D'Angelo's "Devil's Pie"

But the slice won't apply. Why is why till we fry? Watch his soul stay in line for a slice of the devil's pie. I think at the time I heard it, I thought it was more like, these are all terrible things. And like, I heard the moralizing now when I hear it. I sort of hear like, and I hope I'm not putting something on the Angelo that is not there, but it's almost like he's saying, these are the temptations that I personally am being faced with. I hear that too. And I don't want it, but yet we're programmed to want it. But it definitely feels a lot more personal. It's about temptation. It's about we can't control these things that are out there and tempting us and its life. All right, luxury. So today we're honoring an artist who epitomizes black genius. His music blurred the lines between gospel, funk, hip hop and jazz. Proving that soul music could evolve, challenge expectations and fill timeless all at once. That's right, T'Yallo. And today we're highlighting a song that was arguably a bridge between his debut and sophomore albums. Four shadowing the raw innovation and spiritual vulnerability that was to come. That's right. Today we're talking one song and that song is Devil's Pie by D'Angelo. What the slice won't apply? Why is why till we fry? Watch his soul stay in line for a slice of the devil's pie. I'm actor, writer, director and sometimes DJ D'Yallo Rill. And I'm producer, DJ, songwriter and musicologist Luxury, AKA the guy who whispers interpolation. And this is one song. The show where we break down the stems and stories behind iconic songs across genres and tell you why they deserve one more listen. You'll hear these songs like you've never heard them before and you can even watch one song on YouTube and Spotify while you're there, please like and subscribe. All right, D'Yallo, today we're going to pay tribute to an absolute legend that we lost this year, D'Angelo. This one hit us all pretty hard. Yeah, I think we're still dealing with it. You know, ironically, we just talked about D'Angelo while discussing Neil's soul. Just a couple of days before it happened. Crazy coincidence. He was very in front of my mind. I had just bought the record. It was on my turntable. I was listening to D'Angelo when I heard the news. It was right there. The cover was staring at me. Crazy. He was in the air. He has always been in the air. Absolutely. And I know that, you know, anybody who's ever worked with him or was close with him, still feeling it. So there's a little raw as we try and dive into this song and this legendary singer. And I'll even say, ever since we started the show, D'Angelo was an episode that we wanted to do. You know, something that we wanted to do for the very beginning. There are a couple of people, you know, from New York to Whitney, there's certain people who just, if you appreciate singers, you know that like, oh, we got to do an episode about them. So we're doing this episode admittedly because we're all thinking about him right now. And hopefully everybody will come away feeling like we've only celebrated this once in a lifetime artist. DiOlleriddle, when was the first time you heard D'Angelo? So I got brown sugar in the mail when I was working at my college radio station and D'Angelo immediately stuck out to be, first of all, he had cornrows and a leather jacket, which back then was like code for like, you know, probably like I'm a rapper. I'm an East Coast rapper specifically, you know, there was that I'm a thug, you know, that was out there because of a Tupac. But then when I put on the music, he was singing these beautiful soul songs. It was crazy that these two things together. I just remember being impressed by how his visual style and slang were very much rooted in the present of the mid 90s. Meanwhile, his sound was more informed by the past, but in a good way. That's really well said. And I had the same impression. There was something surprising about when he opened his mouth, whether it was to sing with his incredible vocals, but also just talking. He was obviously such a thoughtful person, like his creativity. It was all tied together with who he was very authentic, very vulnerable. His vocals are so vulnerable and real. The fact that they were getting into this and we listen to the stems, they were so raw and unprocessed and unperfected. Authentic. Authentic. They don't all line up perfectly. They don't all hit every single note exactly. This is when pro tools exists, but that isn't being used for any of this music. And I think it's it's exactly perfectly who he was as a person. And I also think it's a little bit about the timing because if you think about it, like this is a time when like we're still living with, you know, sort of like the polished Keith sweat, you know, like R&B singers typically still wear suits and look like, you know, very smooth, you know, like it was like that GQ smooth vibe that Eddie Murphy has in boomerang, you know, but this was decidedly not that. He's not doing that. He's a totally different guy who's just doing him. And yet he's still able to sing these beautiful ballads. I think it's one of those things that artistically when everybody else is saying, I'm going to the right, he was like, I'm going to go left. Like it's just something completely off into a different direction. I thought creatively that's what kept him so interesting for the start. What about you, luxury? What was the first time you heard DeAngelo? It was definitely the iconic video for untitled. That was the first time I saw and heard and the entire package was delivered and I received is a beautiful man with a beautiful voice and a beautiful video. The artistic everything was all encompassing. And of course I wasn't the only one who felt that way. We're going to get into this a little bit later, but that video made a big impression. A lot of people in a time before social media and everything being online, you can almost say it went viral, so to speak. Everybody was talking about it. And of course I'm talking about the iconic untitled video where DeAngelo is shown shirtless, gradual reveal that he's shirtless. It's a single shot and it rotates around his body while he sings this incredibly beautiful, vulnerable song. And it just gives you the entirety of who he was in one video. But of course it was also controversial. We'll be talking about a little bit later. We'll talk about that. The implications of how this video was for him as an individual and for his career. Absolutely. Since we're here to pay tribute to DeAngelo, why don't we back up a bit and talk a little bit about how DeAngelo, a.k.a. Michael Eugene Archer, got his start in Richmond, Virginia. So DeAngelo was the son and the grandson of Pentecostal ministers and he grew up in the church. There's some incredible early footage of him in the church like singing and playing piano. He's an incredible keyboard player. Wow. He started playing piano when he was three. My three year olds have just not been this impressive. No, they've been underwhelming. I wanted to talk to you about their piano performance. Watching Coco Mellon all day. And in addition to his early piano prodiginess, he also joined the choir at age five. So music is in his blood at an early age. Plus he was just born with something special. So he was taught these things and he was in the church environment to like learn and become and grow at them. But there was also some seed that was just who he was. That's right. I think there was clearly something going on there. It's also such an analog period in time. Like I do think that like, you know, there's so many digital distractions for kids now. Their creativity goes elsewhere. Right. You know, but at this time it was just like, oh, I have all these, you know, musical thoughts. I got to join a choir. You know, it's fine. I'm fine, but I got to do something with my life. Not only was the Angelo growing up with a heavy dose of gospel, he was also soaking up the sounds of legends like Prince and Al Green. They're also newer artists at the time. I'm talking Key Sweat. I'm talking about the band Guy. Like he's digesting all of this too. It was interesting is that the Angelo has said it was actually Teddy Riley's fusion of hip hop and R&B that really pushed him into start making his own music. You know, we've talked on the show about New Jack's Wing. Now Brown sugar for those who've heard it, we know that's anything we would ever qualify as New Jack's swing, but you can clearly hear DeAngelo blending hip hop and R&B in his own way. And that's one of the things that makes him so unique. Let's check out a bit from the title track for Brown Sugar. This is Brown Sugar. I love that song. It's so bad. And you can hear so much of what's coming in his future in that because there's like that old organ in there. Sounds like a church organ. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, by the way, he played all the instruments on this. It's just him and Ali Shahid Muhammad, right? Ali Shahid Muhammad, one of our unsung heroes because I don't think that I knew at the time that he was a part of this project and he surely was. I'd also be remiss if I didn't play my favorite song off of this album. I love his remake of Cruisin by Smokey Robinson. Yeah. But really Lady, which is Rafael Sadiq produced, I believe. This song just sends me. Here's a little bit of the album version of Lady. And here's a gem for fans of D'Angelo. This is a live version of the song on the Chris Rock Show back in 1997, performing with Rafael Sadiq, Ali Shahid Muhammad and Questlove. Like I said, on the Chris Rock Show, this is Lady Live. So fun to see them all young like that. Incredible. Yeah. Great footage. It's not new jack swing, but it's swing. All these songs have swing. Well, they do have a swing and I think some of that has to do with Rafael Sadiq. And I just realized while watching that clip, to me, Rafael Sadiq is like now Rogers. He's a little bit like Pharrell. He has his own recording career, but you get the sense he actually enjoys producing for other people too. I think so. Participating in all of these incredible other career. Yeah. Yeah. Seeing him like on that stage, like sort of like, you know, bouncing around with his guitar. Like you get the sense he's very much in his, I create music because it makes me happy space. Yeah. And I just, I love Rafael Sadiq. It's just, he's done so many things, whether with Tony, Tony, Tony or Lucy Pearl or DeAngelo, like it just people slept on his album instant vintage, great album. And if you ever get a chance, please go back and listen to that. No, you're right. He's kind of like, like Mark Ronson is kind of a similar figure where he's a producer, a songwriter. He has his own career, but he's also constantly collaborating and you see him like playing bass on stage with maybe, you know, Maroon of Mars or Lady Gaga, whoever it is. And he enjoys that. Yeah. He enjoys being part of eclectic mix of music. Thank you. I love this quote from DeAngelo about his approach to combining R&B and hip hop. He said, quote, to me, it's not melding the two worlds so much as it's exposing where they meet in the middle. That's great. And I cannot agree more. It's not that he was melding. He was literally just saying like, Hey, there's so much shared culture here overlap. Yeah. That we're not exploring, you know, in some of the contemporary R&B of the moment. Let's, let's go a third way. And I'll say as like a guy who was primarily hip hop at this time, like this was R&B that I could really get into, like, you know, real way because there seemed to be so much happening sonically that felt almost more hip hop to me than even R&B at that time. I wonder if it's just the organic instruments because I am trying to find what that middle ground is. It's such a great quote and I hear it, but I'm trying to tease out what the specifics are. I think, you know, in some ways, maybe it is that there's an organic drummer. So this programming actually like on Brown Sugar, I looked it up. I didn't know. I believe it. Program drums. But I feel like sound real. You know, I'm just thinking about the R&B at the time. Like nowadays it's actually hard to put yourself in a time capsule and go back and be like, oh, this, yeah, there's, of course, there's R&B that sounds like this, not at that particular moment. Yeah. It was mostly digital. It was mostly synthetic production. It was very smooth. Yeah. I love Keith's wit. He's a great guy personally and artistically, but everything was very smooth. It's very clean, very smooth. But this felt different. This felt more for the lack of a better term, like grimy and grimy. It felt more like, it felt more like East Coast hip hop at the time. Well, obviously D'Angelo's Brown Sugar was as a breakthrough record, something that put his career to the next level. And that's a record that he worked on with Bob Howard, it should be said. Go back to our tribe called Quest. Episodes are two parter for more about him, an engineer who really brought out a lot of the sonics. But D'Angelo has said in upon reflection, what he was wanting to do for the next record was go a little bit of a different direction and go back to what the demos sounded like before they turned into the final version of Brown Sugar. There was something in those demos that he had done at home with a four track just by himself, where once it got produced, it lost something to him. There was something that changed. When it came time to make Voodoo, it was an exploration and a search for something that didn't really have a name. And that was a big part of the process and we'll be getting into that later. What's crazy is I feel like I hear exactly what D'Angelo is saying. Like I absolutely hear where there is a smoothness in the Brown Sugar album that's definitely thrown out by the time that we get all the way to Voodoo. But there was a process getting there and sort of along the lines of talking about that process of getting there after the huge success of Brown Sugar, D'Angelo started feeling the pressure to follow it up, you know, with something, you know, just as big. And that led to some serious writer's blog. There was also getting frustrated with being labeled Neo Soul, which is funny because I think that we talk about genre on the show all the time. We use these terms like Neo Soul and New Wave so that it's easier to talk about music. But in our heart of hearts, it's not so that we can put the artists that we love into a box. So I even understand why D'Angelo did not feel totally comfortable with the idea of Neo Soul. But we've talked about it before and it's worth saying that even the term Neo Soul was actually created and marketed by his then manager, Qatar Massenberg. What actually broke him out of this crippling writer's blog was the birth of his son. He had a son with Angie Stone, who I'd also love to do an episode about, the birth of Michael Archadrugner, aka Swayvo Twain. In fact, the first song he wrote for Voodoo, Send It On, was something that he and Angie Stone wrote together. Let's hear a little bit of Send It On. And if you send it on, send it back, send it on. Lord, I got the send it on. Thank you. Love that song. So good. It's like the tightest, coolest, untight rhythm section of all time. Tight, untight. What's going on in that rhythm section? Well, just one thing that happens a lot in both albums, actually, we've been discussing is the side stick on the drum kit, like this use of the stick to hit the rim. It's not a rim shot, by the way, common, common this conception. A rim shot is very loud. A rim shot is like, you're actually hearing the snare and the rim at the same time. So it's really loud. But a side stick is that really kind of cool mellow. It's very jazz. It's softer. And it's all over both of these records. I spend time with Questlove in the studio sometimes and every now and then he'll just be there and he'll be doing that little side stick right there. I didn't know they had a name. That's pretty cool. It's Moss Chill, man. Moss Chill. Let's shout out some of the incredible players on sitting on. And the rest of Voodoo, we got Questlove on drums, Pino Paladino on bass, Bankie Alford on guitar, and Roy Hargrove on trumpet and flue horn. And I also want to mention Russell Elavato as, yeah, as mixer and head engineer. And also Sugar Steve, who, you know, is a buddy of mine. And I know that like so many who worked on this album, Voodoo, there's a lot of hurt, you know, there's a lot of sadness, but we're here, like I said, to celebrate. And I'd be remiss if I didn't point out the credited, by the way, interpolation or interpolation on the song. That's right. Cool and the gang's C.O. Tranquility is interpolated at the very top of the song. So here it is incended on and then I'll play for you the source of what was replayed. Cool and the gang's C.O. Tranquility from 1969 sounds a little like this. It's a fair cop, you know, you use that. Absolutely. You pay for it. And you know what, it actually tracks with the stories that they've said, which is that they would go into the studio and they would watch all these, you know, VHS tapes and self-burden DVDs that Questlove had of these performers, you know, they were, you know, digesting all this stuff. They were absorbing and digesting and really like the word ingestion is a huge process for a year from what I've come to here in all of the interviews and there's many wonderful interviews with Questlove and D'Angelo and the rest of them. They'd spent almost a year at Electric DVD Studios. Actively recording. This isn't like one of those things where they're like, I would be back up in a couple of months. They would, they said, quote, the majority of the time we would sit and watch prints and that's how the process would start. We would sit in front of the TV from seven in the evening to nine o'clock. We would watch performances over and over again and then they'd go to the studio and just having like absorbed into their bodies the experience of watching and listening to this music and talking about it and playing records. Then they would go to the studio and start playing and it would gradually morph and evolve naturally into original material. It starts as them maybe covering an idea or taking a little fragment of something they'd heard and expanding on that. And before you know it, it becomes something completely new. And sometimes it doesn't, such as in this case where they're like, you know what, let's just keep that go on the gang thing we liked, which is what they ended up doing on this song. And I have to say this. This is all self-archived material. Think about the year, everybody. This is like late 98, 99. Like you don't have YouTube nowadays. People were like, oh, have you ever seen a Jimmy Hittrick's perform on that weird late night show with a, you know, like, here it is. Now you just jump there and you go there. And it's like, this is all stuff that like almost like in his backpack, Queslum is walking around with like every episode of Soul Train. Okay. And that's so important to realize that like, that's the level of commitment that you had to have back then to be able to produce to somebody and say, Hey, by the way, I've got all these performances on tape or on DVD. You, Queslum likes to say that at the time before there was YouTube, he was YouTube. He says that he was the guy that everyone would send the archival to like rare footage. And then he would go from, you know, country to country with touring with the roots and people knew that Queslum just was absorbing, he was a collector. So they'd give him not just records and B sides of like, you know, records, not just musical material, but also VHS tapes of like rare archive, like, you know, live performances that had never been, you know, released publicly of Prince and, you know, Slime the Family Stone. So he just kept all this stuff. I think he's got lots of warehouses somewhere in Philadelphia. And this was the material that they absorbed and they were able to sort of swim in their influences in the process of making this record. Queslum, by the way, called these treats quote unquote, like these, he said, we had all these treats lying around and they would study these treats. And he said that they had a handful of influences in particular that he called, he referred to as the Yodas. So the Yodas were Jimi Hendrix, George Clinton, Prince, I think Sly Stone, Al Green, Phelacuti were all in the mix as like, these were the ones that were particularly absorbed into their musical bloodstreams in the process of making this record. That's so interesting because all those guys like lead bands. That's a really good point, right? These are all like individual visionaries, musical visionaries who sort of put the pieces together with different musicians from album to album year to year. All these guys were band leaders. They were literally like Miles Davis and Duke Ellington in that sense. I mean, what are their influences? Clearly Jimi Hendrix, what can you tell us about the relationship of Voodoo with Jimi Hendrix? Jimi Hendrix was at the core of the operation here. Jimi Hendrix, first of all, this is recorded at Electric Lady Studios, which at the time, go back to our Jimi Hendrix, by the way, double episode, we talk about the making of Electric Lady Land, the record at Electric Lady Studios, which was It seems like it should be the opposite, right? Electric Lady should be the song Electric Lady Land should be the place. I do. It is classic me to get those two confused. I think we're all confused. Electric Lady is the studio and when they came to Electric Lady, they hadn't really been used in a long time. But when they walked in the doors and they saw all the iconic, like literally the Rhodes keyboard that Stevie Wonder had used and like Jimi Hendrix wall, it's like the 70s music that they had been listening to and absorbing. This was the place and this was the vibe. And this is where they sat for a year and change, jamming, eventually turning the jams into songs and just living and breathing in the music. And Jimi was sort of the central shrine in all of this was Jimi Hendrix, literally images of him throughout the studio. Of course, this being the place where he made that record and they literally jammed on Jimi Hendrix songs to that was the the genesis of the song Root came out of jamming on a handful of tunes from Electric Lady Land and Access Bold as love. So there's a lot of Jimmy in the mix in this record. Oh, I hear the Jimmy. Why is that so good? Why is it so good? Why is music so good? But why is that music so good? That music is so good because you get the sense that they were in the studio 12 hours listening to all their favorite stuff and they're like, let's record. And the dryness of all of it is so real because they're not adding lots of reverb and effects. There's almost none. Like I don't hear any. There's probably a little bit, but the dryness makes it very intimate. You hear it's like they're in the room with you. It's like a musical whisper. Like they're like right there in your ear. And by the way, I really heard the Jimmy having teed it up with that with like knowing the backstory for the song. Castle's made of sand. Yeah. Like in that guitar line. It's not the same, but I hear the influence. I hear where you start with Castle's made of sand and you tweak it. You go sideways from it and you have a completely new song that comes from it. Castle's made of sand. Fall in the sea. Eventually. So this song is a good example of what Quest calls the drunken beat. D'Angelo famously wanted him to drag the beat versus playing it straight, which gives it almost like a wobbly feel. We've talked about Dylan's influence on D'Angelo in the past. Let us know. What is this? Listen, go back to our Farsight episode. It's one of my favorites. They're all great. We don't have any bad episodes. But on the Farsight episode, we go into more detail about Dilla. I do some demonstrations. Basically though, in a nutshell, here's the summary. If you want to really broadly talk about how time, musical time works, there's usually straight time and then there's swing time. But then there's this third category called Dilla time. That's Dan Charnes' phrase. And actually JD himself called it simple complex. It just means that multiple things are happening at once in the stack of instruments. And so that's a very oversimplified way of explaining it. But I'll just be really clear. Some of the things that might be swung. So you might swing the kick drum while the hi-hat remains straight eighths. That's what happened in the demonstration for Farsight for running. The eighth notes are da, da, da, da, da, da. But where the kick and snare come are not on the grid. They're a little bit ahead. They're not frontized. They're a little behind. They're usually a little bit behind. But sometimes they're a little bit ahead. So this idea of Dilla time is just playing with the lines between swing and straight time, the lines between one instrument is playing this one, another one is playing like one instrument could be swung. But the bass might just be straight. But even within the instruments, and this is what Quest famously, he's talked many times about how he trained himself to sort of have the kick drum sound like a drunken five-year-old or something like that. While the snare might remain on the two and four. So that's kind of this idea of playing with time and it shows up throughout this whole record kind of on all the instruments. Sometimes it'll be in the drums. A lot of the vocals, a lot of D'Angelo's vocal delivery plays with back phrasing and being just a little behind. But maybe one of the harmonies is right on. It's amazing what it does for this record. Unlike most of the songs on Voodoo that were played, like you said, with live instruments and with this live jam feel, Devil's Pie started off as a beat produced by the legendary hip hop producer, DJ Premier. The story goes that it was originally intended for the rapper, Cannabis, who passed on it. But when D'Angelo heard it, he loved it immediately. We're going to take a quick break, but don't go anywhere. When we come back, we're breaking down the magic behind Devil's Pie from the gritty samples to those wonderful D'Angelo vocals. When we get back. Guys, Wayfares Black Friday sale is the perfect time to score huge deals on all things home, no matter what your style. Wayfares is the place to shop for all things home, everything from sofas to spatulas. You name it, they have it, and you can get up to 70% off during Wayfares Black Friday sale. That's right. Wayfares also has styles that you can't find anywhere else. No generic pieces. You've seen it under times. You can make sure your home is incredibly you. Starting October 30th, you can shop Wayfares, but you can't miss Black Friday deals all month long. Plus, you can sit back and relax with Wayfares Fast and Easy Shipping just in time for the holidays. D'Angelo, what are you doing for Thanksgiving? I think we're actually going to stay in town. So that means we have a whole bunch of family coming over. And that means, honestly, given how they really put it on us to be good hosts, we're going to decorate the heck out of our house. So we're going to use Wayfares to do it because everything from the cooking utensils and everything that takes to sort of make your place look festive, you know, for the harvest. The spatulas and the sofas, as we were just mentioning, everything, the gamut. It runs the gamut of what all of our holiday needs are. Wayfares is the go-to destination for everything home, no matter your style or budget. Our reward is to get the best savings in the neighborhood with Wayfares new loyalty programs, 5% back on every item across Wayfares family of brands, free shipping, members only sales, and more terms apply. Wayfares makes it easy with fast and free shipping, even on the big stuff. They'll even help you set it up. Don't miss out on early Black Friday deals. Head to Wayfare.com now to shop Wayfares Black Friday deals for up to 70% off. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com. Sale ends December 7th. Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run, and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand, marketing tools that get your products out there, integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time, from startups to scale-ups, online, in-person, and on the go. Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at shopify.com slash setup. All right, welcome back to one song. All right, Luxury, let's get into the music. Should we start with the main drum sample? Let's start with it. And just to remind her, this song is such an outlier on this record. It's just two guys. There's no Questlove on this. There's no Dilla, like literally or figuratively. It's just D'Angelo and DJ Premier. It started with DJ Premier creating this beat, which I will now play for you. And that's it. A two-bar loop, a kick, a snare, and a hi-hat. Program, by the way, I should say. So DJ Premier originally from Houston, Texas. His name is Chris Martin, but he started as Waxmaster, C before becoming DJ Premier or Primo, as he's famously known. With Guru, he was in the duo Gangstar. And then of course, very famously and epically as well as a DJ slash producer, did cuts, including and not limited to Nautz's New York State of Mind. He had a kick in the door for Biggie. It's almost too much to name. You've got Come Clean by J.Roo the Damage. You've got, I mean, like that's, his production career is intense. It's insane. Right, but what's crazy about it? Group Home, Superstar, all that. You could keep on naming names. You could keep on going and going. What's crazy though is I found a quote where he talks about how at heart he still thinks of himself as like mainly a DJ. He's DJ Premier and quote, the producing pays the bills. What? Yeah, I know. Did he really? Yeah. Like that's insane. I know he's got that's like Leonardo DiCaprio being like, I got this piece up and it's really my helicopter designs. Like what in the world? That's, that's, I've never knew that. He's a very talented man on the decks, but also on the MPC. He doesn't both, but DJing, his identity. It sounds like DJ Premier, it says it right there in the title as, as a DJ. Well, yeah. So he produced this track. It's an amazing track. So I'm going to recreate by the way the samples coming up, but first let me just quickly walk you through his process. So what we know about DJ Premier's production process at this point in 1998 when this track was made was that he had two Akai's. He had a Rockmount S950, which was his main sampler. That's what he would use to sample records and to get the sounds into the device. But then he would actually use his MPC 60 with the 16 pads, the class. Yeah. As a performance device. That was his instrument. The one that gets shout out on all the 90s hip hop songs. The MPC is the hip hop tool of choice. Yeah. And specifically the 60, I want to say. The 60, right. At this point, the 60 is the one. So he uses it not as a sampler, but just to trigger the sounds. Cool quote from DJ Premier. He said, I tend to program my drums, but a lot of the time I'll turn off the 16th note, meaning the quantization, which would get a perfect. And I'll play the MPC live. So it sounds like live drumming. I like it to sound loose. That's why my drums have a little bounce to them. I'm not sure on this track. That's a two bar loop. What I just played for you across the entire song. I listened the entire way. There's a little bit of variation. So he might have played this one on the pads. He might not have, but I'll play them for you. I'll recreate what he might have done with his MPC 60. Oh, cool. This is an Akai device made for the digital age. So this is a way to trigger sounds that are coming from Ableton, but it's not that dissimilar from the idea behind an MPC, which is that there's eight pads here. I'm holding my device. It's got eight of what he would have had 16 pads, each of which you put a sound in. So in this case, he's chopped up three sounds. There's a kick. There's a snare and there's a hi hat. So from that quote again, he may have programmed the pattern across the song, or he may have performed it like this. All right. I think we can call that successful. 92% accurate. I love that boom, Bap. It's the boom, Bap. It's that boom, Bap, DJ Premier, just really known for it. It sounded so good when you were in your headphones, walking down the street, you know, feeling yourself. Yeah. And it's got a little bit of swing. It's got that like walking down the street swing to it. It's not straight. It's good. It's that second kick drum, that 16th, boom, boom, that gives it a little bit of a swing. Yeah, I love it. I love it. It felt a little bit like a beat down, but you also might just be walking down the street. Like a beat down. I grew up in a violent neighborhood. Let's talk about the bass. What's going on with the bass in this song? And by the way, can I just say, I think the bass is one of the other just, I mean, obviously defining features of the song. It sounds so good. Not only is it the defining feature of the song, this song has like kind of four things in it. Yeah. It's that drum beat we just listened to, the bass we're about to hear, DeAngelo's voice, and then peppered throughout, sprinkled throughout. There's a handful of samples and scratching, but it's a really sparse song that's really centered on. And very dark. I mean, like you got to remember coming out of Brown Sugar, which was like beautiful and lush, like cruising and lady and me and those dreamy eyes of mine. Like those are so beautiful. And then this song comes and it sounds more ominous and dark. Yeah. You know, that part of it. The sparseness, I think, contributes to the darkness. Totally. I think, you know, it's a little bit like what we're talking about, Riz's production for Wu Tang, like that sparseness kind of creates a darker. Yeah, there's all of the harmonic content, all of the polyphony in the song is in the vocal. There's only a single bass note that you're ever hearing at any given time. There's no guitars. There's no keyboards. There's no chords being played across the entire song, except in the vocal stacks. And boy, those are some big chords when we hear them in the moment. Absolutely. But first, let's start with the bass. Woo. Come on. That was cycling through my head all night long. That means like so good. Why did I just say, come on, like I'm seven. Come on, young man. They didn't say, let's go. They said, come on. Come on. Everybody come on. I thought you're doing an ODB thing. Come on. Come on. Come on. Different song. So let's talk about the bass. This is not contrary to what you might think from listening to the rest of the record and maybe knowing about it. It's not Pinot Palladino, but it sounds very Pinot Palladino. That's crazy to me because I guess not knowing, you know, the intricacies of music production at the time this came out, I would have assumed that the same basis was on the entire album. It really fits into the record. It's really interesting how that happens. Like there's something about the tone and the choice of notes and even the melodicism. I'll talk in a minute about the strangeness of what's happening in the notes that are being played. But first I'll recreate it because this is a sample that comes from a Teddy Pendergrass song from 1977 called And If I Had. That's what makes Premiere a freaking genius, dude. Yeah, right. Just this little fill at the beginning. That little intro doesn't even have a rhythm to it. It's just a slide into a song and he reworking in our brain so much. I love stuff like that. I can't pretend to be anywhere near the genius of a Premiere or a Dilla, but I do have the ear of someone who's been chopping breaks for two decades now. You go about the world and you hear an isolated section of something. Yeah. It starts with drums. I remember being at a cafe when I first started producing and I heard train in vain by the clash. I'm like, I'm going to go grab that cake and snare. And then your whole life unfolds in front of you. You're constantly like, I'm going to go grab that isolated thing. Premiere's brain does many things that I don't understand. But he heard this and he's like, I can take those bass notes and build a new bass line out of it. I guess for me, it's just almost like a tempo thing, right? Like it's almost like a, there are times when you'll hear like a weird little part of a song. Yeah. And because it's already into the song and there's always like four or four time or whatever, like you'll be like, oh, that small little snippet. But this is even not even that. This is like something that technically is not on a time signature yet. It's the slide into the song. I hear what you're hearing. Yeah. What you're hearing in that moment, it's free floating. It's the top of the song. It's about to introduce you to what ended up being a very slow ballad. Yes. So it's sort of that more shocking to realize that it was put into this 92 BPM too. You named it. Right. Yes. So cool, right? Well, let me show you what he did to that. So we always do this. There's a sample phantom on this song. There's a gentleman who's a bass player whose name we know. So that player is Jimmy Williams, who is part of the Philly International Contingent. By the way, another Philly connection. That's fantastic. Gamblin Huff, come on. Gamblin Huff, McFadden and Whitehead. One of my favorite baselines of all time is this gentleman. Here it is. McFadden and Whitehead, eight no stop in the snow in 1979. Jimmy Williams, give it up. Here we go. When I sit down in front of Ableton with my bass strapped on and I got a beat ready and I'm like, I'm going to create a new song. I often start with that. I often go sideways. How can I do something like that but different? It's melodic. It's grooving. It's funky. Jimmy Williams. It's Jim Williams. Bernard Edwards. Bernard Edwards. They're their, their, their baselines are just really, really complicated. And they didn't have to be that complicated, but because they are, they're so great. You just love it. It just makes a smile. It's a hook. It fulfills the purpose that your brain needs from a song, which is usually in the vocal. But no, no, this is giving you a melody, but it's groovy and it's low and sexy. The same basis on eight no stop in us now is on devil's pie. That's right. So let me just remind you of what the original sounds like. Right. So it's blinking. You miss it. One, two, three, four, four notes. It's on a Waltz swing. You're right. It's like 12 eight time, like a triplet feel. So great. So we took those four notes. He pitched the entire thing down one or he pitched all the individual notes down one, mapped them to his MPC and performed by the way, part of his own song. He's talked about is there's a lot of trial and error. So he played around with different ideas until he got to this one, which is each of those sounds chopped up and pitched down and one of them pitched down again. So I'll just explain that to you. So here it is. That's the beginning of the pattern. And that's the fourth note, but then he pitches that fourth note down three more steps. So he's playing the first note down one, and then he's playing the second note down the fourth note down three more steps to get a fifth note out of it. So he's playing this. And that's the baseline to doubles pie. It's so genius. It's so genius. There's little subtle things that he left in that are different. These three notes are done down down in the transposition down one step, one half step. That's B C sharp B, but the B's are different is short. And the second one is longer. And he used them in the mix differently. They fulfill different functions. If you were to do it doesn't work as well. So he did longer one. It's just these little subtle genius. And by the way, it's because of the song he sampled. It sounds like you have a live basis on. Oh, you hear the fingers, you hear the strings, you hear the slide of the strings. Yeah, no, it's especially on this note. Yeah, hiding down. But you could play those notes on a keyboard, but it wouldn't sound the same because you wouldn't you wouldn't feel the thread. The second bar just has these two sliding notes, one of which is pitched down an extra three. So it sounds like this. Which gives it the sort of like drunken feel, which is happening across a lot of the other Dilla inspired parts of this record. I love it. While we're talking about these samples, there's this other part in the song. It's like this descending almost sounds like something out of the movie Alien. It sounds like something out of the Alien franchise. But I'll play us a little bit of that just so the audience doesn't want to talk about it. Okay, here it is in the mix. This is also topped up from a sample, which I'll show you in a second. But first, here's what it sounds like in the mix. Isolated. Yeah, that's it. Sounds like a 1960s flying saucer landing. Bingo. Oh, no, do I guess you nailed it, my friend? It is an actual flying saucer that they recorded in 1967. Oh, okay. No, but you're not wrong. It's called Jericho Jerk. It's a song from 1967 by Pierre Henry or Henri, maybe. And Michonne Colombier. And it sounds like this in its original form. Wow. It's a groovy. I'm feeling this. I have been waiting for this song to do something so I could place it neatly in a genre and it refuses to cooperate. It really is not cooperative at all. This song is five minutes of intro. It's a long ass intro. I don't know. I don't know. Is this... Where's it going? We're halfway through the song. I thought it was going to go to a lougie place. It never went there. It never went there and we're halfway done. I'll fast forward. Let's just see where it ends up. Nope. I'd submit it 40. That's what it was. Now it's over. It gave you genre in the last bar. Because... In the last two seconds of that song, it went to genre. It's all freaking awesome late 60s sound effects and modes. So good. Next time I throw a party with a shag carpet and a twister set, I am putting that song on for 11 minutes. That's the one. That was fantastic. That's a really cool, weird song. It's a cool, weird song and the same dudes who did that did the song that Futurama based their theme song on. That is super cool. Premier had that in his back pocket. He knew the sound. He's waiting for the moment. And this was the moment. I mean, from that weird quirky sound, which does play a huge part in why we love this song. It's one of the only things you're hearing that isn't his voice and the rhythm section. It's almost all there is in the middle. He took this thing that didn't have a rhythm or tempo and he gave it to it and birthed this new song. Another thing that I think Premier does that I absolutely love is that he'll take the smallest word snippet. He's done this so many times. He'll cut them into whole sentences to be the chorus of a whole other song. He did this famously on one of his own songs. This is a snippet from Gang Stars. You know my steeze. Check out this chorus. You know my steeze. Method. Let him know. Do your thing, y'all. Keep it live. Live. Do the beat y'all. The beat is sound. Like, just the king of that. Yeah, it's re-contextualizing. You got methamphetamine, flavor of flavor. You got a couple of different hip hop icons all sampled to form a whole new sentence for the chorus of that song. And he does a little bit of this on this song, on Devil's Pie. Yeah, we pop. We're going to play. Check it out. Listen, obviously that last one is Fat Joe, a song called Success. But he's got vocal sampling in there from Rick Juan. I and I, which if you don't know the song, Fake and Jax, you've probably heard in some of your favorite post 1997 hip hop songs. Go check out Fake and Jax by I and I by a group produced by Pete Rock, among others. You got Dick Gregory in there, a speech called Black Progress. You've got Rick Juan and Ghost Face from Who Gant Beans, the Beans off the books this year. So many wonderful moments of him just grabbing snippets and little pieces of Black 90s excellence. I love it. I love what Premier does when he scratches a vocal in. And while we're talking about vocals, this wouldn't even be a New Angelo episode unless we talked about the amazing singer at the heart of all this wonderfulness. Such a great song. Such poignant lyrics. We'd love to hear something. Why don't you start us off, my man? But the slides won't apply. Why is why? Till we fry. Watch us all stand in line for what's like Southern Devil's pie. Insane. So beautiful. Beautiful. The stack. The stack is all the Angelo. It's him for maybe five voices at times. It's hard actually for me to extract what those harmonies are because those are church and gospel and jazz, frankly, chords. The overlap of all of that is there. You can really hear the gospel influence from the band. Very close harmonies, very interesting choices. They don't stack perfectly and that's part of the beauty of it. So it's like three or four at a time, right? At least. There might be four or five. At the very least, I can get one or two of the voices out of there. Let's see what that sounds like. Here's the background. The slides won't apply. Why is why? Till we fry. And then here's the lead and I'll mix them together. But the slides won't apply. Why is why? Till we fry. Watch your soul stand in line. For the slice of the devil's pie. What's crazy about these lyrics to me is that I think I understood them one way when they came out. And I understand them totally differently now. When I came out, it felt like, hey, this is messed up. We're all standing in line trying to get a piece of the devil's pie. Wine and women. By the way, I'd like the women is always a sin because it's always been singing. But like crazy, forbidden, sexual fans, all that stuff is in this song. It actually reminds me of the Depeche Mode song, Walking in My Shoes, where he says, Forbidden food for me to eat. You mean it's vulnerable. It's not just decrying all the sins. Well, but that's the thing. Admitting defeat to a degree. I think at the time I heard it, I thought it was more like, these are all terrible things. And I heard the moralizing now when I hear it. I sort of hear like, and I hope I'm not putting something on the Angelo that is not there, but it's almost like he's saying, these are the temptations that I personally am being faced with. I hear that too. I hear that too. And I don't want it, but yet we're programmed to want it, whether we're programmed at birth genetically to want more, more, more, you know, things in excess, or maybe society has pushed us towards that. But it definitely feels a lot more personal. It's about temptation. It's about, it's about, we can't control these things that are out there and tempting us and its life. And maybe it's something in the middle. Maybe he's both judging these things, but also saying, yes, I too understand why people fall for the devil's power. I hear that too. And that was like on repeated listens as well. I think the first time I heard it, it felt like a moralizing thing as well. Yeah. And not a bad message, not one that I can't stand behind. Like, you're right. Like be, be careful of things that are bad for you. Well, I mean, he's going to have a gospel background. So he probably has pretty strong opinions about. And the devil's pie, it's right there in the title, right? Right there in the title. But I also think that, you know, as you get older, you start to, I don't know. A part of me is just like, have we gone too far on the sin thing? Like, can we let people just be people a little bit and show them some, and show them some grace? I don't know. It's a hard thing to nail. It's a hard thing to nail. I think that's part of the human condition is you navigate day to day and you try to make good decisions and you try to also not restrict yourself from doing it. That are fun that don't hurt people, but like a drink every now and then. If you're not an alcoholic, you know what I mean? Like a part of me doesn't want my kids to ever have a drink, but then another part of me doesn't. You know that that moralizing is going to work. If you like, if you, you know, put the hammer down and like never do it, it tends to backfire. Right. Backfiring hammers. I'm mixing my metaphors, but you get my point. I totally get your point. I think, I think you change as you get older and it makes sense that I would hear that song one way in 98 and hear it very differently now. But that's just the chorus. Let's dive into the verse. One thing I wanted to point out, by the way, is that the rhythm of this song is consistent. It's the same in the bass as it is in the vocal. He's singing the same. I'll play them together and you can hear how they lock in, except that he's also adding this behind the beat. Variations from moment to moment. Yeah. And I even hear like a churchy hand clap. There's snaps and hand claps, but I'll play, let me just play what I'm just describing so you can hear how the bass and the vocal lock together, or at least they were late. So in the first bar of that two bar loop, they're locked in and then they sort of go call and response. So there's an interplay between the two. It's a 16th note. One, he and I was three and a four. One, he and a two and a three. And again, it's swung. It's behind the beat. It's inconsistent, but that's kind of the world we're living in rhythmically, which helps, I think, reinforce the simplicity of that motif. Is the whole song. Yeah. Really hearing that across the five minutes, which is why by the end of it, it's just embedded in your brain. You've heard it in the vocals. You've heard it in the bass. And can we just say something about those lyrics? Because I almost got chills just hearing it in his own voice because it's more like a speech and less like a song. So some of that stuff lands harder sometimes. He says, who am I to justify all the evil in our eyes when I myself feel the high from all that I despise? Like, so in other words, just like what we were just talking about, like, we know the pleasant buzz you can get off of a great glass of wine, but we don't necessarily want our children drinking wine, right? So it's just like, and he's on a whole different level. He's an international superstar. Lord knows what he's been offered and he's saying, like, you know, who am I to judge when I felt that high? This is the cognitive dissonance, especially of a, like, of a deep thinker who's sort of self aware and it can put into his art this moment of decision paralysis. Like, I don't want to do it, but I kind of do. I know I shouldn't, but I still kind of want to. I know what it's like and I know I shouldn't, but I want to anyway. Yes. And one other thing I just got to point out. Like, to me I love hearing his voice when he's talking like this because it's still just even the way he's delivering the thing is sort of rhythmic and I was thinking like at 92 BPM is just this weird DJ thing. DJ thing like a prince. Let's go crazy the same way. I always hear in the back of my mind like a church clap. So it's like It's just that it's that back clap, you know that clap Yes, I heard it just now when I've never thought about that in relationship to the song now Blake takes to the bridge All right, you want to talk gospel? I got some gospel for you my friend Oh Listen that all day a gospel choir of just the angel in yeah, I don't know six or seven notes in there At least maybe even more couldn't isolate them all but here's one or two And here's one of the leads taken out Apparently when he did his vocals he was alone quest I've talked about he was just wanted to be secluded So most of voodoo was him just taking hours You know once the track was done It would take hours for him to come up with the stack and be happy with all the takes and all the parts yeah For each of those individual notes that he would be singing this he was the choir of one on this tune on the whole record Just like Jimmy Jimmy you'd like to be isolated. He thought he did not have a great voice at the same place 30 years earlier he was doing the same thing in the same exact studio Wow, that's crazy place a little bit of the vocal outro So good and can't help it shake my head There was one line in there We're it almost sounded like it was most deaf and it occurs to me that Most was almost like a flip side of this coin because the angel was like this R&B singer who was coming with like hip-hop Influences and vibes meanwhile most death was most definitely a rapper Yeah, but he was one of the first rappers I remember who you're like man that dude he's singing all these hooks, you know, he sang for the bush babies Oh He was singing on his own songs like most death also recording at roughly the same time I didn't draw these lines back then but now I'm like seeing like the connections that are going on There was just something in the late 90s where people were trying to do something different again I think it's in large part due to the response of the ubiquity of Bad boy records and all the and the music they were putting out at the time I always understood where most death was a response to that I understand more than ever The D'Angelo is a response to that too. Interesting. Yeah, I see that there Also, you can really hear in his vocals in that outro You can really hear the influence of the blues and I love this one D'Angelo quote D'Angelo said quote I would say the spirit of the vocals is more like a chain gang or like a feel of the slaves and the feel Picking whatever the fuck master had us picking. That's what we'd be singing When we were picking in the hot fucking sun There's like that scene in centers where they show the chain gang and when you see you know that that's sort of what's in his head When he's singing this it kind of makes a lot of sense I'm so glad you mentioned that because like first of all it wouldn't be one song in these past few months without us bringing up The blues and blue notes and tritones. Guess what? There's a tritone in the song Yeah, I found in this strange way because the vocal this is in G major this song Yeah, but the bass line has is not in G major. It's in G Lydian. It's a mode It just means that one note is different. Okay, so the bass is in a different key Technically a different mode then the vocals. It's very strange. I'll just explain what that means briefly The notes that he's playing that he's singing Now of course he's harmonizing this so that's over simplification. It's G major But the bass line is Didn't that note sound strange when I just played it for you? Yeah, the C sharp. It's not in the G major It's a very strange juxtaposition Because there's a C and a C sharp Those two notes exist at the same time sometime and that's a tritone in other words in the G In G major that's the tritone note. So there's a tritone in this song. It's the blues you were just I'm not shows up there. Can I just say I love that you found that and I'm not surprised because the very first time I heard this every time I've heard this song. There's always something a little bit I want to use the phrase in a good way off about it off is the word sonically off and I and to know that it's intentional Just makes me, you know realize the genius of the end. Yeah, listen back to that bass line on its own It's done done done that one half step higher is like stats. That's a little bit of the strangers There's a little wobbly there's some strangers in the rhythm that we've been discussing with the dilla time But there's also some strangeness in that one choice of one half step that is Contrary in a way, but doesn't cause problems in the contrary It's called devil's pie to the key of the vocal you're supposed to feel a little unnerved You know, I mean that that tritone is helping us feel a nerve exactly So now that we have heard the song, how do the splits on devil's pie breakdown the splits are 75% Michael D'Angelo archer 25% Chris E. Martin a.k.a. DJ Premier. Yeah, no, that that makes a lot of sense We know that the song came out in 1998 two years ahead of Voodoo's release And it kind of went under the radar to people outside of the hip-hop community My theory is that it was just too different from what D'Angelo had been doing earlier on Brown sugar and I will say it was way darker than hip-hop and R&B at the time as we said so many times This is like the height of like bad boy and puffy on top of the whole world Although I will point out this song did get a feature in the hype Williams cult classic movie Belly and hype wave is like the guy who in part invented some of that shiny suit Aesthetic that is but like he's he's savvy enough to know. Hey, I'm gonna work with D'Angelo to and throw this into my movie Belly, let's play a clip from the movie Belly. Check this out Shut your mouth when you're five three or four at a time Watch the moon stand in line folks like stuff never done Belly really underrated movie has quite the interesting ending, but that's a that's a subject for another podcast Don't be a spoiler man. Yeah, no spoilers watch Belly And then find me in the DM so we'll talk about it. So like we said devil spy was recorded quite well in advance of Voodoo coming out when Voodoo came out They believed that the single was going to be left and right which featured metham and and red man But they were late in delivering it to mtv and mtv said uh, uh, we ain't showing this video And it looked like that was going to be the end of you know Sort of D'Angelo being this guy who always gets his videos played Lo and behold they filmed the video for Untitled. How does it feel? They start showing it at like key parties in and around new york It's the talk of the town before things were able to go viral and pretty soon mtv is basically forced To start showing this bt all these channels start showing it and it becomes sort of a hit video At the end of sort of like the music video era. It was like a hit Music video and it turned D'Angelo into quite the sex symbol a sex symbol that was a reluctant sex symbol Something he never wanted to struggle with that a lot. Yeah Uh for those in your car You will hear Untitled and for those at your laptops. Here's a little treat for you a visual treat here is Untitled You ready? I will say ever since uh, I saw that video. I've been very self-conscious about the v at the bottom of my uh waste A lot of people learned that that existed for some humans because I didn't know That and Brad Pitt and Fight Club were like you can have a v? I did not know you could have before there were six pack abs. There was that Expression as an expression that was in the common parlance after this video gave all of us body issues Uh, the angel said that he couldn't perform anymore without women basically being like take your shirt off at every Performance for artists as thoughtful as intentional. Uh as d'Angelo This was quite demoralizing and after the success of the untitled video He kind of became a bit of a recluse and uh, there was some Substance abuse, but thankfully that was not the end of the d'Angelo story in 2014. He blessed us with another Incredible album black messiah so many good songs on black messiah. Here's one of my favorites. Let's listen to a bit of charade I mean he's gone back to what I think served him so well on voodoo He's incorporating like sort of like the jam aesthetic Into his gospel and his you know love of prince guitar and sitar sound in the mix and he's playing guitar I think he's he spent more time after voodoo kind of learning guitar and getting that deeper into that instrument So d'Yellow, what do you think the legacy of d'Angelo and devil's pie is? I think the legacy of d'Angelo is Going to be celebrated for a long Time not only is he one of the great singers with with that Gospely bluesy You know voice of his but he's also You know, he's also just this guy who can play so many different instruments And you know to to see his growth from brown sugar to voodoo. Well, he didn't get there overnight clearly You know, there are years in between but right there in the middle of it is devil's pie And I think that that in some ways encapsulates his love of rmb and hip hop into something that doesn't feel retro It feels new it felt new I think that's why we as people who talk about music embrace the term neosoul because it's got the neo in there Moving away from something that feels fake. You know, like like pleather into something that feels authentic and real And I think that it came along at a great time And I think that artists for generations to come will be inspired by him I totally agree. I feel like d'Angelo has really risen Part of obviously his not being in the public eye for so many years. I think hasn't tarnished his reputation Maybe it's enhanced it but unfortunately it has meant he's on the tier with prince He's on the tier with all the other yodas, right? He really is up there with the george clinton's and the slice and maybe unfortunately like sly He did have this moment of sort of retreating from the public spotlight for reasons But he has this incredible body of work of music and again I really do think he is a bit in this mount rushmore of iconic musicians And the fact that we lost him so soon is is such a tragedy only three full albums He could have grown into he could have been harby hankhawk There's no reason to believe he might not have had another 30 40 years of music making an evolution Perhaps at the same pace of you know an album every couple decades sure, but incredible music nevertheless I love that you say he's now one of the yodas. He had his yodas and now he is one of the yodas He's ascended to that place and now he's got like the the force goes, you know shine around him No, I'm serious. I'd be like to me if If you love star wars and star trek as much as me like you're getting those chills right now because you're just like You know he is obiwan. He he did it and We love him for it. All right one song nation. It's time for one genre Our friends at discogs challenged us to do a deep dive into a subgenre and share a few records That we think are essential listening and just a reminder when we talk about genre on this show We talk about it very broadly. We recognize that there are porous borders and overlap in all kinds of genres We don't want to restrict you or restrict your language by insisting something has to only be one genre at a time That's right. That's not how genre works. It's just so we can talk about music that has shared sensibilities All right, so today we're talking about dub reggae a music that evolved in the 1970s in jamaica If you haven't already listened to it, please listen to our sister nancy and don pin episodes because we do some really good conversations About this genre. Can I just say real quick please that as a hip hop DJ? I thought dub just meant instrumental because often you would buy hip hop 12 inches And then it would just say dub makes and that was just a version without the rap But it's so much deeper than that. What can you tell us about dub reggae? Well, I Definitely go back to listen to those it takes two hours So listen to those two one hour long episodes sister nancy and don pen for the full explanation But in a nutshell, yes It was this discovery that you could take songs and mute sections of them in the multi tracks And then start to be creative about like throwing a bit a fragment of a vocal into the delay This creativity birthed an entire movement in the 70s, which we kind of take for granted now as the basis of all remixing Comes out of dub and comes out of jamaica and comes out of this creative explosion in the 70s That's one of the funny things about uh the term mashup that was like so popular in 2000 I was like yeah in the hip hop community the 90s. We always had like a docappella That we throw over somebody else's instrument. I mean technically that is a mashup. We just didn't call it that We're using recorded ideas from different songs has been in the ether for a half century at this point Yeah, so now what is your selection for today's dub? Oh my god. This was such a sophies choice times Guys he was sweating. This is my obsession is dub I have my my discog's You know collection of dub is for the last four years disgusting I've spent a lot of a lot of money the number one record the number one purchase on discogs I should say is a dub record. So the record is called tribesman assault, but the band is roots underground Uh, this one cost me about a hundred bucks worth every penny just for this first song high times My god when I every friday night I sit on the couch with the bass and I put the song on the turntable And I play the bass line to this 10 times in a row. That is how I ease into the weekend One of the greatest dub tracks of all time. Can I ask you real quick? Like is that song available? Like on mp3 like could I listen to it? Yes, it's on spotify. Actually. Yeah, you can go listen to the song and any platform But nothing sounds as good as like when you've got like I think more than more more than some genres The dub genre just sounds better when there's a needle on a record I think so it really benefits from the tactile nature and the sounds in yeah Like all of the dust in the bass just sounds a little bit more lower. Absolutely. Listen, I'm gonna really quickly go through these That's my number one My number two is and this is to get some variety to Horace Andy These are all instrumentals on the tribesman assault record. I used to dress like this. So I'm immediately thinking I gotta get this This is one of the all-time greats dance hall style by Horace Andy and other wackies. These are both on wackies Which is bull wackies, which is a label that actually came out of long island guys from jamaica that moved to long island to make dub reggae and Incredible incredible productions really dry. It's very wu-tang actually really very dark and gritty production sound. Yeah What what what makes Horace Andy's music stand out? His voice is so distinctive. You've heard it on massive attack He's the voice on at least three massive attack songs. Oh very cool I thought I'd seen his name before but now you're saying this dub that you have has vocals This one has the classic thing where they take the vocal version and then on the flip of the 45 They would have dubbed it out But now they make this on the record version you get both Literally spliced together sometimes it'll be a one song But you'll kind of hear where the vocal ends and there's this tiny space before they've spliced in Very charmingly and perfectly the dub version So they're all seven minute long songs and I'll do one more because I know we've got to move on I could do a whole podcast about dub records. I gotta mention my guy least scratch parry I have 50 least scratch parry records. It was so hard to choose the number one But this is it black art in dub if you've got to start somewhere I literally When I'm awake at three in the morning and I can't fall asleep. I put this on and it soothes my brain And by the way Boss got artwork if I'm not mistaken This is actually the wall of his studio if you can believe it and you're you're not wrong to connect That they visually look similar but on the wall of the black arc in jamaica before he burned it down He just had all of these Strange runes and words and letters and symbols But the black arc in question in the title of this record comes from least scratch parry's studio that he made the Some of the greatest music ever made including the congos record. That's very famous and then he burned it down What about you diallo? What is your dub pick this one? Oh mine easily Studio one dub the original right around the world today's saturday. I think you own this one too. Oh my god That was that's another expensive discogs purchase. I've no listen First off, can I just say soul jazz records sort of across many genre totally? Yes Excellent incredible curation. Yeah, so we could talk about brazilian funk We can talk about like weird like new york stuff. Yep on future episodes But this one it's basically dub versions Of songs that had been put out in jamaica in the 1960s studio one tunes studio one two And I would just say like this one I think you can find an mp3 form if you can't just go out and just listen to it It was a good introduction for me to the genre just because I didn't know as much as you I didn't I didn't come up with it the way that you did but uh, man really good Really good song select. I'm drunk and sailor version outstanding. Check that one out in particular Man, I'm so glad you recommended this one to me. Well, thank you my pleasure So those are our one genre picks check out our list on discogs.com And we know there are so many more dub reggae gems out there So please let us know some of your favorites in the comments as always you can find us on instagram and tiktok You can find me on instagram at dialo di a l l o it's just six letters Add the alo or on tiktok at dialo riddle. That's 12 letters I know that's a lot but it's all I could get and you can find me on instagram at lu xx ur y And on tiktok at lectry xx and if you have a radio check out my new radio show every friday night at 10 p.m On kcrw and you can follow our podcast on instagram and tiktok at at one song podcast for exclusive content You can also watch full episodes of one song on youtube and spotify just search for one song podcast We would love it if you like and subscribe Also, be sure to check out the one song spotify playlist for all the songs we discuss on our episodes You can find the link in our episode description and if you made it this far you're officially part of the one song nation Salute good job show us some love give us five stars leave a review and send this episode to a fellow music nerd It really helps keep the show going proud nerd. We're all proud nerds out here. There's no shaman nerd Luxury help me in this thing. I'm producer dj songwriter and musicologist luxury And i'm actor writer director and sometimes dj di a la rome and this is one song We will see you next time this episode was produced by melissa duane as our video editor is kasey simonson Our associate producer is germy membo mixing by michael harman and engineering by eric hicks Production supervision by rizak boykham additional production support from z taylor This show is executive produced by kevin hart mike stein brine smiley eric eddings eric wild and leslie guam