One Song - D'Angelo's "Devil's Pie"

Episode Date: November 20, 2025

How did D’Angelo’s ‘Devil’s Pie’ foreshadow the sound of his seminal album Voodoo? This week on One Song, Diallo and LUXXURY discuss D’Angelo’s upbringing and influences, the unmistakable Dilla influence of the rhythm section, and pay respects to the groundbreaking R&B pioneer. Head to Wayfair.com now to shop Wayfair's Black Friday Sales for up to 70% off! One Song Spotify Playlist SONGS DISCUSSED: “Devil’s Pie” - D’Angelo “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” - D’Angelo “Brown Sugar” - D’Angelo “Lady” - D’Angelo “Send It On” - D’Angelo “King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown” - Augustus Pablo “Sea of Tranquility” - Kool & The Gang “The Root” - D’Angelo “Castles Made of Sand” - The Jimi Hendrix Experience “Kick in the Door” - The Notorious B.I.G. “Supa Star” - Group Home “And If I Had” - Teddy Pendergrass “Train in Vain” - The Clash “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” - McFadden & Whitehead “Jericho Jerk” - Pierre Henry & Michel Colombier “Psyche Rock” - Pierre Henry & Michel Colombier “You Know My Steez” - Gang Starr “The Love Song” - Da Bush Babees feat. Mos Def. “The Charade” - D’Angelo and The Vanguard Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

But the slice won't a pie, why is why, till we fry. Watch it's all, stand in line for a slice of the devil's pie. I think at the time I heard it, I thought it was more like, these are all terrible things. And like I heard the moralizing now when I hear it. I sort of hear like, and I hope I'm not putting something on DeAngelo that is not there. But it's almost like he's saying, these are the temptations that I personally am I hear that too. I hear that too.

And I don't want it, but yet we're programmed to want it. But it definitely feels a lot more personal. It's about temptation. It's about we can't control these things that are out there and tempting us and it's life. All right, luxury. So today we're honoring an artist who epitomizes Black genius. His music blurred the lines between gospel, funk, hip hop, and jazz, proving that soul music could evolve, challenge expectations and feel timeless all at once. That's right.

Diallo and today we're highlighting a song that was arguably a bridge between his debut and sophomore albums, foreshadowing the raw innovation and spiritual vulnerability that was to come. That's right. Today, we're talking one song, and that song is Devil's Pie by DeAngelo. I'm actor-writer and sometimes DJ Diallo Ripple. And I'm producer, DJ songwriter, and musicologist Luxury, aka the guy who whispers, Interpolation. And this is one song. The show where we break down the stems and stories behind iconic songs, Agrasio, genres and tell you why they deserve one more listen.

You'll hear these songs like you've never heard them before. And you can even watch one song on YouTube and Spotify while you're there. Please like and subscribe. All right, Diallo, today we're going to pay tribute to an absolute legend that we lost this year, DiAngelo. This one hit us all pretty hard. Yeah, I think we're still dealing with it. You know, ironically, we just talked about DiAngelo while discussing Neil Sol.

Right. Just a couple of days before it happened. Crazy coincidence. I had just bought the record. It was on my turntable. I was listening to DeAngelo when I heard the news. It was right there. The cover was staring at me.

It's crazy. He was in the air. He has always been in the air, arguably his music. Yeah. And I know that, you know, anybody who's ever worked with him or was close with him still feeling it. So nerves are a little raw as we try and dive into this song and this, this legendary singer. And I'll even say ever since we started this show, DeAngelo was an episode that we wanted to do. You know, something that we wanted to do for the very very very.

very beginning. There are a couple of people, you know, from, from Bjork to Whitney, there's certain people who just if you appreciate singers, you know that like, oh, we got to do an episode about them. So we're doing this episode, admittedly, because we're all thinking about him right now. And hopefully everybody will come away feeling like we've only celebrated this once in a lifetime artist. Diallo, when was the first time you heard DeAngelo? So I got brown sugar in the mail when I was working at my college radio station. And DeAngelo immediately stuck out to me. First of all, he had cornrows and a leather jacket,

which back then was code for like, you know, probably like I'm a rapper. I'm an East Coast rapper specifically. You know, there was that I'm a thug, you know, that was out there because of a Tupac. But then when I put on the music, he was singing these beautiful soul songs. It was crazy that these two things together.

I just remember being impressed by how his visual style and slang were very much rooted in the present of the midnight. 90s. Meanwhile, his sound was more informed by the past, but in a good way. That's really well said, and I had the same impression. There was something surprising about when he opened his mouth, whether it was to sing with his incredible vocals, but also just talking. He was obviously such a thoughtful person, like his creativity. It was all tied together with who he was, very authentic, very vulnerable. His vocals are so vulnerable. And real, the fact that they were, and we'll be getting into this when we listen to the stems, they were. They were

so raw and unprocessed and unperfected. Authentic. They don't all line up perfectly. They don't all hit every single note exactly. This is when Prototals exist, but that isn't being used for any of this music. And I think it's exactly perfectly who he was as a person. And I also think it's a little bit about the timing because if you think about it, like this is a time when like we're still living with, you know, sort of like the polished Keith's sweat, you know, like R&B singers typically still wear suits and look like, you know, very smooth. You know, like it was like, you know, like, it was like that GQ smooth vibe that Eddie Murphy has in Boomering, you know, but this was decidedly not

that. He's not doing that. He's a totally different guy who's just doing him. And yet he's still able to sing these beautiful ballots. I think it's one of those things that artistically, when everybody else is saying, I'm going to the right. He was like, I'm going to go left. Like, it's just something completely off into a different direction. I thought creatively, that's what kept him so interesting for the start. What about you, luxury? What was the first time you heard DeAngelo? It was definitely the iconic video. for Untitled. That was the first time I saw and heard and the entire package was delivered and received. It's a beautiful man with a beautiful voice and a beautiful video. The artistic everything

was all encompassing. And of course, I wasn't the only one who felt that way. We're going to get into this a little bit later. But that video made a big impression on a lot of people. In a time before social media and everything being online, you can almost say it went viral, so to speak. Everybody was talking about it. And of course, I'm talking about the iconic untitled video where DiAngelo is shown shirtless, gradual reveal that he's shirtless. It's a single shot, and it rotates around his body

while he sings this incredibly beautiful, vulnerable song. And it just gives you the entirety of who he was in one video. But, of course, it was also controversial. We'll be talking about a little bit later. We'll talk about that video. The implications of how this video was for him as an individual and for his career. Absolutely.

Since we're here to pay tribute to DeAngelo, why don't we back up a bit and talk a little bit about how DeAngelo, a.k. Michael Eugene Archer got his start in Richmond, Virginia. So DiAngelo was the son and the grandson of Pentecostal ministers, and he grew up in the church. There's some incredible early footage of him in the church, like singing and playing piano. He's an incredible keyboard player. He started playing piano when he was three.

My three-year-olds have just not been this impressive. No. No, they've been underwhelming. I wanted to talk to you about their piano performance. I'm just watching Cocoa Mellon all there. And in addition to his early piano prodigies, He also joined the choir at age five. So music is in his blood at an early age. Yeah.

Plus he was just born with something special. So he was taught these things and he was in the church environment to like learn and become and grow at them. But there was also some seed that was just who he was right. I think there was clearly something going on there. It's also such an analog period in time. Like I do think that like, you know, there's so many digital distractions for kids now. Their creativity goes elsewhere.

Right. You know, but at this time it was just like, oh, I have all these, you know, musical thoughts. to join a choir. You know, it's fine. I'm five, but I got to do something with my life. Not only was DeAngelo growing up with a heavy dose of gospel, he was also soaking up the sounds of legends like Prince and Al Green. There were also newer artists at the time. I'm talking Keith Sweat. I'm talking about the band guy. Like, he's digesting all of this too. It was interesting that DiAngelo has said it was actually Teddy Riley's fusion of hip hop and R&B that really pushed him into start making his own music. You know, we've talked on this show about New Jack Swing.

Now, Brown Sugar, for those who've heard it, we know that's not anything we would ever qualify as New Jack Swing, but you can clearly hear DeAngela blending hip-hop and R&B in his own way. And that's one of the things that makes him so unique. Let's check out a bit from the title track from Brown Sugar. This is Brown Sugar, babe, I guess high up your love, I don't know how to behave. I love that song. That's so bad. And you can hear so much of what's coming in his future in that because there's like that old organ in there. Yeah.

Sounds like a church organ, the Hammond organ. Yeah, I mean, like, by the way, he played all the instruments on this. It's just him and Ali Shahid Muhammad, right? Ali Shahiqi Muhammad, one of our unsonged heroes, because I don't think that I knew at the time that he was a part of this project, and he surely was. I'd also be remiss if I didn't play my favorite song off of this album. I love his remake of Cruising by Smokey Robinson, yeah.

But really, Lady, which is Raphael Sadiq, produced, I believe. This song just sends me. Here's a little bit of the album version of Lady. And here's a gem for fans of Neangelo. This is a live version of the song. On the Chris Rock Show back in 1997, performing with Raphael Sadiq, Alicia He Muhammad, and Questlove.

Like I said, on the Chris Rock show, this is Lady Live. It's so fun to see them all young like that. Incredible. Yeah. What great footage. It's not new jack swing, but it's swing. All these songs have swing to. Well, they do have a swing.

And I think of some of that has to do with Raphael Sadiq. And I just realized while watching that clip, to me, Raphael Sadiq is like Nile Rogers. He's a little bit like Farrell. He has his own recording career. But you get the sense he actually enjoys producing for other people, too. I think so, participating in all of these incredible other careers. Yeah. Yeah.

Seeing him like up on that stage, like sort of like, you know, bouncing around with his guitar. Like, you get the sense he's very much in. his I create music because it makes me happy space. Yeah. And I just love Raphael Sadiq. It's just he's done so many things, whether with Tony, Tony, Tony, or Lucy Pearl or DiAngela, like it just, people slept on his album, Instant Vintage. Great album.

And if you ever get a chance, please go back and listen to that. No, you're right. He's kind of like Mark Ronson's kind of a similar figure, where he's a producer, songwriter, he has his own career. But he's also constantly collaborating. And you see him like playing bass on stage with maybe, you know, Marino Mars or Lady Gaga, whoever it is. And he enjoys that.

Yeah. He enjoys being part of eclectic mix of music making. I love this quote from Neangela about his approach to combining R&B and hip hop. He said, quote, to me, it's not melding the two worlds so much as it's exposing where they meet in the middle. That's great. And I cannot agree more. It's not that he was melding.

He was literally just saying like, hey, there's so much shared culture here. There's a lot of overlap, yeah. That we're not exploring, you know, in some of the contemporary R&B of the moment, let's go a third way. And I'll say as like a guy who was primarily hip hop at this time, like this was R&B that I could really get into, like in a real way, because there seemed to be so much happening sonically that felt almost more hip hop to me than even R&B at that time. I wonder if it's just the organic instruments, because I am trying to find what that middle ground is. It's such a great quote, and I hear it, but I'm trying to tease out what the specifics are. I think, you know, in some ways maybe it is that there's an organic drummer. Some of this programming actually on brown sugar, I looked it up.

I didn't know. I believe it. Programmed drums. But I feel like... I'm just thinking about the R&B at the time. Like nowadays, it's actually hard to put yourself in a time capsule and go back and be like, oh, this... Yeah, of course there's R&B that sounds like this.

Not at that particular moment. Yeah, it was mostly digital. It was very digital. It was very smooth. I love Keith's wet. He's a great guy, personally and artistically, but everything was very smooth. It's very clean, very smooth.

But this felt different. This felt more... for the lack of a better term, like, grimy and gritty. And it felt more like, it felt more like East Coast hip-hop at the time. Well, obviously, DiAngelo's brown sugar was, as a breakthrough record, something that put his career to the next level. And that's a record that he worked on with Bob Howard, it should be said. Go back to our tribe called Quest.

Episodes are two-parter for more about him, an engineer, who really brought out a lot of the sonics. But DiAngelo has said upon reflection, what he was wanting to do for the next record was go a little bit of a different direction, and go back to what the demos sounded like before they turned into the final version of brown sugar. There was something in those demos that he had done at home with a four track just by himself, where once it got produced, it lost something to him.

There was something that changed. When it came time to make voodoo, it was an exploration and a search for something that didn't really have a name. And that was a big part of the process. And we'll be getting into that later. What's crazy is I feel like I hear exactly. what DeAngela's saying. Like I absolutely hear where there is a smoothness in the Brown Sugar

album that's definitely thrown out by the time that we get all the way to voodoo. But there was a process getting there. And sort of along the lines to talk about that process of getting there after the huge success of Brown Sugar, DeAngela started feeling the pressure to follow it up with something

just as big. And that led to some serious writers' blog. He was also getting frustrated with being labeled Neil's soul, which is funny because I think that we talk about genre on this show all the time. We use these terms like Neil Sol and New Wave so that it's easier to talk about

music. But in our heart of hearts, it's not so that we can put the artists that we love into a box. So I even understand why DeAngelo did not feel totally comfortable with the idea of Neil Sol. But we talked about before, and it's worth saying that even the term Neil's soul was actually created and marketed

by his then-manager, Kedar Maasenberg. What actually broke him out of this crippling writer's blog, was the birth of his son. He had a son with Angie Stone, who I'd also love to do an episode about the birth of Michael Archer Jr., aka Swayvo Twain. In fact, the first song he wrote for Voodoo, Send It On, was something that he and Angie Stone wrote together. Let's hear a little bit of Send It On. Love that song. It's like the tightest, coolest, untight rhythm section of all time. What's going on in that rhythm section? Well, just one thing that happens a lot in both albums, actually, discussing is the side stick on the drum kit.

Like this use of the stick to hit the rim. It's not a rim shot, by the way, common misconception. A rim shot is very loud. A rim shot is like, you're actually hearing the snare and the rim at the same time, so it's really loud. But a side stick is that really kind of cool,

mellow, it's very jazz, it's softer. And it's all over both of these records. I've spent time with Questlove in the studio sometimes, and every now and then he'll just be there and he'll be doing that little side stick right there. I didn't know they had a name. That's pretty cool.

It's Maschill, man. Maschill. Let's shout out some of the incredible players on sitting on. And the rest of Voodoo, we got Quest Love on drums, Pino, Paladino on bass, Ban Ki-Alford on guitar, and Roy Hargrove on trumpet and fluehorn. And I also want to mention Russell Elavado as, yeah, as Mixer and Head of Juden. And also, Sugar Steve, who, you know, is a buddy of mine. And I know that, like so many who worked on this album, Voodoo, there's a lot of hurt.

You know, there's a lot of sadness, but we're here, like I said, to celebrate. And I'd be remiss if I didn't point out the credited, by the way, interpolation or interpolation on this song. That's right. Cool and the gang's Sea of Tranquility is interpolated at the very top of the song. So here it is in Send It On, and then I'll play for you the source of what was replayed. Cool and the gang's Sea of Tranquility from 1969 sounds a little like this. It's a fair cop, you know. You use that, you pay for it.

And you know what? It actually tracks with the stories that they've said, which is that they would go into the studio and they would watch all these, you know, VHS tapes and self-burdened DVDs that Questlove had of these performers. You know, they were, you know, digesting all this stuff. They were absorbing and digesting and really, like, the word ingestion is a huge, but this process for a year from what I've come to here in all of the interviews. And there's many wonderful interviews with Questlove and DeAngelo and the rest of them. they'd spent almost a year at Electric Radio series. Actively recording. This isn't like one of those things.

They would meet back up in a couple months. They said, quote, the majority of the time we would sit and watch Prince, and that's how the process would start. We would sit in front of the TV from seven in the evening to nine o'clock. We would watch performances over and over again. And then they'd go to the studio and just having absorbed into their bodies the experience of watching and listening to this music and talking about it and playing records. Then they would go to the studio and start playing.

And it would gradually morph and evolve naturally into original material. It starts as them maybe covering an idea or taking a little fragment of something they'd heard and expanding on that. And before you know it, it becomes something completely new. And sometimes it doesn't, such as in this case where they're like, you know what, let's just keep that Golo and the gang thing we liked, which is what they ended up doing on this song. And I have to say this. This is all self-archived material. Think about the year, everybody. This is like late 98, 99.

Like, you don't have YouTube. Nowadays people are like, oh, have you ever seen a Jimmy Hedrich perform on that weird late night show with a, you know, like. Here it is. Now you just jump there and you go there. Like, this is all stuff that like almost like in his backpack, Questlop is walking around with like every episode of Soul Train in his pocket. And that's so important to realize that like that's the level of commitment that you had to have back there to be able to produce to somebody and say,

hey, by the way, I've got all these performances on tape or on DVD. Questlove likes to say that at the time before there was YouTube. He was YouTube. He says that he was the guy that everyone would send the archival to like rare footage. He would go from country to country touring with the roots, and people knew that Questlove just was absorbing. He was a collector. So they'd give him not just records and b sides of like, you know, records,

not just musical material, but also VHS tapes of like rare archive, like, you know, live performances that had never been, you know, released publicly of Prince and, you know, Slime the Family Stone. So he just kept all this stuff. I think he's got lots of warehouses somewhere in Philadelphia. And this was the material that they absorbed. and they were able to sort of swim in their influences in the process of making this record.

Questlo, by the way, called these treats, quote unquote. Like these, he said, we had all these treats lying around and they would study these treats. And he said that they had a handful of influences in particular that he called, he referred to as the Yoda's. So the Yoda's were Jimmy Hendricks, George Clinton, Prince, I think Sly Stone, Al Green, Falakuti were all in the mix as like, these were the ones that were particularly absorbed

into their musical bloodstreams in the process of making this record. That's so interesting because all those guys lead bands. That's a really good point, right? These are all like individual visionaries, musical visionaries, who sort of put the pieces together with different musicians from album to album year to year. All these guys were band leaders. They were literally like Miles Davis and Duke Ellington in that sense. I mean, one of their influences is clearly, Jimmy Hendricks.

What can you tell us about the relationship of voodoo with Jimmy Hendricks? Jimmy Hendricks was at the core of the operation here. Jimmy Hendricks, first of all, this is recorded at Electric Lady Studios, which at the time, go back to our Jimmy Hendrix, by the way, double episode. We talk about the making of Electric Ladyland, the record at Electric Lady Studios, which was a set. It seems like it should be the opposite, right? I always get that awesome. Electric Lady Land should be the place. I do, I do classic, it is classic me to get those two confused. Oh, I think we're all confused.

Electric Lady is the studio, and when they came to Electric Lady, it hadn't really been used in a long time. But when they walked in the doors and they saw all the iconic, like literally the Rhodes keyboard that Stevie Wonder had used and like Jimmy Hendricks wall, it's like the 70s music that they had been listening to and absorbing. This was the place. And this was the vibe. And this is where they sat for a year and changed. Jamming, eventually turning the jams into songs and just living and breathing and the music. And Jimmy was sort of the central shrine in all of this was Jimmy Hendricks. Literally images of him throughout the studio. Of course, this being the place where he made that record. And they literally jammed on Jimmy Hendrick songs. That was the genesis of the song, Root, came out of jamming on a handful of tunes from Electric Ladyland and Axis Bold as love. So there's a lot of Jimmy in the mix in this record. Oh, I hear the Jimmy. Why is that so good?

Why is it so good? Why is music so good? Because you get the sense that they were in the studio, 12 hours, listen to all the things. their favorite stuff and they're like, oh, let's record. And the dryness of all of it is so real, because they're not adding lots of reverb and effects. There's almost none. Like, I don't hear any. There's probably a little bit. But the dryness makes it very intimate. You hear it. It's like they're in the room with you. It's like a musical whisper. Like they're like right there in your ear. And by the way, I really heard the Jimmy having

teed it up with that with like knowing the backstroy for the song, Castle's made a sand. Like in that guitar line, it's not the same. But I hear the influence. I hear where you start with Castles Made a Sand and you tweak it, you go sideways from it. And you have a completely completely new song that comes from it. So castles made a sand fall in the sea eventually. So this song is a good example

of what Quest calls The Drunken Beat. DeAngela famously wanted him to drag the bead versus playing it straight, which gives it almost like a wobbly feel. Yeah, it's a good word for it.

We've talked about Dilla's influence on DeAngela in the past. Let us know. What affects is this? Listen, go back to our Farsight episode, which is one of my favorites, they're all great. We don't have any bad episodes. But on the Far Side episode, we go into more detail about DILA.

I do some demonstrations. Basically, though, in a nutshell, here's the summary. If you want to really broadly talk about how time, musical time works, there's usually straight time and then there's swing time. But then there's this third category called DILA time. That's Dan Charnis's phrase. And actually, J.D. himself called it simple complex. It just means that multiple things are happening at once in the stack of instruments.

And so that's a very oversimplified way of explaining it, but I'll just be really clear. Some of the things that might be swung, so you might swing the kick drum while the hi-hat remains straight eighths. That's what happened in the demonstration for Farsight for running. The eighth notes are but where the kick and snare come are not on the grid. They're a little bit ahead. They're a little bit behind. They're usually a little bit behind, but sometimes they're a little bit ahead.

So this idea of Dilla time is just playing with the lines between swing and straight time, the lines between one instrument is playing this while another one is playing. Like one instrument could be swung, but the bass might just be straight. But even within the instruments, and this is what Quest famously, he's talked many times about how he trained himself to sort of have the kick drum sound like a drunken five-year-old or something like that, right? While the snare might remain on the two and four. So that's kind of this idea of playing with.

with time and it shows up throughout this whole record, kind of on all the instruments. Sometimes it'll be in the drums. A lot of the vocals, a lot of DeAngelo's vocal delivery plays with backphrasing and being just a little behind. But maybe one of the harmonies is right on. It's amazing what it does for this record. Unlike most of the songs on Voodoo that were played, like you said, with live instruments and with this live jam feel, Devil's Pie started off as a beat produced by the legendary

hip-hop producer DJ Premier. The story goes that it was originally intended for the rapper Cannabis, who passed on it. But when DeAngela heard it, he loved it immediately. We're going to take a quick break, but don't go anywhere. When we come back, we're breaking down the magic behind Devil's Pie from the gritty samples to those wonderful DeAngelo vocals. When we get back. Guys, Wayfair's Black Friday sale is the perfect time to score huge deals on all things home, no matter what your style. Wayfair is the place to shop for all things home.

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Head to Wayfair.com now to shop Wayfair's Black Friday deals for up to 70% off. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R-com. Sale ends December 7. All right, welcome back to one song. All right, Luxury. Let's get into the music. Should we start with the main drum sample? Let's start with it.

And just a reminder, this song is such an outlier on this record. It's just two guys. There's no Questlove on this. There's no Dilla, like literally or figuratively. It's just DeAngelo and DJ Premiere. It started with DJ Premier creating this beat, which I will now play for you.

And that's it. A two-bar loop, a kick, a snare, and a high-hound. program, by the way, I should say. So DJ premiere originally from Houston, Texas. He, the name is Chris Martin, but he started as Waxmaster C before becoming DJ Premier or Primo, as he's famously known. With Guru, he was in the duo Gangstar. And then, of course, very famously and epically as well as a DJ slash producer,

did cuts, including and not limited to Nod's New York State of Mind. He had a kick in the door for Biggie. This goes out to you It's almost too much to name You've got Come Clean by Jay Rutha Damager You've got I mean like that's

He's his production career Is intense It's insane Right but what's crazy about Group home superstar All that's Yeah as I watch my friends die But all I can do

Is sit back and cry These are feelings I'm expressing through my rhymes I've been through hard times You could keep on naming names You could keep on and going What's crazy though Is I found a quote

Where he talks about how at heart He still thinks of himself as like mainly a DJ. He's DJ Premier and quote, the producing pays the bills. What? Yeah, I know. Did he really? Yeah. Like that's insane. I know. He's got. That's like Leonardo DiCaprio being like, yeah, I got this pay. But it's really my helicopter designs. Like, what in the world? That's, that's, that's, I never knew that. He's a very talented man on the decks, but also on the MPC. He does them both. But DJing, his identity, it sounds like

DJ Premier. It says it right there in the title. He says a DJ. Well, yeah, so he produced this track. It's an amazing track. So I'm going to recreate, by the way, the sample is coming up. But first, let me just quickly walk you through his process. So what we know about DJ Premier's production process at this point in 1998 when this track was made was that he had two Akis. He had a rack mount S950, which was his main sampler. That's what he would use to sample records and to get the sounds into the device.

But then he would actually use his MPC 60 with the 16 pads, the class as a performance device. That was his instrument. The one that gets shout out on all the 90s hip-hip-hop songs. The MPC is the hip-hop tool of joy. Yeah, and specifically the 60, I want to say. The 60, right? At this point, the 60 is the one. So he uses it not as a sampler, but just to trigger the sounds. Cool quote from DJ Premiere.

He said, I tend to program my drums, but a lot of the time, I'll turn off the 16th notes, meaning the quantization, which would get a perfect, and I'll play the MPC live. So it sounds like live drumming. I like it to sound loose. That's why my drums have a little bounce to them. I'm not sure on this track, that's a two-bar loop what I just played for you. Across the entire song, I listen in the entire way, there's a little bit of variation. So he might have played this one on the pads.

He might not have, but I'll play them for you. I'll recreate what he might have done with his MPC 60. Oh, wow, cool. This is an Akai device made for the digital age. So this is a way to trigger sounds that are coming from Ableton, but it's not that dissimilar from the idea behind an MPC, which is that there's eight pads here. I'm holding my device.

It's got eight of what he would have had 16 pads, each of which you put a sound in. So in this case, he's chopped up three sounds. There's a kick. There's a snare, and there's a high hat. So from that quote again, he may have programmed the pattern across the song, or he may have performed it like this. All right, I think we can call that successful.

92% accurate. I love that boom-bap. It's the boom-bap. It's the boom-bap. DJ premiere, just really known for it. It sounded so good when you were in your headphones walking down the street, you know, feeling yourself. Yeah.

And it's got a little bit of swing. that like walking down the street swing to it it's not straight it's good it's that second kick drum that 16th note boom boom that gives a little bit of a yeah i love it i love it always said it felt a little bit like a beat down but you also might just be walking down the street like a beat down i grew up in a violent neighborhood let's talk about the bass what's going on with the bass in the song and by the way can i just say i did the bass is one of the other just i mean obviously defining features of the song it sounds so good not only is it the defining feature of the song this has like kind of four things in it.

Yeah. It's that drum beat we just listened to. The bass we're about to hear DeAngelo's voice and then peppered throughout, sprinkled throughout. There's a handful of samples. Samples and scratching. Yeah. But it's a really sparse song that's really centered on.

And very dark. I mean, like you got to remember coming out of Brow Sugar, which was like beautiful and lush, like cruising and lady and me of those dreamy eyes of mine. Like those are so beautiful. And then this song comes. And it sounds more ominous and dark.

You know, that part of it. The sparseness, I think, contributes to the darkness, I think. Totally. I think, you know, it's a little bit like when we're talking about Riz's production for Wutang. Yeah, that sparseness kind of creates a darker vibe. Yeah, there's all of the harmonic content, all of the polyphony in the song is in the vocal.

There's only a single bass note that you're ever hearing at any given time. There's no guitars. There's no keyboards. There's no chords being played across the entire song, except in the vocal stacks. And boy, those are some big chords when we hear them in a moment. Absolutely. But first, let's start with the bass.

Come on. That was cycling through my head all night long, by the way. It's so good. It's so good. Why did I just say, come on? Like, I'm 70. Come on. Come on, young man.

They didn't say, let's go. They said, come on. Come on. It was more inviting. Come on, everybody. Come on. Come on. Come on.

Come on. Different song. So let's talk about the bass. This is not contrary to what you might think from listening to the rest of the music. record and maybe knowing about it, it's not Pinot Palladino, but it sounds very Pino Pino, isn't it? That's crazy to me because I guess not knowing, you know, the intricacies of music production at the time this came out, I would have assumed that the same basis was on the entire

album. It really fits into the record. It's really interesting how that happens. Like there's something about the tone and the choice of notes and even the melodicism. I'll talk in a minute about the strangeness of what's happening in the notes that are being played. But first I'll recreate it because this is a sample that comes from a Teddy Pendergrass song from 1977 called And If I Had. That's what makes Premiere a freaking genius, dude. Just this little film at the beginning. That little intro doesn't even have a rhythm to it. It's just a slide into a song.

And he reworked it in our brain so much. I love stuff like that. I can't pretend to be anywhere near the genius of a premiere or a Dilla. But I do have the ear of someone. who's been chopping breaks for two decades now, you go about the world and you hear an isolated section of something. It starts with drums. I remember being at a cafe when I first started producing

and I heard train in vain by the clash. I'm like, I'm going to go grab that kick and snare. And then your whole life unfolded in front of you. You're constantly like, I'm going to go grab that isolated thing. Premier's brain does many things that I don't understand. But he heard this and he's like, I can take those bass notes and build a new bass line out of it. I guess for me it's just almost like a tempo thing, right?

Like, it's almost like a, there are times where you'll hear like a weird little part of a song. Yeah. And because it's already into the song and there's always like four, four time or whatever. Like you'll be like, oh, that small little snippet. But this is even, not even that. This is like something that technically is not on a time signature yet. It's the slide into the song. I hear what you're hearing too.

Yeah. What you're hearing in that moment, it's free floating. It's the top of the song. It's about to introduce you to what ended up being a very slow ballad. Yes. So it's sort of that more shocking to realize that it was put into this 92 BPM tune. You named it. Right.

Yes. So cool, right? Well, let me show you what he did to that. So we always do this. There's a sample phantom on this song. There's a gentleman who's a bass player whose name we know. So that player is Jimmy Williams, who is part of the Philly International Contingent. By the way, another Philly connection.

That's fantastic. Gambling Huff. Gamble and Huff, McFadden and Whitehead. One of my favorite bass lines of all time is this gentleman. Here it is. McFaddenin Whitehead. Ain't no stopping us now, 1979. Jimmy Williams, give it up.

Here we go. When I sit down in front of Ableton with my bass strapped on and I got a beat ready. And I'm like, I'm going to create a new song. I often start with that. I often go sideways. How can I do something like that but different? It's melodic. It's grooving.

It's funky. Jimmy Williams. It's Jim Williams. Bernard Edwards. There's some people who their bass lines are just really, really complicated. And they didn't have to be that complicated, but because they are, they're so great. You just love it. It just makes a smile to you.

It's a hook. It fulfills the purpose that your brain needs from a song, which is usually in the vocal. But no, no, this is giving you a melody, but it's groovy and it's low and sexy. The same basis on Ain't No Stop on us now is on Devil's Pie. That's right. So let me just remind you of what the original sounds like. Right? So it's blinking, you miss it.

One, two, three, four. Four notes. It's on a walt swing. You're right. It's like 12-8 time, like a little triplet feel. So crazy. So he took those four notes. He pitched the entire thing down one,

or he pitched all the individual notes down one, mapped them to his MPC, and performed, by the way, part of his process is, as he's talked about, is there's a lot of trial and error. So he played around with different ideas until he got to this one, which is each of those sounds chopped up and pitched down,

and one of them pitched down. So I'll just explain that to you. So here it is. That's the beginning of the pattern. And that's the fourth note. But then he pitches that fourth note down three more steps to get a fifth note out of it. So he's playing this. And that's the baseline to doubles pie.

That's so good. It's so genius. It's so genius. There's little subtle things that he left in that are different. The first three notes are, done, down in the transposition down one step, one half step. that's B, C-sharp, B. But the Bs are different.

It's short, and the second one is longer. And he used them in the mix differently. They fulfill different functions. If you were to do, it doesn't work as well. So he did the longer one. It's just these little subtle genius touches. By the way, it's because of the song he sampled. It sounds like you have a live basis on.

Oh, you hear the fingers. You hear the strings. You hear the slide of the strings. You hear the, mm-hmm. Yeah, no, it's... Especially on this note. Yeah. Sliding down.

Like, you could play those notes on a keyboard, but it wouldn't sound the same, because you wouldn't feel the thread. The second bar just has these two sliding notes, one of which is pitched down in extra three. So it sounds like this. Which gives it the sort of like drunken feel, right?

Which is happening across a lot of the other DILA-inspired parts of this record. I love it. While we're talking about these samples, There's this other part in the song. It's like this descending, almost sounds like something out of the movie Alien. It sounds like something out of the alien franchise. But I'll play us a little bit of that,

just so the audience does what I'm talking about. Okay, here it is in the mix. This is also chopped up from a sample, which I'll show you in a second. But first, here is what it sounds like in the mix, isolated. Yeah, that's it. Sounds like a 1960s flying saucer landing. Bingo.

Oh, no. Did I guess it? You nailed it, my friend. It is an actual flying saucer that they recorded in 1967. Oh, okay. No, but you're not wrong. It's called Jericho Jerk. It's a song from 1967 by Pierre Henry, or Henri maybe, and Michel Colombier, and it sounds like this in its original form.

So groovy. I'm feeling this. I have been waiting for this song to do something so I could place it neatly in a genre and it refuses to cooperate. It really is not cooperative at all. This song is five minutes of intro. It's a long-ass intro. I don't know. I don't know.

Where's it going? We're halfway through the song. I thought I was going to go to a loungy place. It never went there. It never went there and we're halfway done. I'll fast forward. Let's just see where it ends up. Nope.

That's a minute 40. That's what it is. Now it's over. It gave you genre in the last bar. In the last two seconds of that song, it went to genre. It's all freaking awesome late 60s like sound effects and modes. Next time I might throw a party with a shag carpet and a twister set. I am putting that song on for a less.

minutes. That's the one. That was fantastic. That's a really cool weird song. It's a cool weird song, and the same dudes who did that did the song that Futurama based their theme song on. That is super cool. Wow. Premiere had that in his back pocket. He knew the same place. He's waiting for the moment. And this was the moment. I mean, from that weird, quirky sound, which does play a huge part in why we love this song. It's one of the only things you're hearing that isn't his voice and the rhythm section. Oh, sure. It's almost all there is in the middle. But then there's like what he did with the bass. He took this thing that didn't have necessarily a rhythm or a tempo, and he gave it to it and birthed this new song. And another thing that I think Premier does that

I absolutely love is that he'll take the smallest, like, word snippet. You know what I mean? Like, he's done this so many times. And he'll cut him into, like, whole sentences to be the chorus of a whole other song. He did this famously on one of his own songs. This is a snippet from Gangstars. You know my Stee's. Check out this chorus. Method. Let them know so you beat you're like just the king of that.

Like you know you've got Meta Man, flavor flavor. You've got a couple of different hip hop icons all sampled to form a whole new sentence for the chorus of that song. And he does a little bit of this on this song, on Devil's Pie. Listen,

obviously that last one is Fat Joe, a song called Sixth. but he's got vocal sampling in there from Ray Kwan. I and I, which if you don't know the song Faking Jax, you've probably heard in some of your favorite post-1997 hip-hop songs. Go check out Faking Jax by I and I, by a group produced by Pete Rock, among others. You got Dick Gregory in there, a speech called Black Progress. You've got Rayquan and Ghostface from Ugambinos,

the B-Nus off the books this year. So many wonderful moments of him just grabbing snippets and little pieces of black 90s excellence. I love it. I love what Premiere does when he scratches a vocal in. And while we're talking about vocals, this wouldn't even be a Neangelo episode unless we talked about the amazing singer at the heart of all this wonderfulness. Such a great song, such, such poignant lyrics. We'd love to hear something. Why don't you start us off, my man? For the slice, won't the pie. Why is why till we fry. Watch us all stand in line for Slice of the devil's pie.

Insane. So beautiful. Beautiful. The stack, the stack is all DeAngelo. It's him four, maybe five voices at times. It's hard actually for me to extract what those harmonies are. Those are church and gospel and jazz, frankly, chords. The overlap of all of that is there. You can really hear the gospel influence. Very close harmonies, very interesting choices.

They don't stack perfectly. And that's part of the beauty. So it's like three or four at a time? At least, there might be four or five. At the very least, I can get one or two of the voices out of there. Let's see what that sounds like. Here's the backgrounds. And then here's the lead, and I'll mix them together.

What the slice, want the pie, why is why till we fry. Watch it's all stand in line for a slice of the devil's pie. What's crazy about these lyrics to me is that I think I understood them one way when they came out. And I understand them totally differently now. When I came out, it felt like, hey, this is messed up. We're all standing in line trying to get a piece of the devil's pie. Wine and women. By the way, I like the women.

It's always a sin because it's always been singing. But, you know, like crazy, you know, forbidden sexual fantasy. All that stuff is in this song. It actually reminds me of the Depeche Mode song, walking in my shoes, where he says, forbidden fruit for me to eat. You mean it's vulnerable. It's not just decrying all the sins. It's also admitting defeat to a degree.

I think at the time I heard it, I thought it was more like, these are all terrible things. And like I heard the moralizing now when I hear it. I sort of hear like, and I hope I'm not putting something on DeAngelo that is not there. But it's almost like he's saying, these are the temptations that I personally am being faced with. I hear that too. And I don't want it, but yet we're programmed to want it. Whether we're programmed at birth genetically to want more, more, more. things in excess, or maybe society has pushed us towards that.

But it definitely feels a lot more personal. It's about temptation. It's about we can't control these things that are out there and tempting us and it's life. And maybe it's something in the middle. Maybe he's both judging these things, but also saying, yes, I too understand why people fall for the devil's power. I hear that too. And that was like on repeated listens as well.

I think the first time I heard it, it felt like a moralizing thing as well. And not a bad message, not one that I can't stand behind. You're right. Be careful of things that are bad for you. He's coming from a gospel background, so he probably has pretty strong opinions about. And the devil's pie. It's right there in the title. It's right there in the title.

But I also think that, you know, as you get older, you start to, I don't know. A part of me is just like, have we gone too far on the sin thing? Like, can we let people just be people a little bit and show them some grace? I don't know. It's a hard thing to nail. It's a hard thing to nail. I think that's part of the human condition is you now. navigate day to day and you try to make good decisions and you try to also not restrict yourself

from doing things that are fun that don't hurt people, but like a drink every now and then. If you're not alcoholic, you know what I mean? A part of me doesn't want my kids to ever have a drink, but then another part of me doesn't You know that that moralizing is going to work. If you like, if you put the hammer down and like never do it, it tends to backfire, right? Backfiring hammers. I'm mixing my metaphors, but you get my point. I totally get your point. I think you change as you get older. Yeah. And it makes sense that I would hear that song.

one way in 98, and hear it very differently now. But that's just the chorus. Let's dive into the verse. Who am I justify all the evil in our eyes? I myself feel the high of all that I despise. One thing I wanted to point out, by the way, is that the rhythm of this song is consistent. It's the same in the bass as it is in the vocal.

He's singing the same, da-da-da-da-da. I'll play them together, and you can hear how they lock in, except that he's also adding this behind. behind the beat variations from moment to moment. Yeah, and I even hear like a churchy hand clap. There's snaps and handclaps. But let me just play what I'm just describing

so you can hear how the bass and the vocal locked together. Or at least they were late. So in the first bar of that two-bar loop, they're locked in, and then they sort of go call and response. So there's an interplay between the two. It's a 16-note. And one, e and a three and a four hand a one, he and a two and a three. And again, it's swung.

It's behind the beat. It's inconsistent. But that's kind of the world we're living in rhythmically, which helps, I think, reinforce the simplicity of that motif. Dun to da, da, is the whole song. We're really hearing that across the five minutes, which is why by the end of it, it's just embedded in your brain. You've heard it in the vocals.

You've heard it in the bass. And can we just say something about those lyrics? because I almost got chills just hearing it in his own voice because it's more like a speech and less like a song. So some of that stuff lands harder sometimes. He says, who am I to justify all the evil in our eyes when I myself feel the high from all that I despise? Like, so in other words, it's just like what we were just talking about. Like, we know the pleasant buzz you can get off of a great glass of wine, but we don't necessarily want our children drinking wine, right? So it's just like, and he's on a whole different level.

He's an international superstar. Lord knows what he's been offered. And he's saying, like, you know, who am I to judge when I felt that high? This is the cognitive dissonance, especially of like of a deep thinker who's sort of self-aware and can put into his art, this moment of decision paralysis. Like, I don't want to do it, but I kind of do. I know I shouldn't, but I still kind of want to. I know what it's like and I know I shouldn't. Yes.

But I want to anyway. Yes. And one other thing I just got to point out, like to me, I love hearing his voice when he's talking like this because it's still, just even the way he's delivering the thing is sort of rhythmic. And I was thinking like at 92 BPMs, it's just this weird DJ thing.

Like I've always, I've prints, let's go crazy the same way. I always hear in the back of my mind like a church clap. So it's like, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Like, it's just that, it's that back clap. You know, that clap on the back beat. The double time, yes.

I heard it just. now when I've never thought about that in relationship to this song. Now, Blake, take us to the bridge. You want to talk gospel. I got some gospel for you, my friend. Listen to that all day. A gospel choir of just DiAngelo. Yeah.

I don't know, six or seven notes in there, at least, maybe even more. Couldn't isolate them all, but here's one or two. And here's one of the leads taken out. Apparently when he did his vocals, he was alone. Questlove talks about he just wanted to be successful. So most of voodoo was him just taking hours. You know, once the track was done, it would take hours for him to come up with stack and be happy with all the takes and all the parts. For each of those individual notes that he would be singing.

He was the choir of one on this tune, on the whole record. Just like Jimmy. Jimmy liked to be isolated. He thought he did not have a great voice. At the same place, 30 years earlier. He was doing the same thing in the same exact studio. Yeah, it had been in almost 30 years. Wow, that's crazy.

Play us a little bit of the vocal outro. Out there. Get down. Four slice of the devil's fine. I don't think he said anything there. So good. Can't help it shape my head. I know.

We were all just vibed. With my hair right there. There was one line in there where it almost sounded like it was most deaf. And it occurs to me that most was almost like a flip side of this coin because DeAngelo was like this R&B singer who was coming with like hip hop influences and vibes. Meanwhile, Most Def was most definitely a rapper. Yeah. But he was one of the first rappers I remember who were like, man, that dude, he's singing all these hooks. You know, he sang for the Bush babies.

He was singing on his own songs. Like Most Def, also recording it roughly the same time, I didn't draw all these lines back then, but now I'm like seeing like the connections that are going on. There was just something in the late 90s where people were trying to do something different. And again, I think it's in large part due to the response. of the ubiquity of bad boy records and the music they were putting out at the time. I always understood where most deaf was a response to that.

I understand more than ever, the DeAngelo is the response to that, too. Interesting, yeah, I see that there. Also, you can really hear his vocals in that outro. You can really hear the influence of the blues. And I love this one, DeAngelo quote. DeAngelo said, quote, I would say the spirit of the vocals is more like a chain gang

or like a feel of the slaves and the feel picking, whatever the fuck master had us picking. That's what we'd be singing when we were picking in the hot fucking sun. There's like that scene in centers where they show the chain gang. And when you should know that that's sort of what's in his head when he's singing this,

it kind of makes a lot of sense. I'm so glad you mentioned that because, like, first of all, it wouldn't be one song in these past few months without us bringing up the blues and blue notes and tritones. Guess what? There's a tritone in the song, which I found in this strange way.

Oh, wow. Because the vocal, this is in G major, this song. Yeah. But the bass line, is not in G major. It's in G. Lydian. It's a mode. It just means that one note is different.

So the bass is in a different key, technically, a different mode, than the vocals. It's very strange. I'll just explain what that means briefly. The notes that he's playing, that he's singing. Now, of course, he's harmonizing this, so that's oversimplification. It's G major.

But the baseline is, didn't that note sound strange and I just played it for you? The C sharp, it's not in the G major. It's a very strange juxtaposition because there's a C and a C sharp. Those two notes exist at the same time, sometime. And that's a tritone. In other words, in the G, in G major, that's the tritone note.

So there's a tritone in this song. It's the blues you were just referring to. I'm not. Can I just say, I love that you found that. And I'm not surprised because the very first time I heard this, every time I've heard this song, there's always something a little bit, I want to use the phrase in a good way, off about it. Yes, off is the word. Sonically off.

And to know that it's intentional just makes me, you know, realize the genius of DeAnda. Yeah, listen back to that baseline on its own. It's done, dun, dun, done, that one half step higher is like, that's a little bit of the strangness. There's a little wobbling. There's some strangeness. In the rhythm that we've been discussing with the dilatine. But there's also some strangeness in that one choice of one half step that is contrary in a way, but doesn't cause problems in the contraryness. In fact, I would argue, it's called devil's pie.

To the key of the vocal. You're supposed to feel a little unner. You know what I mean? And that tritone is helping us feel in nerve. Exactly. So now that we have heard the song, how do the splits on Devil's Pie break down? The splits are 75% Michael DeAngelo Archer,

25% Chris E. Martin, aka DJ premiere. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. We know that the song came out in 1998, two years ahead of Voodie's release, and it kind of went under the radar to people outside of the hip-hop community. My theory is that it was just too different

from what DeAngelo had been doing, earlier on brown sugar. And I will say it was way darker than hip-hop and R&B at the time, as we said so many times, this is like the height of like bad boy and puffy on top of the whole world. Although I will point out this song did get a feature in the Hype Williams cult classic movie, Belly. And Hype Williams is like the guy who in part invented some of that shiny suit aesthetic

that is in charge. But, like, he's savvy enough to know, hey, I'm going to work with DeAngelo, too, and throw this into my movie Belly. Let's play a clip from the movie Belly. Check this out. Belly, really underrated movie. Has quite the interesting ending, but that's a subject for another podcast. Don't be a spoiler, man. Yeah, no spoilers.

Watch Belly and then find me in the DM, so we'll talk about it. So, like we said, Devil's Pie was recorded quite well in advance of Voodoo coming out. when voodoo came out, they believed that the single was going to be left and right, which featured Methaman and Red Man, but they were late in delivering it to MTV, and MTV said, uh-uh, we ain't showing this video. And it looked like that was going to be the end of, you know, sort of DeAngelo being this guy who always gets his videos played. Lo and behold, they filmed the video for Untitled, How Does It Feel?

They start showing it at like key parties in and around New York. It's the talk of the town before things were able to go viral. and pretty soon MTV is basically forced to start showing this BT, all these channels start showing it. And it becomes sort of a hit video at the end of sort of like the music video era. It was like a hit music video. And it turned DeAngelo into quite the sex symbol, a sex symbol that was a reluctant sex symbol,

something he never wanted to be. And he struggled with that a lot. Yeah. For those in your car, you will hear Untitled. And for those at your laptops, here's a little treat for you, a visual treat. Here is Untitled. I will say ever since I saw that video, I've been very self-conscious about the V at the bottom of my waist.

I think a lot of people learned that that existed for some humans. Dude, between that and Brad Pitt and Fight Club, we're like, you can be so cut that you could have a V? I did not know you could have, before there was six-pack abs, there was that as an expression that was in the common parlance. After this video gave all of us body issues. Diablo said that he couldn't perform anymore without women basically being like, take your shirt off. at every performance. For artists, is thoughtful as intentional,

as DeAngela. This was quite demoralizing. And after the success of the untitled video, he kind of became a bit of a recluse, and there was some substance abuse. But thankfully, that was not the end of the DeAngelus story. In 2014, he blessed us with another

incredible album, Black Messiah. So many good songs on Black Messiah. Here's one of my favorites. Let's listen to a bit of charade. I mean, he's, gone back to what I think served him so well on Voodoo. He's incorporating sort of like the jam aesthetic into his gospel and his, you know, love of prince. Guitar and Sitar sound in the mix. And he's playing guitar. I think he spent more time after

Voodoo kind of learning guitar and getting that deeper into that instrument. So, Diel, what do you think the legacy of D'Angelo and Devil's Pie is? I think the legacy of DiAngelo is going to be celebrated for a long time. Not only is he one of the great singers with that gospely, bluesy, you know, voice of his, but he's also, you know, he's also just this guy who can play so many different instruments. And, you know, to see his growth from brown sugar to voodoo, well, he didn't get there overnight, clearly, you know, there are years in between. But right there in the middle of it is devil's pie. And I think that that, in some ways, encapsulates his love of R&B and hip hop into something that doesn't feel retro. It feels new. It felt new. I think that's why we as

people who talk about music embrace the term neo soul, because it's got the neo in there. Moving away from something that feels fake, you know, like pleather, into something that feels authentic and real. And I think that it came along at a great time. And I think that artists for generations to come will be inspired by him. I totally agree. I feel like DiAngelo has really risen part of obviously his not being in the public eye for so many years, I think hasn't tarnished his reputation. Not at all. But unfortunately it has meant he's on the tier with Prince. He's on the tier with all the other Yoda's, right?

He really is up there with the George Clinton's and the Slies. And maybe, unfortunately, like Sly, he did have this moment of sort of retreating from the public spotlight for reasons. But he has this incredible body of work, of music. And again, I really do think he is a bit in this Mount Rushmore of iconic musicians. And the fact that we lost him. so soon is such a tragedy. Only three full albums.

He could have grown into, he could have been Harvey Hancock. There's no reason to believe he might not have had another 30, 40 years of music making in evolution, perhaps at the same pace of an album every couple decades.

Sure. But incredible music, nevertheless. I love that you say he's now one of the Yodas. He had his yodas. And now he is one of the Yodas. He's ascended to that place. And now he's got like the forced ghost,

you know, shine around him. No, I'm serious. I mean, like to me, if he loves Star Wars and Star Trek as much as me, Like, you're getting those chills right now because you're just like, you know, he is Obi-Wan. He did it. And we love him for it. All right, One Song Nation.

It's time for one genre. Our friends at Discogs challenged us to do a deep dive into a subgenre and share a few records that we think are essential listening. And just a reminder, when we talk about genre on this show, we talk about it very broadly. We recognize that there are porous borders and overlap in all kinds of genres. We don't want to restrict you or restrict. your language by insisting something has to only be one genre at a time. That's right.

That's not how genre works. It's just so we can talk about music that has shared sensibilities. Precisely right. All right. So today we're talking about dub reggae, a music that evolved in the 1970s in Jamaica. If you haven't already listened to it, please listen to our sister Nancy and Don Penn episodes because we do some really good conversations about this genre. Can I just say real quick that as a, you know,

hip-hop DJ, I thought dub just meant instrumental because often you would buy hip hop 12 inches and then it would just say dub makes and that was just a version without the rap. But it's so much deeper than that. What can you tell us about dub reggae? Well, I definitely go back to listen to those. It takes two hours. So listen to those two one hour long episodes, Sister Nancy and Don Penn for the full explanation. But in a nutshell, yes, it was this discovery that you could take songs and mute sections of them in the multi-tracks and then start to be creative about like throwing a bit, a fragment of a vocal into the delay. This creativity birthed an entire move in in the 70s, which we kind of take for granted

now as the basis of all remixing comes out of dub and comes out of Jamaica and comes out of this creative explosion in the 70s. One of the funny things about the term mashup that was like so popular in 2000, I was like, yeah, in the hip-hop community, the 90s, we always had like an a cappella that we throw over somebody else's instrumental. I mean, technically that is a mashup. We just didn't call it that. Reusing recorded ideas from different songs has been in the ether for a half century at this point.

Yeah. So now, what is your selection for today's dub? Oh my God. This was such a Sophie's choice times 12. Guys, he was sweating. This is my obsession is dub. I have, my discogs collection of dub is for the last four years disgusting. I've spent a lot of money.

The number one record, the number one purchase on discogs, I should say, is a dub record. So the record is called Tribesman Assault, but the band is Roots Underground. This one cost me about $100 worth every penny just for this first song, High Times. My God, when I, every Friday night, I sit on the couch with the bass and I put this song on the turntable and I play the bass line to this 10 times in a row. That is how I ease into the weekend. One of the greatest dug tracks of all time. Can I ask you real quick?

Like, is that song available, like on MP3? Like, could I listen to it? Yes. It's on Spotify, actually. Yeah, you can go listen to the song in any platform. But nothing sounds as good as like when you've got like, I think more than more than some genres, the dub genre just sounds better when there's a needle on a record.

I think so. It really benefits from the tactile nature and the sounds in the, like all of the dust and the vinyl. The base just sounds a little bit more lower. Absolutely. Listen, I'm going to really quickly go through these. That's my number one. My number two is, and this is to get some variety to,

Horace Andy. These are all instrumentals on the Tribe's Minnesota record. I used to dress like this. So I'm immediately thinking, I got to get this. This is one of the all-time greats. Dance Hall style by Horace Andy and other wackies. These are both on wackies, which is Bullwackies, which is a label that actually came out of Long Island,

guys from Jamaica that moved to Long Island to make dub reggae. And incredible, incredible productions really dry. It's very wutang, actually. Really? It's very dark and gritty production sound. Yeah. What makes Horace Andy's music stand out? His voice is so distinctive.

You've heard it on Massive Attack. He's the voice on. at least three massive attack songs. Oh, very cool. I thought I seen his name before. But now you're saying this dub that you have has vocals. This one has the classic thing where they take the vocal version and then on the flip of the 45, they would have dubbed it out.

But now they make this on the record version, you get both literally spliced together. Sometimes it'll be one song, but you'll kind of hear where the vocal ends and there's this tiny space before they've spliced in very charmingly and perfectly the dub version. So they're all seven minute long songs. And I'll do one more because I know we've got to move on. I could do a whole podcast about Dub Records. I got to mention my guy, Lee Scratch Perry. I have 50 Lee Scratch Perry records.

It was so hard to choose the number one. But this is it. Black Art and Deb if you've got to start somewhere. I literally, when I'm awake at 3 in the morning and I can't fall asleep, I put this on and it soothes my brain. And by the way, Bosca had artwork, if I'm not mistaken. This is actually the wall of his studio, if you can believe it. And you're not wrong to connect.

that they visually look similar. But on the wall of the black arc in Jamaica before he burned it down, he just had all of these strange ruins and words and letters and symbols. But the black arc in question in the title of this record comes from Lee Scratch Perry's studio that he made some of the greatest music ever made,

including the Congo's record that's very famous. And then he burned it down. What about you, Diallo? What is your dub pick? Oh, mine easily. Studio one dove, the original. right around the world today's sound today. I think you own this one too.

Oh my God. That's another expensive discogs purchase. I mean, yeah. No, listen. First off, can I just say soul jazz records, sort of across many genres? Totally, yes. Excellent.

Incredible curation. So we could talk about Brazilian funk. We can talk about like weird, like New York stuff. Yep. On future episodes. But this one, it's basically dub versions of songs that had been put out in Jamaica in the 1960s. Studio one tunes.

Studio one tunes. And I would just say like this one, I think you can find an MP3 form. If you can't just go out and just listen to it. It was a good introduction for me to the genre just because I didn't know as much as you. I didn't come up with it the way that you did. But man, really good, really good song, select. Drunken Sailor version, outstanding. Check that one out in particular.

Man, I'm so glad you recommended this one to me. Thank you. My pleasure. So those are our one genre picks. check out our list on Discogs.com. And we know there are so many more dub reggae gems out there, so please let us know some of your favorites in the comments. As always, you can find us on Instagram and TikTok.

You can find me on Instagram at Diallo, Dialo, Dio, L-L-O. It's just six letters, at Diallo, or on TikTok at Diallo-R-R-L-O-R-L-E-L-E-S-X. That's 12 letters. I know that's a lot, but it's all I could get. And you can find me on Instagram at L-U-X-X-U-Y and on TikTok at LuxuryX. And if you have a radio, check out my new radio show every Friday night at 10 p.m.

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help me in this thing. I'm producer, DJ, songwriter, and musicologist luxury. And I'm actor-writer-director and sometimes DJ Diallo Roel. And this is one song we will see you next time. This episode was produced by Melissa Duanyas. Our video editor is Casey Simonson. Our associate producer is Jeremy Vimbo. Mixing by

Michael Harmon and engineering by Eric Hicks. Production Supervision by Razak Boykin. Additional production support from Z. Taylor. This show is executive produced by Kevin Hart, Mike Stein, Brian Smiley, Eric Eddings, Eric Wilde, and Leslie Guam.