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.