Sampling is a masterful art that takes a great piece of music and completely recontextualizes it until the song is something completely new. Although sample culture is often associated with hip-hop, the earliest examples of sampling occurred in the 1940s with Pierre Schaeffer and the musique concrète movement. Over time, technology evolved to include keyboards, […]
King Gheedorah. The Supervillain. Viktor Vaughn. Metal Fingers. Daniel Dumile went by many names, but the biggest was MF DOOM (don’t forget the all-caps) and his secret identity has been hidden by an iconic metal mask since the late-1990s. While MF DOOM never quite slipped into the mainstream during his nearly three-decade-long career, he is […]
It’s difficult to come to grips with the idea of J Dilla being gone, considering how much his creative spirit continues to prosper in his absence. The man dubbed “the godfather of lo-fi hip-hop” has made a lasting impact on artists from all over the globe. His sample-based form of instrumentation has given way to […]
On the cusp of the new millennium, at Electric Lady Studios, three of the brightest lights in modern R&B made their masterpieces simultaneously. D’Angelo conjured Voodoo in Studio A. In Studio B, Common concocted Like Water for Chocolate. Erykah Badu polished up Mama’s Gun in Studio C. The common thread between these three artists? They […]
“You say … you say … you say, you say, you say, you say, you say one for the trouble …” These words, lurching forward and then pausing and rewinding, hesitant at first, as if aware that a new world awaits on the other side when this pause is resolved, form the opening seconds of […]
There are several ways to define the headphone experience. Our first installment in this Discogs series of albums that sound great on headphones, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, is the pinnacle of a classic approach — let’s call it “stoner whoa” — where the studio is used to achieve an altered state […]
The last American-born creative renaissance occurred over the internet in glorified message boards thanks in part to the U.S. government’s narrow-mindedness. On January 16, 2007, DJ Drama and DJ Don Cannon were arrested after the Morrow County Sheriff’s Joint Vice Task Force and the Clayton County Police raided their offices, confiscating 81,000 mixtape CDs in […]
Keyboardist Bob James has been sampled in hip-hop classics from Run-DMC’s “Beats to the Rhyme” to Eric B. and Rakim’s “Follow the Leader.” An agogô-bell breakbeat from one of his recordings has propelled tracks by N.W.A. and A$AP Rocky. No jazz artist has been sampled more than him. The term “godfather of hip-hop” has even […]
Since its inception in the 1970s, hip-hop has consistently displayed a certain level of homophobia. Whether looking at the lyrics of the seminal tune “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five (in which two F-bombs are dropped) or tracks by Eminem such as “Criminal” (“A homosex, hermaph, or a trans-a-vest / Pants or […]
