My favorite Missy Elliot song out of many is “Work It.” Unfortunately, YouTube only has the clean version; it’s well worth seeking out the explicit version, which is unspeakably filthy but flows better and is much funnier.

This song came out eight years ago and it still feels like it fell out of the future. During the chorus, the part that sounds like gibberish is actually the lyric “I put my thang down, flip it, and reverse it” played backwards. There are more backwards lyrics in one of the verses — the line “Listen up close while I take you backwards” is followed by the reversed line “Watch the way Missy like to take it backwards.” There’s nothing new about backwards masking, but you don’t usually hear it as the hook of a pop-oriented dance track. Hip!

“Work It” uses three great samples. The beginning is from “Request Line” by Rock Master Scott & the Dynamic Three. If you care about eighties fashion and dance at all, you must not miss this video.

The cowbell rhythm at the end is from Bob James’ recording of Paul Simon’s “Take Me To The Mardi Gras” as famously sampled in “Peter Piper” by Run-DMC.

Here’s a mashup of Bob James, Paul Simon, Run-DMC and Missy:

Peter Piper Mardi Gras Megamix by ethanhein

There’s also a synth percussion loop that runs throughout “Work It” sampled from the intro to “Heart Of Glass” by Blondie. Sorry, no embedding on this one.

This has nothing to do with the song, but it’s so awesome I can’t not share it: Missy’s turntable ring.

Like my other favorite hip-hop artists, Missy understands that the record player is the defining musical instrument of our time (along with its cousins the tape recorder, digital sampler and Pro Tools workstation.) There’s nothing intrinsically cold or alienating about electronic music production technology, if it’s in the right hands. Herbie Hancock once compared the synthesizer to an axe, that could be used to build a house or murder someone. Missy uses her axe to build awesome houses.

Gilbert with a Roland CR-8000 drum machine around his neck! Lamar and Wormser doing the robot dressed as Michael Jackson! Booger dressed as Elvis! If the Lambda Lambda Lambda/Omega Mu was a real band right now, imagine how huge they’d be. The kids love eighties retro. These guys would probably be opening for Lady Gaga, or maybe the other way around.

It occurs to me that the vibe I’ve been working towards all these years is pretty similar to this one. I can’t promise anything this visually arresting at our show tonight, but performing live guitar and vocals over a prerecorded track is exactly what we’ll be doing.

Some of the comedy in this movie hasn’t aged well, but the soundtrack has. I’m particular fond of the song “One Foot In Front Of The Other” by Bone Symphony, which plays under the “fixing up the house” montage. Eighties!

The Apache break is an especially interesting sample, because there’s a yawning gap between its lame original context and the diversity of uses that musicians have since put it to. More than most samples, the Apache break has enormously transcended and eclipsed its original context. “Apache” was first written as fake Native American music by Jerry Lordan in the late fifties, inspired by a cowboys-and-Indians movie. How such a lame song became a cornerstone of electronic music is a long and convoluted story. Here are two good tellings: an essay called All Roads Lead To Apache, and a followup New York Times article.

Here’s the story of “Apache” in network diagram form:

“Apache” has been sampled uncountably many times. The first noteworthy example is “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel.”

In a similar vein, check out Double Dee & Steinski’s “Lesson” mixes. They’re must-hears if you care about the art of the mashup.

In keeping with the old-skool flavor, here’s West Street Mob’s “Break Dance Electric Boogie,” which uses some of the horn parts from the Incredible Bongo Band recording in addition to the percussion break. Got to love those vocoded robo-vocals.

The first song to sample Apache that landed on my consciousness was probably “Things That Make You Go Hmmm…” by C+C Music Factory:

Drum n bass producers love the Apache break. Instead of just looping the sample, they like to slice and dice it into new, more complex beats. Goldie’s “Inner City Life” is a high-profile example. I admire the drum n bass guys conceptually, but when it comes to day-to-day listening I’ll take hip-hop every time. Nas uses the Apache break on “Made You Look” — I think he even paid for it.

I have some friends who like hip-hop as music but are uncomfortable with the practice of sampling. They have this idea that sampling is a form of stealing. These friends tend to rally around the Roots, who play hip-hop on live instruments. The thing is, even though the Roots’ Questlove is one of the best drummers in the world, he also programs and uses samples in his production work. Hear Roots MC Black Thought do one of his hottest rhymes over Apache on “Thought@Work”:

When the Roots play this live, Quest and the percussionist re-create the break in the manner of The Sugarhill Gang’s “Apache Rap.” Missy Elliot sampled the Sugarhill Gang remake in “We Run This.”

Electronic music undermines the western concept of the composer. For any track based on the Apache break, who composed it? Jerry Lordan wrote the song but you’d never guess a connection between his original recording and anything that samples the Incredible Bongo Band. Should the composer credit go to the Incredible Bongo Band? Or just their rhythm section? Should it go to Kool Herc or whichever DJ first had the idea to loop the break by itself, or the producer who did the sampling? What’s the connection between Jerry Lordan’s song, the Bongo Band version, the Sugarhill Gang’s recreation of it and Missy Elliot’s song sampling the Sugarhill Gang? To me, the question becomes meaningless. Music emerges out of collective cultural practice more than any single person’s mind.

Asking what the origin is of a given piece of music is like asking what the origin is of my blue eyes. The gene/musical meme analogy is a useful one. James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” has dominant hip-hop genes. The roots of hip-hop are obvious in this song, since JB is literally rapping over a funk beat. It’s like the way my mom has blue eyes — there’s no big mystery where that gene came from in me. My dad had brown eyes, though; the blue-eyed gene was recessive in him. The hip-hop gene is recessive in the Bongo Band’s “Apache”, and more recessive still in Jerry Lordan’s original.

Hit me in the comments for noteworthy Apache mixes. I’m working on a mix of my own, I’ll post it when it’s done.

Here I’m going to collect some breakdance media and see if any thoughts emerge. Your suggestions welcome.

Beat Street

Grandmaster Flash spins in Wild Style

Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo broom dance

Here’s a fan video someone did, Michael Jackson breakdancing in slo-mo to Nite Lite by Yo Gotti.

Anything else I should see?

People have been experimenting with recording playback devices as musical instruments for a hundred years. But the concept didn’t cross into mass consciousness until the rise of hip-hop turntablism in the early 1980s. The breakthrough moment for a lot of people was Herbie’s song “Rockit” from his 1983 album Future Shock. The song includes turntable scratching over a blend of live and programmed drums and synths, along with some heavily processed robo-vocals. Future Shock is named for the Curtis Mayfield song, which is itself named for the Alvin Toffler book. The basic gist is, “Too much change too fast is stressful for people.” Herbie, at least, has managed to get some pleasure from his future shock.

Many fans of Herbie’s acoustic jazz work were distraught when he crossed over into the land of synths and other high tech. Herbie himself was ambivalent about electronics at first. In interviews, he says he was reluctant to try electric piano, and only relented when his then boss Miles Davis insisted. Herbie was convinced and then some. Here’s what his studio looked like at the time of Future Shock’s recording.

In the early eighties, Herbie started collaborating with Bill Laswell, another electronic adventurer. They wrote and constructed “Rockit” together with keyboardist and drum programmer Michael Beinhorn. The track includes turntable scratching by Grand Mixer DST.

The record DST is scratching is “Change Le Beat” by Fab Five Freddy, featuring B-Side. It’s an oddity among old-school hip-hop records because it’s mostly in French. Fab Five Freddy laces the track with heavily vocoded interjections, and it ends with his robotic voice saying “This stuff is really fresh.”

This phrase has been scratched and sampled a zillion times. It’s in four different tracks each by Eric B & Rakim and the Beastie Boys. On “Rockit,” Herbie answers DST’s scratched vocal with some vocoded speech of his own.

Here’s a live performance of “Rockit” from the 1984 Grammy Awards. I love the breakdancing robots.

Since Herbie loves electronic music and hip-hop, it’s no surprise that they love him right back. He’s been sampled by musicians ranging from Tupac Shakur to Deee-Lite.

Jazz is in a tough spot right now. It’s been the worst-selling genre of music for years. A lot of jazz musicians and fans loathe electronic music, especially hip-hop. This makes me sad. My formal music background is in jazz, and I absorbed plenty of prejudice along with all the music theory. When I started meeting and working with some hip-hop musicians, I discovered that they mostly love jazz and are deeply reverent towards it. Some of the best hip-hop musicians come from jazz training. For instance, Rakim Allah trained as a bebop saxophone player; you can hear its impact on his linear, intricate flow.

Many jazz cats have a hard time returning the affection. A lot of jazz musicians don’t like the extreme harmonic and rhythmic minimalism of hip-hop and other electronic forms. I’ve heard jazzers deride repetitive dance music as “dumb” or “unmusical.” What’s ironic is that classical musicians used to say exactly the same thing about jazz. For its first few decades, jazz was dance music.

In my own music-making experience, hip-hop is every bit as challenging to create as jazz. Simpler, highly repetitive music has its own discipline. You have to mercilessly reject most of your ideas in order to identify the most intense and compelling ones, the ones you want to hear repeated sixteen or thirty-two or sixty-four times. Such strict editing can be uncomfortable after the relaxed effusions of post-bebop jazz soloing. It’s easier to deride new music as dumb than to admit that it’s evolving past the limits of your skill set. I admire Herbie for having the humility to being willing to keep learning, to keep subjecting himself to new constraints.

I believe in practicing what I preach, so here’s my remix of “Rockit.” It includes some samples of Herbie’s Chameleon and the movie Scratch.

This stuff is really fresh!

See a followup post about Herbie’s relationship with synthesizers.