I tossed this together back in 2019 as an audio demonstration of a production style I hear in a lot of hip-hop music these days and it drives me nuts. It's just people grabbing some old soul or R&B song, feeding it into Serato Sample, chopping it into an atonal mess, looping five seconds of it for three minutes, and calling it a day. I completed this in just a few minutes, and actually it has too much complexity to really fit the criteria of what I'm talking about; this has an A and B part to the loop, and the drums should really be simple separated unquantized booms and baps, not a smooth breakbeat. But I guess I couldn't help myself.
So yeah, this is just a small snippet of Curtis Mayfield's "Kung Fu", chopped and screwed and looped ad infinitum, set to some Glenn Yarborough drums. That's it. Took me a few minutes. And okay maybe it doesn't intrinsically suck, maybe this could be built upon with complementary samples, melodies, harmonies, choruses, bridges, you know an actual song arrangement. And hell, you toss a great rapper on top of even the most simple beat and you've got a great rap song. I understand that the music is the secondary part of "rap music". It just really bugs me when I hear producers stick with their first idea and only their first idea and stop there, adding nothing more.
What this stuff reminds me of is what I was doing in the late 80s & early 90s, when I'd have a rap group come into my studio and we'd sit all day going through sampleables, vinyl, tapes, whatever, and loop up anything that sounded cool. I'd sample it, set it to the first breakbeat that came to mind, record five minutes of that onto a cassette for them to write to, and move on to the next idea. They'd take that "loop tape" away for a week or whatever, and come back with songs they'd written to those beats, whereupon I would actually begin production on it as a song, arranging my samples and drums around what they'd written, using the original idea as a base and building from there. If I ever just left the loop exactly the same for the length of the song, I'd want to punch myself in the face. Maybe I "overproduce" some of my stuff. I really can't tell. All I know is I work on it until it's a piece of music, until it does everything I would've been conducting a band playing those instruments to do. Maybe that's putting too much emphasis on the "music" part of "rap music". But it's obviously too late for me to change now.
Anyway yeah, that's why I tossed this piece of crap together in a few minutes; to demonstrate just how easy and boring the whole thing can be, once the easy shortcuts become the new norm. I still always strive to be and create more, and I hope you will too.
For a visual demonstration of this same point, watch: https://youtu.be/67Ckve3L8EA
