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Lady of Rage - Unfucwitable (produced by DJ Premier)
Though I haven't had a chance to write about it as much as I originally anticipated, I recently started up another semester over at Scratch. This current semester has focused on battle style scratch routines, something that even during my most prolific turntable days I was never particularly good at. On Saturday DJ Spictacular showed up as the guest instructor for the class and, after watching me and several others fumble through chirps, transforms and military scratches, he proceeded to show us all how to properly put together a routine worthy of the DMC's. After ten minutes of a virtual assault on wax - at one point he started cutting up a Lady Gaga record and even managed to make that sound hard - he dropped in the instrumental for the above song, Lady of Rage's Unfucwitable, produced by DJ Premier. I'm not sure how this 8 year old song managed to stay under my radar for this long, but hearing it for the first time over the weekend reminded me just how great Premier can be when he gets his hands on the right sample.
The "Fe Fi Fo Fum" chopped up sample is what makes this beat so tremendous, and as soon as I got home I started digging to find out its source. Thanks to youtube, my search quickly turned up the following:
Yvonne Fair - Let Your Hair Down
Off of Yvonne Fair's album The Bitch is Back, the song opens up with the sample used in the Lady of Rage song. Keep listening until the :57 mark and you'll hear what should be another very familiar sample, the main ingredient for Jay-Z's Where I'm From:
Jay-Z - Where I'm From
Produced by D.Dot Angeletti (aka The Madd Rapper), I used to think this was one of the most genius samples ever, a flip of what was essentially a brief bit of feedback from Fair's microphone into one of the greatest beats Jay's ever rapped over. As I did a little bit more research, however, it turned out that D.Dot was far from the first to make use of the sample. The exact same sample was used for almost the exact same beat some six years earlier, on Fat Joe's Bad Bad Man produced by the legendary Diamond D. Peep:
Fat Joe - Bad Bad Man
A few years prior to that, DJ Cool V and Paul C used the same sample for Biz Markie's Check it Out. Youtube wouldn't let me embed the song, so here's the direct link:
Biz Markie - Check It Out
Biz liked the beat so much, he recycled it a couple of years later to get production credits for his protege Grand Imperial Diamond Shell's Captain Speakin'. Unfortunately I couldn't find the song anywhere on the internet so you'll have to take my word for it.
As much as it's been used over the past two decades, however, the sample didn't officially earn the label of "played out" until earlier this year, when Diddy got his hands on it for the autotuned monstrosity of Angels:
Diddy featuring C.O. Ricky Rozay - Angels
(Marginally better is the Lupe fiasco remix: Diddy featuring Lupe Fiasco - Angels Remix)
8/11/2010 8:45:50 PM posted by Fresh