source and reach as it did between Eric B & Rakim's "You Know You Got Soul" (1987) and De La Soul is Dead (1991). For me, personally, inspired by The Clash's political bombast as a raw youth, It Takes a Nation was the Black punk rock I'd been waiting for. I Felt the Noize. "Armageddon, it's been in effect, go get a late pass. Step." 

"Mind Playing Tricks on Me," Geto Boys (1991)

Sometimes the lasting value or allure of a pop song is how it nails a time and/or place. In this case, the crack era gangster life and its milieu in the Dirty South and urban Trap housing in cities more or less everywhere in the 1990s. The Wire TV drama, trying to document the same, never quite gets it as perfectly as "Mind Playing Tricks on Me." The song reached 23 on the Hot 100 in 1991. The Stax sound gives soulfulness to a crude, funny, wildly paranoid Robert Altman Short Cuts-like take on the crack era, busted drug deals, paranoid Halloween fantasies, living with the relentless threat of stress and violence that can turn desperately touching: "Goddam Homie, My mind is playing tricks on me." 

 Big sample source behind this one is Isaac Hayes' instrumental "Hung Up On My Baby" (1974): 

"For The Lover in You," True Mathematics (1991)

 

In a way this is just another golden era hiphop song about "gold diggers" but True Mathematics gets all philosophical about it: "When the material girl in you comes out will the lover in you see what the love is about?" And, crucially, the funk is sharp and bouncy as it could be. TM is Kenny Houston, sidekick on some Public Enemy albums. Surprised he doesn't rap more as he gives as good as he gets from the Bomb Squad: Carl Ryder (aka Chuck D), Hank Shocklee, and Eric "Vietnam" Sadler. I like the original but TM's version is popping; similar funk vintage to Young MC's "Bust a Move" (1989) or EPMD'S "You Gots To Chill" (1988). Hiphop or rap music is, basically, funk made with turntables, a mixer, a synth/sampler, a drum machine, and a rapping DJ or MC. If you like funky beats and pop hooks this cannot miss. In a classic hiphop persona, the disinterested observer of human relations, "some guys will use you/some guys will love you," TM raps, "But I'm neither one/just here to observe."  

The original comes from Shalamar's 1980 album Three for Love: 

"Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell," Das Racist (2008)

 Das Racist, Heems and Kool A.D., their chosen collective name a commercial perversion from the start, score an unexpected hit in 2008. It blows up on My Space (I know, at this point that sounds like The Jetsons), which means it has been streamed enough that now it has its own page on Wikipedia. Heems and AD are on their cell phones in "the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell on Jamaica Avenue" in NYC but can't find each other. 

They sound perplexed but also like mildly amused stoners, they could be Harold and Kumar at White Castle, but the punky insistence of the hook over and over urges annoyance and speculation. Maybe they're celebrating and/or satirizing fast food combo places, like Black rappers naming special places in their home neighborhoods. Like Dick's in Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Posse on Broadway." My favorite guess is a suggestion that there are actually two combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell's on Jamaica Avenue, as if they'd never met before. Real mysterious like Repo Man! The song is simultaneously mocking and a irrepressibly goofy dance track, two South Asians from Brooklyn doing their hiphop best. And not bad at that. I think Backpacker hiphop applies but I'm not entirely up on these matters. Anyway, a sly banger, Heems tapping an epic and massive dance club record from 1991, Masters At Work "The Ha Dance (Pumpin' Dubb)." 

Das Racist were unable to match the success of their debut viral sensation but I really like Heem's Eat Pray Thug album from 2015. Raw and cringingly catchy stuff about the immigrant experience before the fascist purge began. Hopefully they've reached that point in their lives where their one-hit wonder is a source of pride as it ought to be. 

"The Whistle Song," Frankie Knuckles (1991)

Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan, maybe most important DJs to expanding 1970s disco era experience into '80s House music and dance club music beyond. I read somewhere they used to hang out together in the classic disco era at David Mancuso's Loft parties, enthralled but also able to share a joke about the hippie vibe on the Loft's dance floor. In light of such gossip let's call "The Whistle" Frankie's LGBTQ+ hippie loving ode to the Loft. It's like a perfect Quiet Storm easy listening jazz flute fantasia, sandwiched between some hooligan-friendly men's whistling choir, and on the bottom an undeniably skipping and softly booming House music smooth dance club tempo. "The Whistle Song" feels like a perfect gay disco homage to the Loft. Even if Frankie had no such intentions, Mancuso had to hear the sincere compliment. First ballot 20th Century Dance Music Hall of Fame. 

Post-Punk Protest Music

"Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair," PJ Harvey (1991): 

"Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair." 

Actually, Harvey calls her song "Sheela-Na-Gig," after carved figurines of a naked woman with an exaggerated vulva, architectural grotesques found on cathedrals, castles, and other buildings throughout Europe in the middle ages. Love the esoteric feminist history but had to look it up, of course. I was originally slow on the uptake with Harvey when she first came out in the early 1990s. Both Dry ('92) and Rid of Me ('93) first struck me as too much like Patti Smith. That same melodramatic shamanistic banshee vocalizing thing. Which was such a rock snobby take, no doubt, but for the life of me now I can't hear what a fuss I was making. I mean, sure, there's a vocal styling resemblance but Harvey is way more Sturm und Drang, and way more intensely sexual. Being her own person, like Smith, the power in that, is what Harvey shares most with Smith. Don't try to pigeonhole them too much. They will arrive in their own time and on their own terms. Maybe Harvey was a little bit to the '90s what Smith was to the '70s, rockers, sui generis strong women art rockers. Salute. 

"Leave the Capitol," The Fall (1981): The Fall at an early peak; from The Slates EP. In a fitful nightmare I imagine Mark E. Smith taking down Grump in a battle rap royale, jabbing him with his rat a tat tat militant nonsense, dancing around the Fat Bastard spastically. Never being touched. The TKO'd G crumpling with Smith leering over him, pointing a finger at him, taunting him with the hook here, "Then you know in your brain/LEAVE THE CAPITOL!/EXIT THE ROMAN SHELL!" Over and over. The dream look is Clockwork Orange. No doubt the obtuse ranting lends itself to such fantasy because Smith is a little Trumpy; like one of Elvis Costello's "Two Little Hitlers." Apparently, the song is about Smith wanting to get out of London, to get away from the pop press hype. Post-punk revenge pop. 

(1988): 

"And the mercy seat is waiting

And I think my head is burning

And in a way I'm yearning

To be done with all this measuring of proof.

An eye for an eye

And a tooth for a tooth

And anyway I told the truth

And I'm not afraid to die."

"It Ain't Over Til It's Over," Lenny Kravitz (1991)

All together now: 

"So many years we've tried 

To keep our love alive

So many tears we've cried

So much pain inside

But it ain't over til it's over"

Lenny Kravitz is a gorgeous hunky "rock star" model but I've always found his music a little too packaged and derivative to connect much with. And this song is no different in a way. It could easily be a rip-off of some precious soul hit from the early 1970s. Hearing this in the car on the radio recently, and not knowing who it was, I was half expecting the DJ to identify it as some chestnut off one of those wonderful Rhino Soul Hits of the 70s: Didn't It Blow Your Mind comps. Instead, it's Kravitz from his 1991 album Mama Said. And turns out as a single it reached number 2 on the charts, although I have no memory of ever hearing it before. But there is a big classic echo in it anyway? It reminds me of something: maybe EWF's "That's The Way of The World," which is song that ought to be emulated more, certainly. It's one of those old soul hits that makes me feel misty and sentimental as an almost involuntary response. Anyway, as a simple, boldly drawn soul workout I'm finding "It Ain't Over" irresistible today; 2024, USA, Earth. If you'd like the full rock star presentation there are alternate versions on youtube. I passed but had to share the song. TGIDF.   

Reactionary and Progressive Laws in the Economic and Social Sciences

 "The history of social science [post-Enlightenment] could actually be written in terms of the history of the search for these two kinds of laws [laws of stability or laws of motion]. Here a thumbnail sketch must suffice. 

Ever since the natural sciences came forward with laws ruling the physical universe [Newton et al], thinkers on human society have set out to discover general laws that govern the social world. What economists, for once under the influence of Freud, have lately taken to calling the "physics envy" of their discipline has long been a characteristic of all the social sciences. The aspiration found the early expression in the assertion that the concept of "interest" provides a unified key to understanding and prediction of human and social behavior. This conviction was already widespread in the 17th century and carried over into the 18th, as Helvetius wrote triumphantly, "As the physical world is ruled by the laws of motion so is the moral universe ruled by the laws of interest." 

The interest paradigm found its most elaborate and fruitful application in the building up of the new science of economics. Here it was used both for elucidating timeless principles underlying the basic economic processes of exchange, production, consumption, and distribution and for understanding the specific economic and social changes that were visibly at work during the second half of the 18th century. 

It was Karl Marx's proudest claim...that he had "come upon the traces" of what he would call precisely "the economic law of motion of modern society." 

Any proposition to the effect that human societies pass necessarily through a finite and identical number of ascending stages [laws of motion] is a close relative, on the progressive side, of what has been described as the reactionary futility thesis [laws of stability that cannot be altered by reforms].  

Albert Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991)