Hip-hop at its best is about truth-telling. It doesn’t get any realer than “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)” by Pete Rock and CL Smooth.
There are a lot of “serious” musicians who think that the best way to express their inner pain is by causing pain to the listener. The music I like uses inner pain as the starting point for pleasure. “T.R.O.Y.” tells a somber story, but it uses attractively tight and funky music to do it. The track was inspired by the life and early death of Pete Rock’s cousin and friend “Trouble” T. Roy of Heavy D & the Boyz. In a 2007 Village Voice interview, Pete Rock said:
I had a friend of mine that passed away, and it was a shock to the community. I was kind of depressed when I made it. And to this day, I can’t believe I made it through, the way I was feeling. I guess it was for my boy. When I found the record by Tom Scott, basically I just heard something incredible that touched me and made me cry. It had such a beautiful bassline, and I started with that first. I found some other sounds and then heard some sax in there and used that. Next thing you know, I have a beautiful beat made. When I mixed the song down, I had Charlie Brown from Leaders of the New School in the session with me, and we all just started crying.
The Tom Scott record in question is his rendition of “Today” by Jefferson Airplane. The great sax riff comes in at 1:37.
Here’s a transcription of it:
Pete Rock wasn’t the first hip-hop producer to have noticed this riff. Slick Rick used it a year earlier it on “It’s A Boy.” Hip-hop loves Tom Scott generally — many many tracks sample the beat from “Sneakin’ In The Back.” I had never heard of Tom Scott before writing this post, but I turn out to have heard a lot of his work. He’s best known to hippies for playing sax and lyricon on Terrapin Station by the Grateful Dead and has been a session guy on a zillion other albums. He also wrote the theme songs for Starsky & Hutch, Hill Street Blues and Family Ties.
And what about the original Jefferson Airplane song at the head of this memetic family tree? Here it is, in all its trippy glory. Enjoy the psychedelic light show that the YouTube poster thoughtfully added.
The chain of ideas from Jefferson Airplane to Tom Scott to Pete Rock and CL Smooth reminds me very much of the chain from Paul Simon to Bob James to Run-DMC that culminates in “Peter Piper.” It seems like a recipe for success: golden-age hip-hop group samples jazz fusion cover of sixties pop-rock song.
I’ve debated the musical merits of sampling with my friends, musician and non-musician alike, many times. “T.R.O.Y.” is a perfect example of why sampling is so valuable. Sampling is the only way Pete Rock could have arrived at his sound. Looping a piece of the loose-limbed original recording gives it a laser-like focus. Even Pete Rock had wanted to hire Tom Scott to come in and play his sax riff live in the studio, it wouldn’t have sounded nearly as good. There wouldn’t be all the background instrumentation and ambiance from the original recording, the bassline and drums and groovy chanting. And even if they had been able to recreate all of that stuff exactly, emotionally there wouldn’t necessarily have been the same flavor. There’s much to be said for pulling a sample from the middle of a performance. Playing a riff off a sheet of paper sounds very different than having it emerge spontaneously in the heat of the moment.
The chain of memetic inheritance doesn’t end with Pete Rock and CL Smooth. The song has been sampled many times, for example by Mary J Blige in her remix of “Reminisce.” The lyrics have been quoted and referenced by dozens of emcees. I’ve been on an obsessive kick with it and am insistently playing it for anyone who’ll listen, including, hopefully, you. It makes me feel good about the world that Pete Rock’s pain has inspired so many new ideas.
Hear a mashup of the tracks discussed above, plus a few more.
They Reminisce Over You Megamix by ethanhein