Archive for the 'Sampled' Category

It’s A Shame
The Spinners
7″ Single, 1970

It all comes back to the Wonderlove. Stevie crops up so many (good) places. Click on the 45 label for a larger view and check the songwriting credit. As previously touched on (while discussing this other hot song that he co-wrote from that period), 1968-71 was a transitional period for Stevie as he went from being a teenage star to becoming a 20-something one-man show – establishing full creative control with Motown, took over his publishing rights and his production, and playing most of the instruments on most of his songs.

Although this song isn’t that much like his material that would come out a short time later, I like to imagine him sitting around, writing these instantly memorable melodies, instrumental lines and horn harmonies, gaining confidence and psyching himself up to take the giant leap forward that was soon to come.

The behind-the-scenes element to this song, that also fun to imagine is that he and Syreeta Wright, his fellow Motown artist and co-writer on this song, got married about 6 months after it was recorded. Was (Lee) Garrett feeling left out of the love-fest…or pre-marital squabbles?

I just found a whole page dedicated to Stevie Wonder songs for other artists but it looks like a long read, so I’ll publish this post first and read second.

>> songs are available for two weeks [4.2 MB]

I Got The
Labi Siffre
Remember My Song, 1975

The Loop Professor is sadly leaving us for 6 months (to work and chill on a ski resort in Switerland, no less). Luckily for me, and by extension – you, or at least anyone looking to my site for a good tune now and again, he left me 7 boxes of records for me to remember him by…ok, so I have to give them back when he gets back but obviously copious amounts of vinyl will be recorded between now and then!

Installment #1: This is track provides the backdrop for “Streets is Watching” by Jay-Z and “My Name Is” by Eminem. As this bio points out, Labi is openly gay, which makes it more than a little funny that his music fueled Eminem’s breakthrough. I know Em hugged Elton and all but still…

Every time I play this song (I have the mad bootleg copy – turns out there’s actually 4 more bars at the beginning and 16 at the end), people think it’s two separate songs. It does switch up pretty dramatically. Look out for the effect on his voice when he finally comes back in on the second half. It’s kind of chilling.

>> songs are available for two weeks [9 MB]

Mystique Blues
Three Children
Crusaders
1, 1971

I was going to announce this as Installment #2 of The Full-Album Hotness You Can’t Find In a CD Store but alas, I checked All Music and the damn thing has been reissued! Although upon further clicking, I found out it was reissued by MVP Japan, it costs $40.99 on Barnes and Noble and Amazon and it takes 2 weeks to arrive! So…my time photographing the album cover was a waste but I can still claim this album in the name of all that is good and wonderful about vinyl, right? Especially as I got it for $2.

I don’t remember what first put this album on my radar screen. It’s been sampled many times, some I knew about before I got it, others I put together later, but the excitement I had when I found it didn’t compare the subsequent joy I got from sitting through all four sides of this stellar double LP. Jazz/Funk never sound much an cross between actual jazz and actual funk.

>> songs are available for two weeks [6.5 MB]
>> songs are available for two weeks [7.2 MB]

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]

Misdemeanor
Foster Sylvers
7″ Single, 1973

“Misdemeanor” is best known (to people under the age of 35, at least) as the sample for The D.O.C.‘s “It’s Funky Enough” (snippet) (1989). I’ve never heard anyone say “oh, that sounds familiar” when I play “It’s Funky Enough.” It’s either “no, i’ve never heard that” or “1! and it comes the 2 to the 3 and 4, then i drop the beat i have in store!” Well, if you didn’t already know where the instantly memorable instrumental loop comes from, now you do.

“It’s Funky Enough” is such a dark track that the turn “Misdemeanor” takes at 0:05 is very surprising. The song actually covers a lot of sonic ground in 2:20. It goes back and forth from the darker intro/bridge (:00, :48) to the happier/major-chord sounding verses and choruses while interspersing dissonant harmonies (:27, 1:15) and crispier-than-expected drums (1:18-1:21) throughout.

The lyrics can’t go without mention, “she stole my heart…but it’s just a misdemeanor…like when you get your first ticket for illegal parking.”

Thanks Ed, for giving me this record on long-term loan!

>> songs are available for two weeks [3.3 MB]

You Are What I’m All About
The New Birth
Birth Day, 1972

There is SO much music that hasn’t been re-released on cd. That said, there is a surprising amount that has been.

The first soul record I ever bought was a (stellar) New Birth album, so when I came across this one for $1, a few years ago, I was quick to snatch it up. It didn’t disappoint and turned out to have a few classic samples including this track, which was used for Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s “Players Anthem.” I quickly recorded it to MP3 and walked around the city for a few weeks, reveling in the crackly vinyl sound, looking at other people listening to iPods thinking, “you’re not listening to what i’m listening to!” (it’s the simple (petty) pleasures, right?)

Well, at my last temp job, I noticed a CD on my friend Constance’s desk that had a re-sized image of the crazy album cover from the first New Birth album that I bought. I picked it up: The New Birth – Golden Classics. Track 8 = You Are What I’m All About.

Of the 650 or so tracks that I’ve recorded from vinyl, I’ve found about 125 of them on CD at some later point in time.

It takes me…say, 9 minutes to record a 4 minute (average) song between plugging my mixer into my laptop, setting the recording level, recording the song, edited the ends, converting it to MP3 and filling in the info in the tag. 9 minutes x 125 songs = 18 hours and 45 minutes.

It’s a good thing I see it all as a means to the end of knowing great music, well at least most of the time…

>> songs are available for two weeks (digi) [5.4 MB]
>> songs are available for two weeks (vinyl) [5.3 MB]

I’d Rather Be With You
Bootsy Collins
Stretchin’ Out In Bootsy’s Rubber Band, 1976

bootsy collins was responsible for most of Parliament’s crazy-wack-funky basslines of the mid-70′s including “Flash Light.” this song is from his first solo album. it’s so PG-13. it starts out “above board” but the lyrics in the fade-out are not for the faint of heart.

it was inspiration for Adina Howard’s “A Freak Like Me” and also for NWA’s “I’d Rather F–k With You” and potentially behind the brilliant but cringe-inducing phife-dawg line “bust a nut inside your eye to show you were i come from” although that’s just conjecture on my part.

me, i just like it for the oboe (that’s an oboe, right?). nothing let’s a woman know you mean business like an oboe!

>> songs are available for two weeks [6.8 MB]

Riding High
Faze-O
Riding High, 1977

I played “Da Goodness” by Redman last week and one of the lyrics that usually floats by undeciphered suddenly came through loud and clear, “I been had a demo before Riding High“. It was one of those moments that made me wonder how many other (potentially more important) connections sit in front of my face every day that I don’t notice. “Riding High” is one of those songs that I actually found “backwards.” As in, the track has been massively sampled but I actually heard it before I heard any of the tracks that sample it. The Breaks says that it been sampled 18 times but I think EPMD’s “Please Listen To My Demo” is the best known, or at least it’s the best known to me (and probably to Redman).

“Riding High” makes me think of driving next to a moon-lit body of water around 1:00 in the morning. It’s a pretty unique song, I can’t really think of anything else that sounds a lot like it.

Don’t miss the drum fills that start @2:37 and continue sporadically throughtout!

>> songs are available for two weeks [7.2 MB]

Open Your Eyes
Bobby Caldwell
7″ Single, 1980

Bobby Caldwell is the man behind the mid-tempo-wanna-be-a-slow-jam classic “What You Won’t Do For Love“. Its in-between tempo was always a reason (in a long list of very good reasons) why I couldn’t ask some some girl to slow-dance in middle school (back when they would play a slow jam or two at a party!).

I didn’t discover “Open Your Eyes” until Common and Jay Dee increased its audience a couple of years back. I remember going to see Common and Jill Scott at The Hammerstein Ballroom in October of 2000, around when “The Light” was big. That was a memorable show for a couple of reasons. In between the time that they had booked the show and when it actually happened, Jill’s status had risen such that she was a little out of place playing before Common. The conversation while waiting for the show to start was whether she was opening for him or whether it was it a double bill and we never found out but we saw the answer to what was behind our question when she was presented with a gold record (for selling 500,000 copies of Who Is Jill Scott? (Words And Sounds Vol. 1)) at the end of her set…and then half of the crowd left.

To Common’s credit, after a twenty or thirty minute set change, he come on and put on a show that really engaged the remaining folks (it wasn’t THAT empty) and greatly exceeded my expectations. It included an un-akward mid-tempo slow dance with a 4-year-old to “Open Your Eyes” before he went into “The Light.” I was a little cocky about how music I thought I knew at the time (big surprise) so when a decent-sized portion of the crowd seemed to know the whole song (not just the parts that were sampled) and I didn’t, I got a little upset.

Needless to say, it went onto my master record shopping list and I eventually tracked it down. (Nothing like excessive pride to get you in touch with some good 7″s!)

Bobby Caldwell seems to be the master of the tempo-ambiguous love song. This song has become a Madame X late night classic and is often accompanied by lots of singing, acting and dancing. It seems to require both the dancing and the acting because it can’t make up its mind whether or not it’s a ballad.

What I love about this song, besides its overall charm, is that he is basically calling this woman a fool but he does it so lovingly, you wouldn’t really know. All he really says is “you think you’re so wise…open your eyes.”

>> songs are available for two weeks [5 MB]

“T” Stands For Trouble
Marvin Gaye
Trouble Man Soundtrack, 1972

The title song from Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man Soundtrack is widely known through its inclusion on many of his Greatest Hits compilations. The rest of the album is known to beat diggers/records collectors mainly through “T” Plays it Cool which has been sampled several times. The song that I am surprised that I don’t hear more people talking about is “T” Stands For Trouble.

I first heard “T” Stands For Trouble on my iPod, on shuffle. When I’m listening to new (new to me) music, I’ll often not look at my screen to find out who is singing or performing the song, even if I am dying to know, because I find myself coming up with a lot of justifications and/or second-guesses once I find out who it is. So, I was diggin’ the mirky, dramatic intro but when that first hand clap dropped @ 1:04, I experienced a confusion that is pretty rare for me. I couldn’t tell if the song was actually from the 70′s or if Rjd2 or someone had made it in the last couple of years and made it with an amalgamation of 70′s samples. The handclaps are so crispy (and consistent) that I could hardly believe that they were live (they would make Jay Dee blush). I’ve been playing it every couple of days ever since.

>> songs are available for two weeks [6.6 MB]