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): 

Hip-hop is the genre where men come to terms with their mothers

"The rollercoaster saga of Eminem and Debbie exemplifies the way in which hip-hop is perhaps surprisingly rich with empathetic songs about struggling mothers. Even when artists reveal difficult truths – like Biggie sharing his mom’s cancer diagnosis with the world on Suicidal Thoughts, or underground hero Boldy James complaining of being neglected by the woman of the house on Mommy Dearest – it tends to culminate in a moment that reveals a touching respect, or the mending of a broken relationship.

It’s the genre where working class men come to grapple with complex relationships with the women who gave birth to them – like Debbie and Marshall Mathers. While the road might be rocky and painful memories are likely to be excavated, rappers (and by extension their fans, who feel “seen” by the lyrics) that immortalise their mothers in music tend to walk away with much lighter shoulders."

Thomas Hobbs @ The Guardian

One of only a few rap songs preserved in the National Recording Registry in the US Library of Congress: "Dear Mama," 2Pac (1995)