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A couple of weeks ago, I saw a request over on the low-bee forums asking for an i.d. of the vocal sample that was used for Lil Wayne's A Milli. The artistic merits of the beat itself were briefly debated on this site, but beyond that I hadn't given the song much consideration. When the topic came up on low-bee, however, someone mentioned that the "A Milli" vocal might have been jacked from a Shabba Ranks song. Y'all know how important Shabba is to me, so I dug out my extensive collection of the dancehall legend's albums and singles and began searching for the three syllables that were used for Weezy's current hit.
I was initially convinced that Bangladesh, the producer behind A Milli, had somehow flipped Shabba's vocals from Ting-A-Ling, a conviction that led to me spending a fair amount of time chopping up the song with nothing but a bunch of sped-up vocal fragments to show for it and further confirmation that I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to producing beats. As it turned out, the suggestion of Shabba Ranks as the source led me way off target, as I wasn't even in the right genre (I can't really complain though, as there's never a bad reason to listen to Shabba Ranks).
Right, so for those of you who didn't read the title of this post, you're undoubtedly asking, "What's the real source for 'A Milli?'" It's from a Norman Cook remix of A Tribe Called Quest's Left My Wallet In El Segundo, off of Tribe's Revised Quest For The Seasoned Traveller, released in 1992. Norman Cook, as the frat boys in the audience are no doubt already aware, became quite popular in the late 90's, deejaying under the name Fatboy Slim (the first time I heard the Segundo remix, in fact, was off of Norman Cook's Norman Cook Collection, which also has an interesting collaboration between Rakim and Industrial group Art of Noise that's worth digging up). On the remix, Phife Dawg - who did not appear on the original version - pops up briefly to spit a few bars in a sort of pseudo Jamaican patois (in hindsight, maybe that Shabba Ranks suggestion wasn't that far off). You can hear Phife's part, which was slowed down for the A Milli beat, at around the 40 second mark. Peep:
I Left My Wallet In El Segundo (Vampire Mix) - A Tribe Called Quest
Here's a youtube video that breaks down how Phife's vocals were manipulated.
And just to close out this whole A Milli discussion (the last time the song will be mentioned on this site, barring something crazy, like an R&B singer putting out a diss track over the beat - oh wait, that actually did happen), here's a Reggae remix of the song by Ross Hogg:
Weezy F Baby - A Milli (Ross Hogg Jamrock Remix)
While we're at it, here's a youtube link for the original El Segundo video. Seventeen years after its release, it remains one of the best hip hop videos of all time.
6/24/2007 08:10:01 PM posted by Fresh