One lone Beastie I be

When I was in 2nd or 3rd grade, I always imagined that parties were all about making out, drinking, and listening to the Beastie Boys (and my parents wouldn’t let me listen to them).  When I was in middle school, I thought the Beastie Boys were about as lame as you could get (and I wouldn’t be caught dead listening to them).  In late highschool, the Beastie Boys were suddently hip again because of nostalgia (and I couldn’t stop listening to them).

Actually, it was right before the Beastie Boys became hip again that I was rummaging through my oldest brother’s cassette tape collection, and I found a bootleg copy of Paul’s Boutique.  I put it on, mostly for humor’s sake, and found myself listening to it 24/7 soon after.  I had only heard their big singles from Licensed to Ill before (you know… Fight for Your Right, Girls, Brass Monkey…) and the production & style of the magnitude that Paul’s Boutique churned out just blew me away.

Anyways, Paul’s Boutique eventually made its way to become (arguably) the Beastie Boys most critically acclaimed album.  It was ground-breaking in several ways, but most notably because of the dense layering that their sampling portrayed.

What I want to do here, is show you just how much sampling would go into a single song on that album.  For this to work, you’re going to have to become familiar with a number of songs, but most importantly, you have to know this funky jam called “Shake Your Rump”:

Ok, now that you’ve heard the Beastie Boys’ song, let’s find out what other songs went into the mix.

First off, we have the intro drum fill, which comes from the Alphonze Mouzon song “Funky Snakefoot.”  It’s also the intro to the song, so you can’t miss it.

Next, we have the basic beat for the song, which comes both from a Harvey Scales song, “Dancing Room Only” and a James Brown and Afrika Bambaataa collaboration called “Unity.”  Watch the video for hilarity’s sake:

The beat comes in at about the 10 second mark.

Now, at about 00:11, a real funky bass line comes in which was sampled from a Ronnie Laws song that most of us are familiar with… “Tell Me Something Good.”  Again, this comes in at the very beginning of the song, so you can’t miss it.

Somewhere around 00:27, there’s a new drum fill.  This is a nice mid-drum sound and it comes from a collaboration of Jazz drummers: Paul Humphrey, Willie Bobo, Shelly Manne, & Louis Bellson.  The song is called Super Mellow.  Said drum fill, again, is the intro to the song, so there should be no trouble finding it.

Just before we get to a super low bass part (at about 00:37), the next drum fill comes in.  This is taken from a song by The Funky 4+1 aptly named “That’s the Joint.”

Immediately following that drum fill is the aforementioned bass swell (around 00:40).  Although I can’t find a free streaming version of the whole song, you can listen to the appropriate sample here.  It’s a song called 6 O’clock DJ (Let’s Rock) by Rose Royce.  It’s pretty obvious from the sample.

That bass section goes for some time until the next section comes in at 00:56.  This drum fill is sampled from none other than Led Zeppelin.  The song is called, “Good Times Bad Times” and the sample I mentioned begins at 02:28.

Once again, at about the 01:02 mark, we have that funky bass line from “Tell Me Something Good.”

Now, here I’m not exactly sure if I’m 100% correct, but I believe the sharp scratches from the DJ that come in at 1:12 are from the Average White Band song “Cut the Cake“  I think the horn bellows at 03:47 are what’s being sampled.

The bass line that comes in at 01:18 is from the Rose Royce song “Born to Love You.” Sorry again for the short sample, but it fits nicely because it begins with the section I’m talking about.

At 01:26 we have the Funky Snakefoot drum fill again, followed by the latter part of the Super Mellow drum fill.  Again, we have the 6 O’Clock DJ bass swell and the Led Zeppelin drum fill.

At about 02:10 there’s the Born to Love You bass line again, and you can begin to hear the Afrika Bambaataa sample with the woodblock percussion and the “woo-ooh-woo-ooh” noise (yeah, that’s what it is).  This is from the song Jazzy Sensation and comes in right around the 5 minute mark.

If you were paying close attention, you’d notice that right around 2:24 there is a familiar section for just a second.  Yes, it’s The Sugar Hill Gang with an extremely brief sample of their song, “8th Wonder.”

Then we repeat some bass swells and a small bassline, the basic drum beat and those Jazzy Sensation noises that we’ve heard before until…

THE END

Yes!  I know it was a lot of effort to click all those links, but I bet you had some fun if you did.  I really enjoyed putting together all those samples so that you can see where they come from.  I know I missed out on a few, but when listening to the song, I couldn’t exactly figure out where they were located.  If you want to check out the Wikipedia page for Paul’s Boutique, it tells you which songs were ostensibly used… maybe you can find the ones that I couldn’t.

Anyways, I gotta hit the sack, I have a lot of marking to do tomorrow.  Take care!

Spank Rock has a special place in my heart

So, generally speaking, I’m not much of a hip-hop guy.  I’m usually much more interested in lyric-based rap than dance music.  Perhaps that’s the white-boy-with-no-rhythm in me speaking, but I can’t do much about that.

However, recently I haven’t been able to stop listening to Spank Rock.  The lyrics are trashy (although sometimes quite good) and the songs are all about dancing and girls, but the production is really outstanding and refreshingly different from your clubbing mainstays.

The beats, of course, are pretty generic, but something different that you’ll hear in Spank Rock’s cuts are these really intense noise swells that seem to come out of nowhere.  They serve as perfect transitions between sections of a song, they often lead into some pretty fast rapping (and sometimes mark the point where Amanda Blank often comes in with her verses):

Something tells me that having a white girl with attitude as your tag-team MC garners you tons of cred with the hipster crowd.  It’s new and different and… well, she’s pretty cute.  Not only that, but she spits like a beast.

I think my favorite thing about Spank Rock, however, is how sarcastic they are.  They are well aware of how ridiculous the club scene is.  They know that they’re putting out club music and they know that they’re doing it better than everybody else.  Maybe they’re not as famous as other outfits, but the quality of their music, the fun and quirky style they evoke, and the trashy humor that they keep in their lyrics put them way ahead of the rest in my book.  Not only that, but it seems like their shows are a riot:

Anyways, I’ll definitely be including some of their stuff in upcoming mixes for any parties that I’m DJ’ing.  I’d suggest that you check out some of their stuff (their singles especially).