Fluxblog 411: the golden age of sampling in hip-hop
Plus new songs by Shiv, Venbee, Arlo Parks, and Kelela
This week’s playlist is SAMPLETOPIA: THE GOLDEN AGE OF SAMPLES IN HIP-HOP 1988-1992, a look back on a five year window in which new sampling technology allowed for a creativity with sound not yet constrained by copyright law. This is a playlist I’ve been wanting to make for a long while now but could not until now because De La Soul’s music was not available and it simply would not have made sense to make this and not include them since their work with Prince Paul is crucial to this story. There’s some extraordinary music in this set – some major hits, but also a lot of deep cuts and songs by artists who I don’t think get much attention from people aside from old school heads. [Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
I’m currently in the middle of running a weekly miniseries on the Fluxblog Patreon in which my old friend Sean T Collins and I talk mainly about how music is used in TV these days. The first two episodes are already available, and the third will go up on Saturday. Subscribe and check it out! If you don’t care about this but would like to support Fluxblog, you can always do a one-time donation on Ko-Fi.
There’s A Cycle To Break
Shiv “Late Now”
“Late Now” sounds extremely early 90s to me without necessarily feeling like a retro thing, which is maybe just the result of taking a familiar kind of breakbeat loop and bass groove and rendering it with modern tools. It’s probably also to do with Shiv’s R&B approach to vocals that adds a richness and depth that wouldn’t quite be there if the same melody was sung by a white guy from Manchester, England. I love the way this song feels both casual and heavy at the same time, and the way Shiv mirrors that contradictory dynamic by singing in a tone that’s very emotionally engaged but also sort of dismissive, as though she’s acutely aware that this person dragging on her feelings doesn’t need to be that important. Not anymore, anyway.
Buy it from Amazon.
Low-Key Crushed On The Inside
Venbee x Goddard “Messy In Heaven”
There’s an old Electric Six song I like a lot called “One Sick Puppy” with a bridge that goes like this: “Jesus was a guy who said some stuff long ago and he had a rich dad who wouldn’t chill or let him go.” “Messy In Heaven” starts from a similar premise with a killer opening line – “I heard Jesus did cocaine on a night out” – but takes the idea of a rich kid Jesus a lot more seriously, with enough space in the lyrics to portray him as a cokehead party boy, as a leader, as a miracle worker, and as a guy slowly destroyed by all the expectations people put on him. Venbee sings all of this with a mix of reverence and pity over a drum and bass track that includes a bit of plaintive acoustic guitar, much like the Roni Size classic “Brown Paper Bag.” You get the thrill of the club, you get the swallowed sorrow, you get some brief moments of uplift.
Buy it from Amazon.
Radiate Like A Star
Arlo Parks “Impurities”
“Impurities” is a love song, but more specifically it’s a song about feeling loved and learning to see yourself from the point of view of someone who adores you and accepts many things about yourself that you do not. Arlo Parks’ arrangement feels airy and dreamy, like she’s so dazzled by this moment and this feeling that she’s floating outside herself and finding a new awareness. Her vocal performance is calm and gentle, particularly in the refrain “I radiate like a star, like a star, like a star,” which is the most melodically satisfying part of the song and the point where she sounds most elated and self-assured.
Buy it from Amazon.
The Bass In My Body
Kelela “Contact”
The first verse of “Contact” describes hearing loud bass-heavy dance music at a party as a surreal experience, a pure and intense sensation that disrupts a sense of time. The music captures that feeling by nudging its 90s-style beat loop into slight distortion and filling out the mix with synthesizer parts that feel a bit eerie and detached, like you’re somehow hearing the beat up against the speakers but everything else is a room away. The sound suggests dissociation but Kelela’s vocal is very present and grounded as the song turns from describing the feeling of being at the party to trying to seduce someone who’s clearly too distracted by their loneliness and stress to surrender to the moment.
Buy it from Amazon.
LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS
• Lane Brown wrote a fantastic piece for Vulture about the sorry state of projection at most movie theaters and how it threatens to hasten the decline of movie theaters in general.
• Spencer Kornhaber wrote about how young pop music is getting faster but not necessarily more energetic and extroverted for the Atlantic.
• Circling back to where this newsletter started - here’s Dan Charnas in Slate on why it’s time to legalize sampling.
• I quite enjoyed this essay by Jaime Brooks about the notion of prestige in culture at this moment in time, especially this part:
The decade we all just lived through was a fever dream of rug pulls, juiced metrics, and false advertising that we’re all still struggling to piece together after the fact. The current decade threatens to take the failings of the last to wretched new extremes. As inflation wipes out the discretionary income of most working class people, corporations are scrambling to transform ordinary mass market products into “elevated,” “premium” “services” and “experiences” in order to maximize their appeal to the shrinking minority of people in this country that can still afford to self-identify as connoisseurs. The target audience for prestige as a concept is now indolent dilettantes who are rich enough to sign up for an annual subscription and then never think about it again. I think we used to call them “suckers.” If the cancerous multinationals that own everything have already decided that prestige means “things that are for suckers” now, maybe it’s time to reconsider the classical definition.