make predictions about what will be in/win magazines' end of year polls - 2003...

"How is it okay for Dizzee Rascal to take the same sample that Run-DMC used and do effectively the same thing, when you'd probably villify Puffy for doing the same, repeatedly?"

I can't speak for Jess but I suspect he'd agree with me when I say that I wouldn't have a problem with Puffy doing the same thing. Often when Puffy *does* do the same thing (or something very similar) it works brilliantly; sometimes it sounds shit. The determinative factor is not the obviousness of the sample or its prior use.

As for Dizzee, you're totally taking this one song out of context and making it representative for Dizzee's craft as a whole. All the other tracks on Boy in da Corner are self-produced and don't like they rely on much sampling at all (except the occasional Playstation game noise maybe). The fact that "Fix Up Look Sharp" deliberately uses a familiar sampled beat and nothing else suggests that it's very deliberately trying to do and be something else; that "something" is two-fold, I think:

1. it's a demonstration of Dizzee's talent for freestyling over the beat, for being a raucous MC with no concerns about production/songcraft. The point of garage MCing is to ride other people's beats, to take them and make them your own. The backstory behind "Fix Up Look Sharp" is that Dizzee was in the studio, heard someone playing the instrumental break, and just started freestyling over it. If anything, the beat having a lineage and tradition makes it more ideal, because the assfuck-recontextualisation by the MC is consequently more radical and impressive.Oh, and see also: Jamaican riddim culture. And then see also: the eternally piratical nature of sampling throughout the hardcore continuum (hardcore--> jungle--> garage--> grime)

2. "Fix Up Look Sharp" is an old-skool beat in an album full of new-school beats. It's a very deliberate attempt by Dizzee to show that he's not "just" garage, but at the same time it's something of a very enjoyable novelty. Dizzee doesn't take the tradition of hip hop beatcraft seriously a la Jurassic 5 or DJ Shadow-style producers because he's working in a genre that is more forward-looking than tradition-venerating. For that reason, the sole purpose of the tune's old-skoolizm is to announce itself as old-skool. And it's much more effective to use an actual old-skool beat that is vaguely recognisable than it is to find something new and obscure. As I said in relation to Missy's Under Construction album (which has a fairly similar attitude to old-skool as "Fix Up Look Sharp" does), if you're going to an Eighties Revival costume party, you don't go as some obscure indie icon no-one but yourself will be aware of; you go as Cyndi Lauper or Madonna or Prince. This is about the past as fun, as shared history, rather than the past as a chessboard for beatmining fetishists.

Oh my god I bet you'd be the most boring DJ in the history of existence!

(i heart tim finney)

Yeah I'd be pretty angry too if I had to listen to you play "Chris Ott's History of the Best and Most Obscure Breaks Ever!!!"

Chris: if hard pressed, could you locate your own genitals? With a map?

(This is another way of asking if you hate fun.)

When you talk about music, you talk about the totality: the emotional, intellectual, cognitive, physical. Not to mention that music isn't heard in a vacuum; it's heard in a variety of different places, etc -- in your bedroom, in dance clubs, at the grocery store. You hear music in a variety of states of mind, too -- When you're sad, when you're happy, when you're angry, or indifferent. So to divorce music from dancing doesn't make sense, just like divorcing music from quarter notes and eighth notes doesn't make sense.

Yes exactly.

Yes, exactly. Low and Basement Jaxx are interchangeable.

Re: Low vs Basement Jaxx, I don't get what you're getting at.

Formulaic.

Tim, so basically, you're saying it's cool for Dizzee to be uncreative because his uncreativity is so incredibly uncreative that it borders on an unforeseen level of uber-innovation? Stop dressing up the situation. I don't see it as some kind of beautiful reinvention either. I can't see a lot of emcees getting away with this, but because he's a more introspective, junglist emcee, because it's 'his environment', he gets away with it? It's the same thing as every rapper making new songs over "Paul Revere", it's just lazy. And should I feel better about it because he doesn't really care about the beats he's making?

Rollie's applying a mentalist strict approach to sample creativity - Missy's not even allowed to reference De La Soul.

"But Chris I still think you're missing the point. The use of recognisable samples in Under Construction is not the result of Missy and Timbaland wanting to make music like they used to dance to and going to the most obvious records on their shelves. Rather, they're deliberately chosen to trigger the most frequent recognition for the most number of listeners in order to make a point about the specific nature of Missy and Timbaland's nostalgia - a nostalgia which is repeatedly explained to be not theirs alone, but a collective nostalgia. Collective nostalgia by its very nature revels in the overly familiar, because it gets by on cultural touchstones that "we" can take for granted as having shaped everyone's awareness. That's why heaps of people go to eighties revival nights as Madonna or Cyndi Lauper or Michael Jackson, but no-one goes as the drummer from The Minutemen (so far as I know!) - what's the point?

Likewise, for Missy and Timbaland, using unfamiliar samples would unnecessarily obscure the nature of the album's retro-fetish - it would bog the approach down in an overly loaded understanding of what their eighties hip hop "golden age" actually was, rather than what it felt like to someone like Missy who, strictly speaking, was probably too young to have an incredibly intimate knowledge of the source material. And it's only really the feeling that the duo are trying to evoke - the samples are largely decorative, and often their retro qualities exist in deliberate contrast to still-very-futurist grooves. In contrast most other current "golden age" hip hop shies away from obviousness in samples but boringly champions an aged + authentic approach to groove construction.

Ultimately I think the retro samples on Under Construction are used in a similar manner to the the way pop songs are used on the 2 Many DJs album, which is pushing an idea about pop as much as Missy is pushing an idea about hip hop. As both are essentially "arguments" as much as they are records, it only makes sense that their creators would cite the most recognised and persuasive precedents in support of their position."

While I can't make the exact same argument about "Fix Up Look Sharp", in Dizzee's case the "so much else" is his rapping, which is captivating even without any musical backing - in that sense the entire groove is the "surplus", almost throwaway. So you're half-right in that regard Rollie, except of course that you're totally ignoring the role of Dizzee's rapping. One should regard "throwaway sample backing" as playing the same role as "deliberately simple instrument-playing" in that it has two purposes - one) it's rushy, exciting stuff that operates on an entirely different plane to any boring ideas of "creativity" that you and Chris insist on peddling; and two) its deliberate lack of "craft" in one sense serves to highlight the presence of a totally different sort of craft (Dizzee's capabilities as an MC).

Explain what you mean by "mattering". In what sense does it not "matter"?

The verdict is still out on Dizzee for me though...my immediate reaction was negative, but it has grown on me. I still don't see whats so great about "I Luv U" though.

So wait...what exactly DO you think Missy's doing?
I don't see how Tim is overintellectualizing this at all...

Still, I see what you say about the purpose of Under Construction. But what's the point of her seemingly taking the same approach with this new album? Or Timbaland with his and Magoo's Under Construction 2 album?

This is a battle of personal preference, it seems. Personally, there's no point to the whole 'retro revival' concept. If I want to hear De La Soul, I'll listen to De La Soul. I don't care if they are trying to make a statement. Their whole music shouldn't be based completely on building upon the past.

This is pretty ironic, considering that you consider almost all hip hop albums of the 90s to be "full of filler".

And Rollie, the thing is, they AREN'T completely based on building on the past. Timbaland's beats are anything BUT reliant on the past - which is what makes the context of the use of "retro" sampling so cool. If he was doing entirely sample-based production a la Prince Paul, it'd be one thing....

life's too short to argue with morons.

or maybe just too much of mine.

(chris ott exemplifies old-pfork fear of body to a remarkable extreme -- dance and have fun? i'd rather sleep!) (if this had some bangsian self-loathing w/r/t the utter stupidity of this thrown in it could still make a cool article tho)

also chris Timbo is the main creative force behind Missy production. also do you hate all songs with I V IV after Louie Louie? if you're going to write a new song, why not use a new chord sequence? and all these records use the same instruments! if you're going to write a new song, why not invent new things to play it on?

also rollie, for pfork's "rap dude" (or one of them) how can you hate sampling so much? you do realize this invalidates most "old-school" rap far more than modern stuff, right!? "fuck eric b. and rakim -- they just stole from james brown, maaaan!"

really, what are you, eighty-five years old or something?

also if you don't rock the bufu you can't claim the bling.

christ, actually please never use that word again! (or at least until you listen to a b.g. or big tymers at the least album IN FULL)

He was spittin fire while you were still wearing training blinders.