The vocal from 1 Thing by Amerie over (mainly) Imperial March (Darth Vader's Theme) from The Empire Strikes Back. Surely the crappest Star Wars film, but best piece of music. Anyhoo, this unlikely pairing came about simply because The Phantom Menace came out round about the same time that the Amerie record was blowing up.
1 Thing vid on YouTube.
It was a huge record for a few of my friends and I - a deceptively simple sounding sample-based groove with that awesome soul vocal. It was then I became aware of the producer Rich Harrison who'd done the similarly awesome Crazy in Love a while before. The use of samples (The Meters' version of Oh! Calcutta and The Chi lites' Are You My Woman respectively I think is what really attracts me, but the records were always big crowd pleasers too. I ended up with 2 American promo 12s of this off of eBay, and had tried doing a DIY acapella with not much success. Then the UK 12 had one on it so I ended up with my 3rd copy.
It's a bit of a concept bootleg and needed a beat, so I looked to one of the many Sci-fi themed cover compilation albums that came out in the 70s to capitalise on the whole space movie thing. Spaced Out Disco by The Galactic Force Band contains the huge synth intro to It Takes 2 by Rob base and DJ EZ Rock, in the token original composition (to raise royalties for whoever got their name on it!) Space Dust, but also has a cover of the pop-space-disco Star Wars track by Meco with a big drum break in the middle. Bingo! The break has a nice suspenseful synth tone all the way though, but also lots of R2-D2 noises in it, I can only apologise.
I also added a light sabre sound effect, and when she sings about bells I stuck in a bit of the Bob James Mardi Gras break because I always think of that as being the bells.
PS: I swear this is true and I didn't dream it, but before Amerie was famous I saw her in this TV documentary about Hip Hop and Porn (blame Snoop Dogg). She was presented as an up-and-coming (sorry) porn star who also happened to sing a bit.
Amerie Wars Friday, 26 June 2009
Triple Trouble: Old School Remix Saturday, 13 June 2009
Have to be upfront here - I fucking love this one. It's not just a bootleg like the others, it's a Proper Remix... I used to play it out off a CD but it's now published here for the first time!
I loved the little resurgence the Beasties seemed to have around the time of this and Ch-Check It Out (possibly more on that later!). However, hearing the original of this, I just thought they hadn't taken it far enough. They clearly went to some lengths on sample clearance and the like - there's the obvious percussion from the intro to Rapper's Delight, but they could've probably gotten away without crediting Chic's Good Times or the referenced-but-not-really-ripped-off Double Trouble At The Amphitheatre from the Wildstyle soundtrack, both of which they do indeed credit on the label (of the promo I'm looking at).
Now, I love sampling. All this legal shit around it is exactly why I think it's never really flourished as an artform in the way it could or should've. I'd argue no legally cleared track has more than a few samples, but I love cut-ups and some of my favourite tracks have scores of samples!
It doesn't seem to be legally/commercially possible to release tracks that have tons of samples in them, but luckily I'm unencumbered by such issues here. SO, when I heard this, it kind of got my mind racing.
For no apparent reason, Rapper's Delight has always brought the Scorpio beat by Dennis Coffey to my mind. They're not really related but have sort of a similar rhythm and, if retrospective history is to be believed, I'd guess Scorpio was a big B-Boy beat by the time Rapper's Delight came out (1979). So I wanted that in, then had the genius/stoopid idea of also using Son of Scorpio - it's got the same rhythm but sounds a bit different so gave me 2 beats to switch between. My friend calls this technique big beat, wee beat.
I then did a bit of research to see if Rapper's Delight was sampled from anything - the re-played Good Times bits were obvious but I suddenly wondered about the percussion and everything else.
I kept seeing this Alan Hawkshaw disco-era record Here Comes That Sound (credited to Love De-Luxe) mentioned as being sampled, so got myself a copy. It's not sampled but you can kind of hear an influence in the stabs. It's tenuous but, in any case, I put them in :).
I also re-visited the Wildstyle soundtrack, which has lots of dialogue. The track was influenced by the Double Trouble... track as credited but I wanted to lift some more and was gifted with the lines I used in the intro:
“If you... Wanna know... the real deal...
We only came here to settle the score, so let's give everybody... what they all came for!”
It's kind of cheesy but summed up what I was trying to do in terms of putting more old school bits in, and I found another bit of dialogue to stick in the end.
I also noticed a synth bass kind of sound they were occasionally dropping in and thought it sounded like the (quite distinctive) synth sound they'd sampled from the Car Wash soundtrack in their track 33⅓ God (or could be one of the others off of that Love American Style 12 which is amazing). It sounded like that and was used in a similar way, but wasn't actually it. So I put the Car Wash one in.
And Finally... Good Times. It's awesome. They'd used the bass line and string stabs (I re-sampled those) but I wanted to take it much further. So it goes from being fairly raw with not much music to basically being Good Times with the drums carrying on (a bit messily). And then kind of deconstructs towards the end in DJ-friendly fashion.
Jazzy Way: Live mix Monday, 8 June 2009
Another straightforward one (there are more interesting things coming honest). Scratchmaster Chuck T's Jazzy Way acapella over a couple of bits of the live version of Grover Washington Jnr’s Mr Magic.
The track with the vocal here isn’t particularly awesome - I came across it on the back of the whole DJ Kool, Sam the Beast etc Hip Hop/Go Go thing. Creative Funk put out the early DJ Kool stuff and I bought this just because of the label and it was 99c or something. I guess I really kept it for the acapella though and thought it would sound better with something a bit more live and suggestive of the Go Go sound.
It alternates between 2 sections of Mr Magic for verse/chorus but, to be honest, this could be a whole lot better - it could use some attention to the sound and some percussion would've helped it too i think. It's a bit flat.
Geeky bit - the Jazzy Way line is sampled from La Di Da Di by Doug E Fresh and Slick Rick. It might be more familiar recently as it was kind of interpolated and re-sung on Notorious BIG's Hypnotize (though it’s changed to “Flashy Ways”).
Mr Magic by Grover Washington Jnr
Jazzy Way by Scratchmaster Chuck T
I couldn’t find this for download, but the vinyl isn’t hard to get - there are some for sale on discogs.
