Everything Good To You (Ain’t Always Good For You)
B.T. Express
Do It (’Til Your Satisfied), 1974
I’ve been meaning to do a post about bootleg vinyl breaks compilations for a while…and this isn’t really the post I was writing in my mind but that’s ok (as I can’t really remember it). I feel like I have to say that what write is inevitably going to be colored by DJ Premier’s tirade on breaks records on Gang Starr’s Moment of Truth album (text below).
That aside, I have to give respect, well, at least acknowledge that a lot of my early record shopping was fueled by the names and tracks found on those compilations. That said, the producers of these compilations take some serious liberties when preparing the tracks for release. This B.T. Express song is a great example. It appears on Strictly Breaks Vol. 5 which come out in 1998. Its listed, like the rest, with a subtitle that says who sampled it, in this case, “Used by DMX for ‘Get At Me Dog’” (it was also sampled on “Get The Bozack” by EPMD 9 years earlier). The Strictly Breaks folks knew that DJs would want to play it right before or after the DMX song which was getting a lot of attention at the time so they went ahead and decided it was ok to slow the song down from 117 beats per minute to…104 (i.e. a lot, making it much closer to tempo of the DMX song - 97) and repeat the first bar four times (creating a clumsy 11-bar intro).
To expect more integrity from a compilation who’s “copyright” line says “Warning: Unauthorized duplications of this joint will end you up with cement shoes at a river near you!!!” is perhaps foolish. But that it doesn’t say “Re-Edit” or “*Remix by Louis Flores” like the Ultimate Breaks and Beats series seems irresponsible. I guess the lesson is that if you are going to get your samples the “lazy” way then you are getting something on par with the amount of effort you are putting out but something about it still bothers me. I guess its that the state of affairs is only getting more sloppy in the internet age of “crate digging.” I haven’t been djing that long but I felt like a senior citizen when a young DJ recently asked me “where do you get all those samples? because they’re really hard to find at good quality [read: download at good quality], trust me I looked…do you [pause] dig?” with a tone that implied he expected me to laugh, say ‘hell no” and tell him the right place to look online.
…and one other thing, what’s the deal with you break record cats that’s putting out all the original records that we sample from, and snitchin’ by putting us on the back of it saying that we used stuff - you know how that go - stop doing that - ya’ll are violatin’, straight up and down! word up man, i’m sick on this sh-t; ya’ll motherf-ck-rs really don’t know what this hip hop’s all about; so while you keep on fakin’ the funk, we gonna keep on walking through the darkness, carrying our torches…
Songs are available for two weeks.
