America's Greatest Pastime
And it's not baseball.
At the bottom of this page, paid subscribers can find 5 tracks from the archives (the most music I’ve ever put out here at one time). But first, some context…
I just finished Lady in the Lake, a new show on Apple TV from one of my favorite directors, Alma Har’el. But I’m not here to write about that show. Instead, I’m going to write about rap music.
In the show’s finale, Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman” is used prominently and extensively during the climax of the plot. I first heard that song in 2010, forty-five years after it was released, and seven years after a young up and coming producer from Chicago, named Kanye West, sampled it to make Talib Kweli’s most successful solo hit, “Get By.” That song is the reason I fell in love with sampling, it is the reason I bought an MPC1000, it is how I discovered Nina Simone, and it set off a chain reaction that changed my entire musical world.
Toward the end of my tenure as a touring musician in the rock music world — or emo or post hardcore world, or whatever the hell I was a part of — I became very bored. Everything started to sound the same to me, and the stuff that was supposed to be “heavy” just sounded silly. The whole landscape felt void of any innovation.
I asked a friend who was in a prominent, influential heavy band at that time, “Where do you find good heavy music?” He said, “I don’t listen to heavy music. I listened to Anthrax in high school. That’s why I play heavy music. But I don’t listen to any of the shit that bands are doing now for inspiration.” He then proceeded to hand me a copy of Bilal’s Love For Sale and said, “Listen to this instead.”
And I fell in love. Not just with that record, but everything that it led me to. I spent about three years on a crash course through the history of rap and R&B — everything I completely missed out on while I was off screaming into a microphone. I became obsessed. I discovered that there was a line drawn through this very rich musical and cultural history, and if you were paying attention, you could connect the dots. I found Dilla and DJ Premier. Badu and The Beastie Boys. Voodoo and Illmatic.
Our country is a melting pot. We have a hard time taking credit for anything (though we certainly try) since we’re really just an amalgamation of other cultures. But this thing… this art form that took hold of the Bronx and Brooklyn in the 70s, born people living in the projects who had nothing but their father’s record collection — this thing that every music executive dubbed a fad that would surely fade — was the most incredible cultural contribution I’d discovered in my own lifetime. It was absolutely beautiful.
To take pieces of something that was created decades before you were born and then chop it up and collage it into something new, and then to be given this massive canvas —16 or 32 bars to say whatever you want? Rock music didn’t have that. Rock music was one color. There was no spectrum. Rock music cosplayed its elders rather than build upon it or invent something new. There was a limited vocabulary. Rap music was a whole new planet to me, and I spent years living there.
When I heard those first few notes of “Sinnerman” come through my television speakers the other night, it brought me back to that moment of discovery that I had back in 2010. Suddenly, I was on my couch falling in love with it all over again, likely looking like a cornball to my wife as she witnessed my flashback, enthusiastically singing along with eyes closed as I heard the Kweli song and the sample flip in my head. I recalled all the jazz and soul records I found through Nas, Wu-Tang, Outcast, A Tribe Called Quest, Beastie Boys, and every other rap icon that I’d studied.
It’s a shame that the industry never figured out how to handle sampling in a way that kept the art form alive. You can now subscribe to all sorts of websites and services to grab royalty-free samples for your music, and they replicate the experience, but it’s not the same. It’s always going to be missing the story and the cultural thread that connected the past to the present. The scavenger hunt experience that I fell in love with. Regardless of its near extinction, I’m thankful for that moment in musical history, as well as my late discovery of it.
During the time that I fell in love with sampling and all this music that was new to me, my peers were still very much entrenched in the rock world. And so my experience existed on an island, literally and figuratively. I was living on Long Island, feverishly rushing to friends’ places to share with them my new discoveries, and was mostly met with blank stares. “What is this? Why aren’t you singing on it? Why are you stealing other people’s music?” I lacked community, and so I lacked confidence. I made a lot of music during that time, and I had the courage to take the art form of sampling and do my own thing with it, but I didn’t have the courage to stand behind it in any real way.
Below are five instrumentals I made during that time. They were all created with an MPC1000, which I bought off Craigslist from a guy in Staten Island. I remember thinking that was perfect because…well, Wu-Tang. What took me hours, days, and weeks to do on that little machine now takes me seconds in software. But the tactile experience was special. It connected me to the people who inspired me to dive into that world in the first place.