Baby, This Love I Have
Minnie Riperton
Adventures In Paradise, 1975

Someone please start a Best Of series of soul artists for hip hop heads. There’s those “Best of Whoever” bootlegs at Beat Street for DJs but that’s not quite what I’m getting at. The A&R’s who put together the Best Of compilations are always targeting them at a nostalgic older generation. They don’t realize that there’s a whole army of younger folks looking for more gritty, layered sounds made familiar by hip hop and we don’t know or care what was on the radio, we actually just want the best songs.

Case in point: Capitol Gold: The Best of Minnie Riperton is a decent compilation but it lacks some of minnie hottest tracks. It, of course, features “Lovin’ You” (is easy cause you’re beautiful) but skips over “Reasons,” the opening track from the same album which features Stevie Wonder on drums and is probably the funkiest track she’s ever done. It also features “Inside My Love” and the title track from Adventures In Paradise but skips over the subtle, sexy (and prominently sampled) album opener “Baby, This Love I Have.” If you don’t already know this Minnie track, you’ll know it from Tribe’s “Check The Rhime” which, of course, led to Soul IV Real’s even bigger hit, “Candy Rain”. Then of course, there was Black Star’s “K.O.S. (Determination)” which flipped the beat around and used the first verse as the chorus.

Greatest hits and Best of are two different things, let’s get some truth in advertising!

>> songs are available for two weeks [5.6 MB]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 7th, 2005 at 6:39 pm and is filed under Music Appreciation, Sampled, Vinyl Recordings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.