Greg: I’ve been listening to 808s and Heartbreak and Twisted Fantasy. I’m really enjoying them. Far more than I thought I would. I think Auto-tune here is somehow protective for Kanye when he is expressing emotion in a genre where that is not really smiled on. I haven’t quite put my finger on it, but I think the dehumanizing of the human voice is somehow a foil for the expression of inner turmoil. It’s haunting.

Ethan: Yes! Absolutely. The Auto-tune gives Ye a way to be the sensitive, vulnerable singer, as opposed to the swaggering rapper. And I like the similar sonic palettes between 808s and Fantasy, except 808s is sparse and Fantasy is full. And the thing of using tuned 808 kick drums to play the basslines is so hip.

Greg: The hard part for me to wrap my head around is the fact that Auto-tune is a filter, a dehumanizer, and it manages to make Kanye both closer and more human.

Ethan: I have a broader philosophical idea brewing about the concepts of “dehumanizing” and “posthuman” and how they’re really kind of meaningless, at least as applied to music. How can things that humans create be dehumanizing? Everyone involved in the production of Kanye’s albums is human. Auto-tune is a novel way of sounding human, but it’s still human, just like the sound of reverb or EQ or compression.

Greg: Yes — I have similar issues with natural vs. unnatural in general. Humans are natural, therefore everything we do is also natural.

Ethan: I’ve been listening a lot to “No Church In The Wild,” the opening track from Watch The Throne.

Kanye doesn’t use any Auto-tune, he just raps. The interesting thing is that the chorus is sung by Frank Ocean, who’s a perfectly capable legit R&B singer, and they put him through the full Cher effect. At the end of each verse, Kanye and Jay-Z tell Frank to “preach” through the Auto-tune. Curious as to your reaction.

Greg: This track is really something. The animal noises fusing with human with street noise. The bizarre outro — WTF is that? The Auto-tune section kind of hides structurally, in some ways. If the liner notes are to be believed, then the Auto-tune section is actually The-Dream on vocals. [Ethan note: it is Frank Ocean singing; The-Dream co-wrote the song.] The extreme EQ of that section is key, though. The dropping to low frequency moves the preceding music into the far distance and down into the horizon. In some ways it heightens the internal effect in an almost cinematic way. It’s a radical emotional zoom and pan. The fact that it is also Auto-tuned may relate to what we were talking about on Kanye’s earlier albums. The sense that Auto-tune allows for and maybe heightens emotional expression. One would think that it is despite the dehumanization, but maybe the dehumanization allows for the words themselves to become more present? I’m not sure. I’ll keep listening.

Ethan: There’s a tradition in hip-hop that if you have an instrumental that isn’t going to get turned into a full song, you append it to the beginning or end of another track. But usually it’s a funk sample or something, not a weird classical piece.

Greg: It reminds me of the Fiona Apple cover of “Extraordinary Machine” for some reason. It’s flat weird.

Ethan: I don’t know that Fiona Apple song, will have to check it out.

Greg: it’s a Marilyn Monroe cover, of all things.

Greg: Funny that delay is not corny, but reverb is? What’s that about?

Ethan: I think the thing with delay is that it’s technologically newer — tape delay goes back a ways, but tempo-synced digital delay is still pretty fresh and of the present. Also, reverb diffuses the sound, and delay keeps everything nice and crisp. Good point about how the EQ spatializes the track — reverb is considered corny by current pop and hip-hop producers, so either you leave everything bone dry or use delay and EQ for spatial effects.

Maybe the Auto-tune heightens emotion by making the melody totally unambiguous. It gives the sung notes an organ-like clarity and distinctness, and slight pitch nuances get exaggerated into stairsteps and warbles. Also, the filter changes the voice’s upper partials in odd ways that adds to the pathos. The-Dream has done some nice Auto-tune singing on other Kanye material — there’s a song called “Flight School” that I have on a mixtape or something. But it’s nowhere near as hip as “No Church.”

Greg: I’m digging “Made in America” as well. The tone is so unapologetic. How often does “banana pudding” show up in rap? It’s unsettlingly positive in some ways. Nostalgic and wistful. Where’s the Auto-tune?

I was teaching John Adams‘ “On the Transmigration of Souls” today and I noticed some distortion on some of the sampled voices. It’s utterly unnecessary but clearly present. I realized that this is related to our discussion of Auto-tune and filters on the voice. My thought in class was: “Do we live so scared that a naked voice is a thing that can’t speak truth?” I’m not sure I still stand by this sentiment, but there it is.

Ethan: I’ll catch myself putting delay on everything as a matter of course. It takes a lot of discipline to leave things dry. I saw this movie called Jiro Dreams Of Sushi about Japan’s best (and most expensive) sushi chef. All he does is cut fish, put it on rice, add some soy sauce and serve. But he uses the best fish, the best rice, the best soy sauce, the best sequencing of dishes, etc. I like that philosophy of getting good ingredients and not processing them at all.

Meshell Ndegeocello at Tonic

In my twenties, I forced myself to experience a lot of very highbrow avant-garde music: free jazz, experimental electronica, and various combinations thereof. One such experience was a show at Tonic. I forget who was on the bill exactly, but it included Susie Ibarra and various other downtown luminaries. The group was ad hoc and clearly had never played together before. Their freeform improvisation was colorful and interesting, but tough to get an emotional hold on.

During the second set, Meshell Ndegeocello showed up, and the band invited her to sit in. She sat onstage with her bass for a minute or two, just listening to all the atonal noise swirling around her. Then she started playing a simple G minor funk groove, quietly but insistently. One by one, the other musicians locked into it, until the whole group was actually playing together, not just at the same time, but together. It was the best show I ever saw at Tonic. It also made me realize that the best musicians play stuff that makes sense.

Ira Newborn and BB King

My favorite class at NYU this semester is Scoring For Film and Multimedia with Ira Newborn. Ira is a cynical curmudgeon — think Larry David with a beard — but he’s really passionate about music. He came up in the blues and funk world before moving into orchestral music. A student in the class had written something really far out and atonal, and it reminded Ira of a story. He had written an atonal piece, and he wanted BB King to play on it for some reason. So he brought BB in and didn’t explain the piece at all or show him a chart, just had him just play whatever he felt like. BB laid down straightforward blues on A7, and Ira said that it tied the whole piece together.

Miles Davis and Bitches Brew

About seventeen minutes into “Pharoah’s Dance,” Miles enters with a short repetitive funk theme. You can hear the swirling chaos gradually coalesce around him into a nice groove.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, if you’re an adventurous and avant garde musician or composer, don’t be afraid to feel the funk. Leave hostility to wards the listener back in the fifties where it belongs. Your music is stronger when you take the risk of inviting the audience in to feel your feelings.

Composition
Duke Ellington – “Concerto For Cootie”

Blues feeling
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers – “Moanin’”

Romance
Count Basie – “Lil Darlin’”

Effortless virtuosity
Clifford Brown and Max Roach – “Joy Spring”

Reinterpreting pop music
Miles Davis – “Someday My Prince Will Come”

Funk
Herbie Hancock – “Fat Albert Rotunda”

Soul-searching and inner flight
John Coltrane – “Venus”

Original post on Quora

Miles Davis was at his wildest and most experimental in his forties. That decade of his life starts with the Miles Smiles band (Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams) and extends into his electric funk period. The music that he was playing at age 49 on Agharta and Pangaea is the most intense he ever made, though it’s not to everyone’s taste.

I saw Max Roach perform a couple of times when he was in his seventies, and he was tremendous. At one of the shows, he did an encore solo piece on just a hi-hat, and you wouldn’t believe how much music he got out of it.

Original post on Quora

Here’s “Amen, Brother.” The famous drum break comes at 1:27.

“Amen, Brother” is an uptempo adaptation of “Amen” by Jester Hairston, written for the movie Lilies of the Field, and made famous by The Impressions (with Curtis Mayfield, before he went solo.)

“Amen, Brother” didn’t get much attention until crate-digging hip-hop producers started sampling the drum break in the 1980s. Breakbeat Lenny included it in the first volume of Ultimate Breaks and Beats. Since then, the break has become ubiquitous not just in hip-hop, but in every style of dance music. It almost single-handedly spawned entire genres of electronica, particularly especially drum ‘n’ bass and its various offshoots. The Amen shows up in rock and pop songs ranging from Oasis to Nine Inch Nails. It’s in TV theme songs and commercials. Casual music listeners have probably heard it in dozens if not hundreds of recordings. Here’s a family tree showing the most noteworthy usages.

As is so often the case in sample history, GC Coleman never got a dime from any of these uses beyond his union scale for the original recording session. He died in 2006, so there’s not much we can do for him now, but I think he at least deserves some recognition.

Inside the break

Here’s the Amen break, looped four times:

Amen break by ethanhein

Wikipedia has handy drum notation and drum machine tablature for the break.

Here’s how the break looks in the sampling program Recycle:

Each blue spiky blob is a drum hit. The vertical lines are slices I added using Recycle. Once you’ve sliced up the loop, you can play the slices back in any order and any combination using a MIDI keyboard or drum pads. You can generate an infinite variety of new loops this way.

Two documentaries on the Amen break

The usual reference for the Amen break is this twenty-minute video by Nate Harrison.

Here’s an hour-long podcast on the break by Crissy Criss:

Noteworthy Amen break samples

I’m not attempting anything resembling completeness here; these are just tracks I like or find interesting. Starting in the eighties with the old skool, here’s “King Of The Beats” by Mantronix.

In “I Desire,” Salt N Pepa mixes the Amen with drums from Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” and the synth line from “Daisy Lady” by 7th Wonder.

Maybe the best-known hip-hop usage of the Amen is NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton” (very, very NSFW.)

The break appears in pitched-down form at the very beginning of “Informer” by Snow. What the heck is he saying in the chorus, anyway?

As I said above, the Amen is most closely associated with drum ‘n’ bass, for example “The Angels Fell” by Dillinja.

Luke Vibert did an album under the pseudonym Amen Andrews where just about every song uses a variation on the Amen break.

An artsier take on the Amen: “Girl/Boy” by Aphex Twin.

Even artsier: Amon Tobin’s “Nightlife.”

David Bowie uses the Amen for his foray into the world of drum ‘n’ bass, “Little Wonder.” It’s not one of his strongest tunes but he gets huge points for trying.

The most current hip-hop song I could find that uses the Amen is Lupe Fiasco’s “Streets On Fire.”

Many, many more examples can be found on the Amen Break Database and Whosampled.com.

The Amen break on TV

As the Nate Harrison documentary points out, the Amen pops up in quite a few TV commercials. It’s made its way into some theme songs, too, most notably the one from Futurama:

The Amen also shows up in the Powerpuff Girls theme song.

Do you still think that sampling is stealing? I don’t mean monetarily, I mean artistically. Do you think that there’s something unoriginal in all these uses of the Amen break? Do you think that the way Aphex Twin or Lupe Fiasco recontextualizes the break is somehow a lesser creative act than getting out a drum kit and playing something? You can probably guess where I stand.

Why is the Amen break so magical?

Producers talk about how funky and passionate the Amen is, how compressed and dirty the drum sounds are, how much hip syncopation it uses in its second half. But what if there’s a mathematical explanation for the break’s popularity? Michael Schneider has a theory that the Amen Break sounds so good because it’s structured around the golden ratio.

Is there anything to this theory? You be the judge.

Try it yourself

Here’s my mashup of many of the above tracks, with heavy processing of the Amen break in Recycle and Reason.

Amen Brother megamix by ethanhein

If you want to play too, the internet is full of resequenced and reshuffled variations on the Amen break available for your downloading pleasure. Here are a hundred fifty Amen loops. Here’s another forty and yet another twenty. Stick them in your favorite audio editor and have fun!

The word “swing,” like the word “blues,” has multiple meanings, depending on context. Swing is both a genre and a technical music term describing a certain rhythm. The two are related, but the rhythm has long outlived the genre.

Swing, the genre

In addition to Duke Ellington, the usual reference points are Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Django Reinhardt. People sometimes use swing to mean big band jazz, but there are plenty of small groups who play swing. Also, there some noteworthy big bands that play non-swing styles, like the one led by Dizzy Gillespie, and the ones on the Miles Davis/Gil Evans albums.

As for singers in the swing genre, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald are the two leading lights, though Ella absorbed a lot of bebop into her style as she went along. Louis Armstrong made his name in Dixieland but sang plenty of devastating swing-style music later on. The albums he made with Ella Fitzgerald are, well, words fail me, just listen.

In the late 80s and early 90s, there was a style of hip-hop-inflected R&B called New Jack Swing. It has nothing to do with jazz except for a shared affinity for swung eighth notes — more on that in a second. Think Janet Jackson, Michael Jackson from Dangerous onwards, Prince, Teddy Riley, Babyface, basically everything I liked on the radio in junior high school.

Swing, the technical music term

When musicians talk about swing, they’re referring to something specific: alternately making eighth notes longer and shorter. The idea is related to (or possibly descended from) notes inégales in classical music. To swing, you make the first eighth note in a given pair longer, and make the other one shorter. The further you stretch the eighth notes away from their metronomic values, the more you swing.

We popularly associate swing with soul and feeling, so it may come as a surprise to you to learn that drum machines can swing. All drum machines (and their software equivalents) have a setting labeled “swing” or “shuffle.” When the knob is at 0%, you get straight (metronomically even) eighth notes. If you set the knob to 100%, you get a swing feel so exaggerated that the first eighth note in each pair is twice as long as the second. If the swing knob is at 50%, the first eighth note in the pair is one and a half times as long as the second.

This all may seem abstract when described verbally, but it jumps right out when you hear it. First, listen to a hip-hop pattern with the swing set to zero:

Now, here’s the same beat with the swing knob set to 70%.

The difference becomes even more clear when you see a side-by-side comparison of the two drum patterns as they appear in the MIDI sequencer. Each red box is a drum hit. The top row is the kick drum, the middle row is the snare, and the bottom row is the hi-hat. Because the hi-hats play on every eighth note, their swing is especially obvious.

Notating swing

Classical music notates swing like this:

This notation shows the sound of the swing knob on the drum machine set to 100%, so the first eighth note is twice as long as the second. That’s the most extreme form of swing, and in real life, you rarely use that much. Even the 70% swing I used in my example is a little over the top for my tastes. But classical music notation has no formal method of acknowledging different levels of swing.

Since swing is critical for most jazz styles, you’d think that its practitioners would have developed a more sophisticated notation for it. Instead, jazz handles the problem by just not notating swing at all. Swung eighth notes are written exactly the same as straight eighth notes. The chart might have a direction written on it like “light swing” or “medium swing,” but more likely it just won’t say anything. You’re expected to be able to apply the right amount of swing by ear. The notational ambiguity in jazz can be an advantage, since different musicians swing by different amounts, even when playing the same material. Historically, the trend since the 1930s has been to use less and less swing. Count Basie used more swing on his rendition of “April In Paris” than Thelonious Monk did.

Some jazz styles don’t use swing. Latin and bossa use straight eighth notes just about exclusively. There are a lot of straight eighth notes in funk too.

The emotional meaning of swing

Musicians don’t just stretch their eighth notes for no reason. Swing has a specific emotional effect. It’s hard to put into words, so here’s an example. First, check out “Dance Of The Sugar Plum Fairy” from The Nutcracker.

This is as straight as music gets. Now here’s Duke Ellington’s version, swung heavily.

What’s going on in Ellington’s version that isn’t in Tchaikovsky? Duke is more soulful, but that word won’t help you if you don’t already know what it means. Duke’s version is also sexier, but while sexiness and soul are closely related concepts, they aren’t identical. Duke’s version feels more “African-American,” but that isn’t very edifying either. Plenty of white people swing just fine — country music uses just as much swing as jazz does. There’s even a whole subgenre of country called Western swing, as exemplified by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.

So why do I like Duke’s music so much better than Tchaikovsky’s? I think the answer has to do with the rubberiness and stretchiness of swing. Listen to the drums at the beginning of Duke’s tune. They sound like a heartbeat. This is no accident. Your pulse swings, especially when it’s slower — in its “lub-dub” rhythm, the “lub” is longer than the “dub.” Perfectly straight eighth notes sound mechanical. Nothing biological keeps time steadily and accurately. Swing feels more like the rhythm of life.

This is not to say that only swinging music is good. I did feel that way during certain points in my jazz education, but am past it. I like plenty of mechanical-sounding music exactly because it’s mechanical-sounding. And good jazz musicians keep tight metronomic time while they swing — the eighth notes might be stretchy, but the quarters are usually right on the grid.

Or are they? My buddy and sometime jazz collaborator Leo Ferguson maintains that the best jazz musicians swing their quarter notes too. He says that Charles Mingus sounds so much better playing walking quarter notes than your average bassist because Mingus subtly alters their timing to produce a kind of meta-swing. I’m sure Leo will weigh in with some thoughts on this in the comments.

Swing is not syncopation

Non-musicians sometimes use the words swing and syncopation interchangeably, but they’re totally different concepts. Syncopation means accenting surprising beats within the bar. For example, you expect to hear accents on the downbeat; you can syncopate by playing accents an eighth note before or after the downbeat. Swing is something you apply to every beat in the bar, not certain specific ones.

People mix the two concepts up because musicians who use the one will frequently use the other. Ellington, Basie and the rest of the musicians mentioned above all use syncopation heavily. But you can have swing without syncopation and vice versa. Freddie Green, the guitarist in Basie’s band, hardly ever used syncopation — he played a steady “chunk chunk chunk chunk” on every quarter note — but he swung like crazy. Meanwhile, if you go see an Afro-Cuban band, you’ll hear wall-to-wall syncopation but probably no swing at all.

Future swing

The big band sound is mostly relegated to history, but swing is alive and well in electronic music. House music is defined in part by its swing. Old-school hip-hop used a lot of heavy swing –  an example is “The Show” by Doug E Fresh and Slick Rick. Hip-hop producers have been dialing back the swing since the mid-90s, and the eighth notes are mostly straight now.. But even when the drum machine is set to 0% swing, rappers will frequently swing a little in their flow anyway.

I’ll close with “Swing Set” by Cut Chemist of Jurassic 5.

Swing it!

I was reminded of it walking down the street the other day, because someone in our neighborhood in Brooklyn was blasting a dancehall track from their car that sampled the “na, na na na na, na na na naaah na na na na na na” part from “Land Of A Thousand Dances.” Then I got to thinking, this cartoon is actually an inspired recipe for a mashup. So here we go:

Na Na Na Na by ethanhein

Production

I put the track together using my new favorite software in the world, Ableton Live. I’ve historically been a Reason/Recycle guy, and while I’ve had Ableton sitting on my hard drive forever, it took me until recently to motivate to check it out. I’m glad I did, it’s been wildly inspirational. Here’s how the mashup looks in Ableton’s session view.

Land Of A Thousand Dances

I used the Wilson Pickett version of “Land Of A Thousand Dances.” Here’s a live version — the hook comes at 0:46.

Hey Hey, Good Bye

The chorus of “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” is such a ubiquitous meme that it’s strange to think it was originally part of an actual song, rather than something written specifically to be chanted at sports games. It’s by an anonymous bunch of studio musicians who called themselves The Steam. Here they are in Austin Powers finery:

I also included the version by Bananarama, because who doesn’t love Bananarama?

Nas Is Like

The one song I put in that isn’t from the cartoon is “Nas Is Like” by Nas. I used it because the repeated “Nas Nas Nas is like, Nas is like” fits the sonic theme well, and because I needed a good strong beat for certain sections of my track.

Batman

The cartoon references Neal Hefti’s groovy theme song from the sixties TV Batman show. The thing is that there is no “na na na” part anywhere, it’s just the way everyone sings the guitar riff. I figured I’d just put it in rather than split hairs.

Katamari

The Japanese a capella voice with the bit of beatboxing at the end is “Sasasan Katamari” by Yu Miyake, from the classic video game Katamari Damacy.

Randall Munroe shares my love of this game and its infectious theme music:

Hey Jude

Finally, I conclude my mashup with the entire end section of The Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” a masterpiece of zen-like repetition.

Other na na songs

Songs I could have included, but didn’t:

• My Chemical Romance – “Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)”
• Akon – “Right Now (Na Na Na)”
• 112 – “Na Na Na Na”
• Jim Jones – “Na Na Nana Na Na”
• Tiffany – “Na Na Na”
• A.B. Quintanilla III Y Los Kumbia Kings – “Na Na Na”

Why are all these “na na na” songs so catchy?

I think nonsense syllables are crucial to good pop music. They enable emotional expression uncluttered by narrowly literal semantic meaning. “Na na na” can mean anything, everything or nothing. It’s a blank space to project whatever feeling you want onto it. I subscribe to the belief that music is much older than language, and that it reaches much deeper into the core of the brain. Like scat singing and obligato, singing “na na na” touches something much bigger and more ancient inside us than any specific set of lyrics can. Maybe that’s why these hooks are so much more memorable than the songs they come from. Anyway, enjoy the mashup, and thanks Randall Munroe for the best comic on the internet.

There’s probably a whole generation of producers who have sliced and diced this beat without having heard the actual song. I’m sure the same is true of “The Funky Drummer” and “Apache.” Beyond the break, “Cold Sweat” is a remarkable piece of music, way out ahead of its time. On James Brown’s album of the same name, it’s sitting alongside jazz standards like “Nature Boy” and some boilerplate blues and R&B. Compared to those more traditional songs, “Cold Sweat” sounds like it belongs in another era entirely. It has a radically simple two-chord structure and an African-influenced intricacy to its rhythmic groove, and it still sounds pretty fresh more than thirty years later.

“Cold Sweat” was written by the Famous Flames’ bandleader Pee Wee Ellis, seeded by a bassline James Brown came up with vocally. Ellis says he got his horn line from “So What” by Miles Davis, which has been the basis for many other tunes as well. Hear a mashup of “Cold Sweat” with “So What” and other related tunes.

So What megamix by ethanhein

As befits a song based on a musical quotation, “Cold Sweat” has been sampled widely. Here’s a sample map; click to see it bigger.

“Cold Sweat” has been a particularly rich source of inspiration for Public Enemy — they sample it on “How to Kill a Radio Consultant,” “Prophets of Rage” and “Welcome To The Terrordome.”

“Welcome To The Terrordome” is an unusually dense web of samples, even by Public Enemy standards. It includes several other James Brown samples, including “Give It Up Or Turnit A-Loose,” “Get Up, Get into It, Get Involved” and “Soul Power.” And “Welcome To The Terrordome” has itself been sampled and quoted many times, by KRS-One, Non Phixion and Ice Cube, among others.

“Cold Sweat” is so influential that Mongo Santamaria’s cover version spawned a hot breakbeat of its own. It’s at 2:21.

RJD2, composer of the Mad Men theme song, uses Mongo Santamaria’s beat in “The Chicken-Bone Circuit.”

Ultramagnetic MCs love “Cold Sweat” almost as much as Public Enemy. They use the James Brown version on “Kool Keith Housing Things.”

And they use the Mongo Santamaria version in “Feelin’ It.”

Finally, I myself use the Cold Sweat break in the first track from my forthcoming Delia Derbyshire remix project.

Planetarium Remix

Me vs James Brown vs Delia Derbyshire vs Babsy Singer

mp3 download, ipod format download

Here’s how to program the Cold Sweat break on a drum machine. Give the drummer some!

If you were to compile the best albums as measured by how often they get sampled by hip-hop producers, the list would look very different. There would be some famous names on it — James Brown, Led Zeppelin, P-Funk — but it wouldn’t necessarily include their best-known songs. And you’d see a lot of names that would be totally unfamiliar, unless you were a really devoted crate-digger. In the top ten, alongside tunes by The Honey Drippers, The Soul Searchers and The Incredible Bongo Band, you’d  find “The Champ” by The Mohawks.

Hip-hop fans will instantly recognize the organ riff that kicks off this song. It’s everywhere. Yet I had never heard of the Mohawks before looking into the source of the riff. They were an ad-hoc band of session musicians led by a British organist named Alan Hawkshaw, best known for his commercial jingles, library music and TV theme songs. He also played on records by Barbra Streisand and Olivia Newton John. Not the likeliest source of inspiration for Big Daddy Kane and Ol’ Dirty Bastard, is he? But the album grooves hard.

I probably first heard Alan Hawkshaw’s organ riff in “Eric B is President” by Eric B and Rakim — listen at 1:49.

The riff is one of the signature sounds of old-skool hip-hop. It’s in “Smooth Operator” by Big Daddy Kane, “The Big Payback” by EPMD, and “Miami Bass” by Stetsasonic. Its use may have tapered off a bit in the nineties but it’s still a go-to sample — Mary J Blige runs it under almost the entirety of “Gonna Breakthrough” from 2005.

Some producers reshape the riff to their own design. Guy reharmonizes it in “Groove Me,” changing the key from B to C# minor. Fu-shnickens flips it creatively in “La Schmoove” to make a different riff. KRS-One flips it even further, turning it into an almost entirely new melody on “Step Into A World (Rapture’s Delight),” named for its long quote of Blondie’s “Rapture.”

The biggest pop hit inspired by the organ riff doesn’t actually use the sample itself — Onyx shouts/sings its melody for the chorus of “Slam.”

The word being chanted at the front of the organ riff sounds more like “Tramp” than “Champ.” This has made it irresistible for anyone doing a song about a person with loose morals. The most obvious example is “Tramp” by Salt N Pepa (no embedding allowed, unfortunately, but don’t miss it.) De La Soul scratches “Tramp” on top of a stack of other hot samples in “Keepin’ The Faith” — I immediately recognized the beat from “Walk This Way” by Aerosmith.

Ice Cube uses the chant all the way through “Friday” and even Janelle Monáe scratches it into “Sincerely, Jane.”

A bunch of producers have mined other parts of “The Champ” too. Trust the RZA to look past the organ riff to the horn phrase a few seconds later as the basis for Wu-Tang’s “Shame On A N****a.” Main Source uses a completely different organ riff from later in the song in “Large Professor.” The Coup uses yet a different one on “Dig It.”

This listing barely scratches the surface of tracks that sample “The Champ.” It would probably be easier to list hip-hop artists who haven’t sampled it. After almost three decades of repurposing this one song, hip-hop’s collective imagination has probably not nearly exhausted its possibilities. If I missed one of your favorite uses, drop me a comment.

This is exactly the kind of golden age hip-hop song I love, a party-friendly beat and lyrics delivered with enough pissed off attitude to give it some bite. Dres and Mista Lawnge, I salute you.

The samples are particularly awesome. The upright bass loop comes from McCoy Tyner’s version of John Coltrane’s “Impressions” – it’s at 3:03 in the track.

It’s appropriate that Black Sheep should have wanted to sample “Impressions” because it too is based on samples, the analog kind. Coltrane borrowed his melody from a Morton Gould composition called “Pavane” and his chord progression from “So What” by Miles Davis.

The beat and accompanying guitar twang in “The Choice Is Yours” come from “Humpin’” by The Bar-Kays. The sample is right at the beginning.

“Big Sur Suite” by Johnny Hammond Smith supplies the organ lick, listen for it at the fifteen second mark.

(Tons of other people have sampled this track, including Dr Dre, Gang Starr, the Beastie Boys, DJ Krush, and, um, Insane Clown Posse.)

The most unexpected sample Black Sheep pulls out is the scratchy guitar hook. It comes from “Her Favorite Style” by Iron Butterfly, of all people. Iron Butterfly! Who knew they even had any songs aside from “In A Gadda Da Vida?” That’s some big-eared listening.

Finally, the James Brown-like grunt and “come on” is Sweet Linda Divine in her song “I’ll Say It Again” – listen at 1:52.

Talk about a track being greater than the sum of its parts. If handed all of these records, I’d enjoy some of them, be indifferent to others, and I very much doubt I’d come up with anything so devastatingly tight and seamless as “The Choice Is Yours.”

It seems like there would be a lot of songs that would sample this one, but I only turned a few from casual web searching:

• Fatman Scoop includes the “Engine engine number nine” part in his tune “Be Faithful.”
• Fatboy Slim quotes the chorus in “Weapon of Choice” ft Bootsy Collins.
• Dres does a verse over a sample of “The Choice Is Yours” on “Where Are They Now” by Nas.

There have to be others, right? Let me know in the comments. Doo-dah dipity.