If all the Coup albums disappeared, what would you listen to instead?

Craft Classic - 2001, Show Business - 2004

It's the new ambient chillout mix I've been working on.

otm btw

Hooray!

Hooray!

Indeedy!

Paris is hardly as personable as Boots, but "Devil Made Me Do It" is so good. Don't know anything about his new stuff, but he supposedly produced a recent PE record?

TS: Early 70's James brown Funk vs. Mid to late 70's Midwest Funk

That "industrial" shit is old. It's virtually all James Brown loops. Too bad if Meat Beat or whoever ripped it off after the fact.

And come 1989/1990, most were trying to sound like PE and missing the mark.

Listening to Rebel w/o a Pause feels like someone rapping over The Grunt & Funky Drummer - because that's exactly what it is.

The Coup sounded like Organized Noize before Organized did.

(this is where I meantion he's from Tampa Florida, but moved to Oakland after his first single hit)

http://www.discogs.com/release/169525

But the label was out west, so his story is the reverse of 2 Live Crew

its not about ripping off or not, there were plenty of people sampling funk before dre and snoop (duh), but dre was one of the very first, if not the first in popular rap, to do replays, and use live musicians (even if he was just playing parts of old pfunk hits). thats what boots is doing on the new one, but his funk is essentially lighter, airier (?) and thinner, theres something about it that just washes over me. doggystyle and the chronic at least had punch. in short, they were funkier. i know boots has more of a bay area sound, which seems to favour something that for lack of a better word, and just cos im tired, seems to be less 'authoritative', but i dunno if thats accidental or not. i seem to remember ant banks and the like being pretty dre-influenced too. i dunno about boots being organised noise before organised noise - ON were producing other people before outkast too. speaking of whom, stankonia shits on pick a bigger weapon in every way too. post-stankonia outkast however, not so much.

does anyone find it a bit hard to take boots seriously with that undercover brother album cover? i know im meant to say its great hes not taking himself too seriously and all that stuff, but well, this is hip hop, i need my rappers to take themselves seriously!

I pity you.

Uh, Sugar Hill/Enjoy/etc Records?

ON were producing other people before outkast too

Hip-Hop, or R&B?

its part of what makes hip hop fun. rappers making ridonkulously outrageously statments and believing them is part of the fun. if they did it all with an obvious tongue in cheek all the time, it would just be boring. (and no im not saying theyre all idiots who dont have a sense of humour, just that they have to deliver it with 100% serious conviction otherwise it just ends up being jokey. hope this makes some sense).

sugarhill and enjoy had house bands, thats true. right or wrong, i tend to regard that era differently to dre and co though, just cos in the early 80s, they just used bands cos they thought there was no other way to make rap records, when dre did it, he consciously got rid of samples.

They were mostly a DJ crew, but they cut a track or two before the members went solo. Egyptian Lover was the star of the crew. Bobcat went on to form the LA Posse, who produced LL's BAD.

I donno of pw remembers but i shook hands w him at some club in brooklyn when i visited, i think we were both kind of drunk at the time.

http://smokingsection.blogspot.com/

The way I see it:

pre-records DJ's
House bands
Drum machine + Synths
Ultimate Breaks & beats samples
Actual Digging for samples
lawsuits = a return to keyboards & sessions players

Dre covers a lot of ground on this. He started in WCWC when they were just a DJ crew DJ'ing at Eve after Dark. He then got into Electro production, the post 6 in the Morning SP12 drum machine + lite sampling, then all out Bom Squad knockoffs (which he admits), then Biz markie got sued, and the game changed...so he, like many, did what he had to do. But still, his big hits from that era are sample based (I Wanna Do Something Freaky to You, etc).

Dre's trailblazing was being the first to tap that Midwest Funk ala Slave or Ohio Players. Dopeman's only sample was Funky Worm, and that came out in 1987. Back then, most on thre West were still doing Electro/Electro Bass ala Techno Kut records.

yes deej, I remember.

And you're right, PA. I forgot that one...but was the music all slinky, or chunky?

what would you say the east coast was sampling? southern funk? im trying to think right now but ive not been listening to much old school hip hop in ages

i dunno about session players being that in demand at the moment in hip hop. most producers seem to be doing it on their own, more or less, and most of them probably (this is guess work though) used to be sampling producers, so when they turn to producing with keyboards, thats why they sound so amateurish, by and large. if more people DID use session guys like ON do, or a lot of ludacris' producers do, a lot of the fall out from old hip hop fans hating the new synth sounds might not have been so widespread. then again....

Something can sound industrial regardless of where the samples are taken from. Looped and edited correctly, the most soulful music on the planet can sound like a broken ATM, a factory line, or a tank. Public Enemy, at their absolute best, sounds like the black American equivalent of Laibach.

Wow really?!?! I would never have guessed you didn't have a fucking clue about the subject of hip-hop production from the way you were talking.

http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Performance/3412/Crates/ultimate.htm
i dunno about session players being that in demand at the moment in hip hop. most producers seem to be doing it on their own, more or less, and most of them probably (this is guess work though) used to be sampling producers, so when they turn to producing with keyboards, thats why they sound so amateurish, by and large.

The secret to todays hip-hop is old sample based producers have a keyboard and/or bass player in their pocket. This is why recently the Dr. Dre vs. Scott Storch debate has been surfacing. Jim Jonsin has Big D. Danny D has Fingarelli. Etc.

The endless & repetitive choruses - a big fuckin' waste of time when I'm waiting for Boots to get to the verses wherein truth is kicked and anger is exhibited.

Very weak, nearly invisible DJing (what is Pam anyway? She was embarassingly lame on that extra disc on STEAL THIS ALBUM and perhaps really shouldn't be there at all). Instruments harshly out of tune throughout entire tunes.

It's gotten really lazy, it seems like it's on autopilot.

Answer to the original question - Yeah, 1st 3 Ice Cube albums. Lench Mob GUERILLAS IN THA MIST. Public Enemy & Paris, though they're certainly humorless by comparison to Coup, Ice & Lench Mob.

i would never have guessed you need to just shut your cakehole up for all eternity and/or get back to munching foreskins. fucking idiot. ive forgotten more than you will ever know.

Plenty of acts long before this were using live instrumentation (as someone mentioned dating all the way back to Sugarhill who OHMIFUCKINGOD were doing replays of "Good Times".) Even the most sample heavy acts' records have plenty of live instruments (see: Eric Sadler in Public Enemy, or Steve Whatever-His-Name-Was in Eric B & Rakim, etc) and those live instruments were at least in part replaying bits of old P-Funk and Meters' records.

"i dunno about session players being that in demand at the moment in hip hop. most producers seem to be doing it on their own, more or less, and most of them probably (this is guess work though) used to be sampling producers"

Session players are still plenty in demand in hip-hop (see: Mannie Fresh supposedly pulling kids from local high school band classes to play on his records or anything produced by Timbaland or Kanye West or basically fucking anybody), most current producers were NOT sample producers whatever that hell means (most of them being to young to have been producing when you could sample ANY and EVERY THING anyway) and some people are complaining about the "new sounds" or "new synths" because some people will try to complain ABOUT anything (especially anything to do with hip-hop, see: titchyschneider.)

It's not guesswork, guy, it's actually fucking knowing something unwise one.

Yup.

Too Short comes to mind in the context of early pre-Dre 90's rappers.

well, i didnt say there was NO live instrumentation, i conceded the early sugarhill/enjoy way of making records. theres other examples in between too, obviously - slick ricks first album prod by the bomb squad had plenty of it, as did teddy rileys early productions, as did electro, but part of the reason the chronic seemed so different at the time is cos it was unlike anything either dre, or anyone in hip hop had been doing for quite some time. yeah, there was live guitars on rock box, on the first BDP album, there was a live drummer on some early NWA/the doc tracks, dre even had live rhythm guitar on straight outta compton, but by and large, hip hop was sample reliant during its 'golden age' etc etc. sampling was seen as the norm. which is why the chronic seemed so different.

as for today, timbaland occasionally uses session players, as do outkast, mannie, dr dre etc, but to act like they werent sample-reliant producers, when they all STILL sample is a bit weird. and besides, pre john brion, kanye was sampling pretty heavily, timbaland still uses samples, as does dr. dre. my point was that sure, they use session players (i already said producers like ON still use them), but theres equally tons of producers who dont. ruff ryders anthem, young jeezy's

well, i didnt say there was NO live instrumentation, i conceded the early sugarhill/enjoy way of making records before your toys-out-the-pram outburst. theres other examples in between too, obviously - slick ricks first album prod by the bomb squad had plenty of it, as did teddy rileys early productions, as did electro, but part of the reason the chronic seemed so different at the time is cos it was unlike anything either dre, or anyone in hip hop had been doing for quite some time. yeah, there was live guitars on rock box, on the first BDP album, there was a live drummer on some early NWA/the doc tracks, dre even had live rhythm guitar on straight outta compton, etc etc but by and large, hip hop was sample reliant during the years now thought of as the 'golden age' etc etc. sampling was seen as the norm. which is why the chronic seemed so different. not sure why this is so hard to grasp.

as for today, timbaland occasionally uses session players, as do outkast, mannie, dr dre etc, but to act like they werent sample-reliant producers, when they all STILL sample is a bit weird. pre john brion, kanye was sampling pretty heavily, timbaland still uses plenty of samples, as does dr. dre. my point was that sure, they sometimes draft in session players (i already said producers like ON still use them so not sure why you had a hissy fit), but theres equally tons and tons of producers who dont. would you like me to yousendit a few examples? then again, i probably dont have to as you must have them all catalogued and commited to memory complete with studio personnel details already.

Bzzzzt.

But I do agree from a mixing standpoint...the bassline is all lopsided.