Sunday, November 30, 2008

What do I have in common with Keyshia Cole?



Answer: We were both in Hip-Hop Weekly last week. Okay, bad quiz.

Diggers' Hotline: The Sylvers, Creative Source, Turkey.

Every now and then Memory (mostly him since he drives) and I have the fortitude to dig across town. We managed to hit four spots the day after Thanksgiving. Some notable finds included The Chambers Brothers, Circle of Fire, Linda Lewis, The Sylvers, and Creative Source.


I planned on uploading the Creative Source and Sylvers albums, but I found that two other bloggers had already done the job.



The Sylvers

"Something Special"

(1976)

Thanks to Good Groove for
posting this album
in 192 kbps.



Creative Source

"Creative Source"

(1973)

Originally posted at
Frisian's Other Favorites.
Thanks for doing the hard work!

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Wet wipes and prog rock

Up until very recently, I felt as though I was one of the few hip-hop producers who dug specifically for not only soul/funk/jazz but for progressive rock as well. Of course if you've been listening to hip-hop for a while, you'll hear the occasional Supertramp, Styx or Alan Parsons sample, but these were groups that managed to reach mainstream U.S. audiences at one point in time. I figured that Renaissance, Baltik and a few other relatively obscure prog records were more or less untouched and unsampled. Wrong. Leave it to Cam'ron (DIPSET!!) to shatter my delusion. On his 2006 album "Killa Season," which I found out DID reach gold (it was his lowest selling album, but come on...), Cam proves my notions of prog sampling wrong... twice.

Firstly, his track "Girls, Cash, Cars," produced by "Stay Gettin'" samples Rick Wakeman's "Black Knight." I was sitting on that sample for a while after I bought the record, along with "The Six Wives of Henry VIII." There went my chance. This track is also interpolated in the intro to Young Jeezy's "The Recession."

The second example on Killa Season is ever stranger than the first. The track "Wet Wipes" has the signature Alchemist sound-- dark, heavy and warm sounds, driving drums (see Lil Wayne's 'you aint got nothing')-- but I figured he produced the whole thing on a Nord Lead or something similar (I don't even know if he uses a Nord, but I wish I did). I was wrong. While I was looking through my own samples, I end up finding this:



Now check the Cam/Alchemist version:



Downloadable Clips
From the following albums: