A late 2000s beat tape

Description

Hello pod people,

How’s it all going? Summer is almost here in the UK, as is another political circus and a World Cup. What a time.

So … I’ve been thinking about the hip-hop instrumental and 2000s’ beat culture, in particular. The spark being Flying Lotus first album 1983, which was released exactly two decades ago. That’s mad. I remember picking up the record on my first trip to NYC and thinking music would never be the same. The way I heard hip-hop would never be the same.

It’s also been 20 years since Jay Dee/J Dilla passed away, just three days after the release of his momentous mixtape Donuts.

This is more than a coincidence. For one thing, Lotus was interning at record Label Stones Throw around the time of Dilla’s final days and recalls dropping off a cheque at his house. Though saddened by how frail this 32-year-old legend had become, seeing all his gear lit up and Dilla still so committed to creation galvanised the young artist to get to work.

I was a rookie reviews editor and writer at Straight No Chaserin the 2000s, a starchart for “interplanetary sounds, ancient to future”. It was my job to seek connections between generations and genres. It was clear that Lotus and his contemporaries, both in LA and elsewhere, were part of a lineage. The torch was being passed. Leaving Records’ Matthewdavid said as much in All Ears, Gus Sutherland’s documentary about the LA scene in 2013.

“When [Donuts] came out, it was like a hit in the face. A call to action. We will not let this sound die.”

In truth, Dilla had been going ‘out there’ for several years prior – embracing synths, techno, the wildest samples and odd time signatures (check Dan Charnas’ book on how he reinvented rhythm). Thinking back to Slum Village, the ’97 mix of ‘Players’ hit different, as did the raw dynamics of ‘Raise it Up’, which I used to skip on Fantastic vol 2in my neo/smooth era!

His debut studio album Welcome 2 Detroit in 2001 featured the Kraftwerkian ‘Big Booty Express’. Later came Ruff Draft and the new wave-y ‘Nothing Like This’.

Common’s Electric Circusbewildered many of us when it dropped in 2002. Dilla was an executive producer on that, programming and playing on several tracks. Today, it’s widely acknowledged as what it always was: an epochal vision of what hip-hop can be. Chaotic yet liberating.

This music was eons away from his work with the likes of A Tribe Called Quest and The Pharcyde, and Soulquarian collaborations with Erykah Badu and Bilal. Today, you can hear traces in releases on Lotus’ label Brainfeeder, Leaving Records, LuckyMe, Ghostly and many others.

Sa-Ra deserve recognition for their experimentation, crashlanding with ‘Glorious’ and freaking the beat as early as 2004 with remixes like this for DJ Mitsu. Another pioneer is Dabrye, whose ‘Game Over’ had Dilla guesting on the mic and sounded like an enormous stargate smashing open.

At their best, productions from this era were more than wonky wormholes or glitchy portals. More than sub-busting, circuit-melting departures from the sparse boom-clap, boom-bap of the 90s.

Though it was thrilling to get blasted by these retro-future sonics in the club, the music that stayed with me had a more elusive quality to it, resonating far beyond the nostalgia of 8-bit frequencies that hooked a whole generation of avid gamers. It had nuance, intricacy and texture. It built a world to inhabit, conjured tension and release. Far more compelling than today’s immensely popular ‘lofi beats’, or “Starbuck music” as Lotus likes to call it.

In a recent interview with Hearing Things’ Dylan Greene, he described the boundlessness of the LA scene back then. “It felt like we had so much potential to the way we were turning beats away from just rappers and crafting a producer world. I was curious to see how far we could take it.”

“Dilla really opened up the possibilities of what could be done with samples,” he adds. “For so long, people were so fixated on getting a two or four-bar loop out of a sample, where he’d get little pieces of a thing and make it sound like it was a four-bar loop.”

Dilla set the trajectory and gave the next generation of producers confidence to take centre stage, to be the headliner. Soon, beat culture would become “part of the fabric of pop culture” according to historian and author Laurent Fintoni.

Did you know that Paul White produced for a young Charli XCX? Or that Bullion wrote one of my favourite songs of recent years with Carly Rae Jepsen?

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to go back – back to the future. So here is a beat tape time capsule of some of my favourite MC-free transmissions from around 2006 to 2010. The rules are simple. No MCs. No guest vocalists. No interruptions.

It’s compiled in the spirit of latter-day Dilla and where he was taking hip-hop: deep into the realms of electronic music. Though if you ask Dabrye, that’s where it’s been since the beginning.

This sound convergence reached its zenith, arguably, in an East London car park during two consecutive summers. Look at those bills.

By 2009, you had the likes of Lotus and Pursuit Grooves releasing on Pinch’s Bristol label Tectonic. United in bass.

Ok, it’s your turn. Please reach me [at]amarofpatel on IG or in the Substack comments with memories, favourites, thoughts… I’d love to know whose influence you see where in modern music.

Look out for part two, where I’ll be in conversation with one of the artists I featured.

Otherwise catch me for the usual runnings on Sister Midnight FM, 26 May and 23 June from 2-4pm GMT.

Stay cool. Stay close.

And turn it up!

*****

FLYING LOTUS – Fall in Love(c2006)

FLYING LOTUS – 1983 [Brainfeeder](2006) 3m 20s(FYI, FlyLo’s Dilla’s Still Here mix on Dublab in 2006)

DIMLITE – In Groups To The Hydrandd (Album Edit) [Sonar Kollektiv] (2005) 7m 30s

2TALL – Distant Shadows [The Content Label] (2008) 11m 50s

HUDSON MOHAWKE – Fuse [Warp] (2009) 15m 30s(Hudson’s Heeters vol 1 also very influential in the heyday of Myspace)

MIKE SLOTT – Snow Birds (2009) [Lucky Me] (2009) 18m 25s

BULLION – Are You The One? [One-Handed Music](2009) 21m 30s