One Song - Nas' "NY State of Mind"

Episode Date: February 26, 2026

Why does “N.Y. State of Mind” still feel like the gold standard for hip-hop lyricism three decades later? Diallo Riddle and LUXXURY dig into Nas’ landmark track, tracing its origins from Queensbridge to Columbia Records, unpacking DJ Premier’s haunting piano sample, and exploring how a dream team of producers reshaped hip-hop forever. Songs Discussed: “N.Y. State Of Mind” - Nas “Halftime” - Nas “The Genesis” - Nas “Professor Booty” - Beastie Boys “Subway Theme” - DJ Grand Wizard Theodore “Live At The Barbeque” - Main Source feat. Nas “Life’s A Bitch” - Nas feat. AZ & Olu Dara “It Ain’t Hard to Tell” - Nas “Long Red” - Mountain “The World Is Yours” - Nas “Just A Friend” - Biz Markie “I Love Music” - Ahmad Jamal Trio “N.T.” - Kool & The Gang “Gangsta Gangsta” - NWA “Breathe And Stop” - Q-Tip “Flight Time” - Donald Byrd “Mind Rain” - Joe Chambers “White Rabbie” - Jefferson Airplane “Milkshake” - Kelis “This Is How We Do It” - Montell Jordan “Children’s Story” - Slick Rick “Mahogany” - Eric B. & Rakim “I’m Glad You’re Mine” - Al Green “Five Man Army” - Massive Attack “New York State of Mind” - Billie Joel “SexyBack” - Justin Timberlake “Gin And Juice” - Snoop Dogg Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The smooth criminal on beat breaks. Never put me in your box if your shit eats tapes. Let's talk about don't put me in your boom box if it eats cassette. There was a time when you put a cassette in a boom box. And if you push the wrong button, it would spit out all the cassette tape. It would eat that tape. So, actually, today we're talking about a song from one of the greatest rappers of all time. And easily, one of the most masterful storytellers hip-hip has ever seen.

His poetic realism and philosophical rhymes paint a vibrant portrait of the community, and it kind of is unparalleled anywhere else in hip-hop. And the beat on this track is by one of hip-hop's greatest all-time producers, DJ Premier. Not the first time we've talked about him on the show. Probably won't be the last. And the sample itself is hypnotic for reasons we're going to delve into, but in part it's because it contains a note that you rarely heard in music, in popular music, I should say, at the time this song came out.

Also, this song is a large part why the album got five. Five mics in a magazine called The Source. For those of you don't know, you're going to find out a little bit about the source. And even for those who do know, you're going to find out the story behind him getting five mics in the source. We've got so much to unpack. We're talking one song. And that song is New York State of Mind by Nas. Rapids are monkey flipping with the funky rhythm.

I be kicking musician. Inflicking composition. A pain I'm like scarface sniffing cocaine. Hey, One Song listeners. If you love our show, you should check. out Trappital, the podcast where technology meets culture. Each episode, Tropital hosts and founder, Dan Runcie, digs into the strategy behind the media and technology that drives our attention. You'll hear Trappital explore topics like YouTube's growing influence in music and entertainment,

the never-ending saga about TikTok's future, and how AI is shaping the future. Media is one of the first industries to get disrupted by new tech. It's Trappital's job to keep you ahead of the latest trends. You can listen to Trappital wherever you get your podcast. That's Trappital, T-R-A-P-P-I-T-L. I'm actor-writer-director and sometimes DJ Diallo Riddell. 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 across genres telling you why they deserve one more listen. You'll hear these songs like you've never heard them before, and you can watch one song on YouTube.

While you're there, please like and subscribe. All right, now I want to set up this episode a little bit differently here. We've been doing this show for a couple of years. And for those of you who've been watching, you might remember this, but for newcomers, check this out. This is a clip from one of our earlier shows where we were discussing a certain song. Our favorite songs that we discovered in 2023, what you got for us? This is an old song.

These are old songs, but I discovered them this year. I'm going to sort of, again, reveal something somewhat vulnerably. These are a couple songs that a lot of people will know. and be like, you didn't know these songs, but I'm okay with that. Is that your impression of me? I'm so afraid to say it. Say it.

Here it comes. Just play it. Oh, God. And await your judgment. I'm leaving this show. Yeah. I mean, come on, man. I forgot to quit all the songs.

I forgot to quit the show. You forgot to quit the show. Who are those guys, by the way? We look so different already. I can't know all the songs. Listen, I stand by the message, which is that you can't. know all the music and to be vulnerable about it is to be open to learning. So here I am.

A couple years later, I now know the song for a couple of years, at least I can say. It's not new to me this year. But yeah, it was new at the time. It was under my radar. How do you feel watching that clip? Do you feel as though you were fair to me? I just can't believe that I wore that shirt. So luxury, how did you first come across New York State of Mine? Honestly, when we were preparing to launch the show, I was reading some really great books to kind of color in gaps in my knowledge. And one of them was can't stop, won't stop. Great book about the early days of hip-hop by Jeff Chang. I just really wanted to get, there was all sorts of names and artists who I'd been aware of in culture, but I didn't know where to place them in my mind

chronologically. I hadn't heard all the records. So in the book, they talk about Nas, they talk about this record. I went out and listened to it and I was like, oh my God, this is an incredible song. Now I understand the sort of mythos behind, you know, Illmatic is the greatest of all time. And Maybe this song is the greatest song on Illmatic. So that was the moment. That was the year. That was two years ago. Three years ago now.

Technically, I've known the song for three whole years. You've known it a little bit longer. Is that right, Diallo? Maybe 30 years ago. When did you first hear the song? Man, I bought this album the day it came out. I'd heard all the buzz about Nause. I was familiar with a song that we're going to talk about a little bit live at the barbecue.

And so this was like a big debut album that was coming out. I'd even heard the song Half Time on the Zebra. head soundtrack. I had no idea how much I was going to love it. How long this album was going to stay with me? I was just literally driving down Sonset Boulevard not too long ago, blasting it like it was brand new just because it aged so well, the rhymes, the production. We're going to get all that.

But I just do remember that when I pressed play on the CD, I heard what would quickly become one of my favorite intros of all time. Elmatic's got an Illmatic intro. Let's hear a bit of that intro. This is the Genesis. There ain't nothing out here for you. Yes, there is. This.

Yeah, that track is so my jam. That is so everything. There's so much going on there. First off, in the background, while you hear the snippet from Wild Style, you know, you hear the trains. I think I like songs that just start with trains. Like, you know, I want to be adored by the stone rose. It starts with trains. Get some geography in the sound.

Yeah, yeah, you know. And then you also hear in the background a young Nas rapping his, you know, infamous verse, infamous verse from Live at the Barbecue before it then segues into Nas and AZ and, you know, some of his crew talking over a subway theme from the movie Wild Style, which we're going to get into. I mean, like, for those of you don't know, Wild Style is a film from 1982. The capture is the essence of those early days of hip-hop in the Bronx. So many classic lines you probably associate with rap albums you've heard. heard are literally just music samples, I should say movie samples, taken from that movie. And Nas talks about how his dad took him to see this movie when he was a kid, and it just had a big influence on him. Yeah, it was a great movie about like hip hop culture, like literally like the four

pillars of hip hop with the graffiti, the break dancing, everything. And the stick up kids. Stick up kids. Beastie boys famously grabbed one of the lines that you're referring to. He played three of those murals with some of that ass. Man, and I saw you're female with them, too. What's up with her? I've been hearing that she's been giving that stuff out to all them graffiti guys. Oh, shut the fuck up, chico, man.

Who paint three of those mirrors for some of that ass. One of my favorite lines is by some guys who they said were actual stick-up kids who wanted to be in the film. And then they just said some, they basically made up some slang on the spot. You heard it on the radio, you seen it on a TV show. A to the game.

A to the motherfucker. see. Little that they know that it would be spread widely throughout the culture and become a world. Absolutely. And also part of that track, what's so cool about it is like the music you hear in it. Like, it's sort of this like almost a wonky funk beat. Like there's something kind of post-punk about it.

And what I love about this is that these are kind of iconic early hip-hop breaks, but they're not like break beats in the traditional sense that are famously known to be like, yeah, that's a bar from Incredible Bongo band, Apache, etc. These were breaks that were created. they were actual, a drummer was playing the beats. So a guy called Lenny Ferraro, who was part of the New York no wave scene. He was just a drummer in a bunch of underground bands.

Fab Five Freddy and DJ Grand Wizard Theater gave him a bunch of break beats or a bunch of songs that they liked the beats of, set him up with a microphone and recorded him playing drums empty, like to nothing at all. That's crazy. He just came up with beats that were inspired by these other songs, and then they recorded the rest of the music on top.

Chris Stein from Blondie. Chris Stein from Blondie. What a cool cameo. So cool. And David Harper on bass, all the music in this iconic seminal, like wild style soundtrack came out of those three dudes just kind of jamming. I always wonder who does the finger snaps because those finger snaps are so delayed.

It's a weird way it drives me nuts, but it's also like a precursor. Yeah, they're super wonky and off. Yeah, the claps are a little wonky and off. Dude, I'm telling you, those snaps are like, it's like wild. And Chris Stein from Blondie,

he's not playing the synthesizer. He's playing his guitar through a synth, like basically like pre-midied midied is to a synth sound. So he's playing guitar but you're hearing synth sounds. About 20 years ago I saw Chris talking in some interview about how excited he was that he got to be a part of this hip-hop history. So cool. They didn't know how huge it would be.

No. These are no iconic tunes. I mean, nobody knew how big hip-hop was going to be. They still thought it was going to be a fad. What do you think the significance of calling the song the Genesis is? I think they're kind of saying it's the genesis of hip-hop, but it's also the genesis of Nas as the rapper. And I think it's just perfect.

that's so important to point out to because with sampling and hip hop, like a lot of times the choices, and we're going to hear that a lot in this song when we get into the stems, the choices of what the samples are are coming from something that's very personal and has a message and meaning and a connection for the rapper, the hip hop or the producer, there's a connection between what they're using and what it means to them. Its significance to them is very meaningful. So there's like a lineage that is connecting the dots between what sampled and the new music. And by the way, you mentioned lineage. I think that's exactly the effect that I'matic this album had on everybody.

Because if you think about it, notorious BIG's album, Ready to Die, kind of starts a very similar way. It talks about like, oh, this is when I was born, this when I was a stick-up kid, and this is when I decided to get, you know, with this record label and produced my album, very similar to Nas' Genesis.

This is my story, and here we go. I'm going to tell you my story. Sit back and listen. Speaking of the Genesis of Nas, Nas' recording debut was on the main source's song Live at the Barbecue, 1991. He was only 18 at the time. and got on the track through his connection with Lars Professor,

who is sort of like this, you know, great producer and also the leader of a group called Main Source. And Large Professor produced the track. Large Professor was one of Nas' early champions, but after this feature, he wouldn't be the only one. Everyone would be asking about the kid who went by Nasty Nas. Let's hear a little bit of Nas' verse from Live at the Barbecue. Spampede the stage.

I leave the microphones split. Play Mr. Tuffy while I'm on some pretty tone shit. Viral assassin. More Uncle Tech pleases. When I was 12, I went to help. That verse so big when it came out. I remember cats trying to break down every single line. Like this at a time, I feel like maybe it was the Howard Stern effect in radio,

but like the idea of shock jocks and like being shocking and just trying to like, you know, shock people was like really big. I know it sounds weird to say, but like that was like a thing. And the idea that he would say when I was 12, I went to hell for snuff and Jesus. Like it scared people off. Like, you know, like, people were like, yo, can you believe he said that? Like, I remember as a person who would like rap rhymes, like, I was even scared to wrap that stuff. I would be like, when I was 12, I went to hell for, you know, like, I didn't say that shit.

How is it, I mean, explain to me why at the time in 1991, right? Yeah. Why did it jump out of the speakers? What about it was so different from what you'd heard before? To be blunt, it's the black community, man, like, you know, good portion of us considered themselves Christian. I mean, like, you know, I told my friends one time I was agnostic. You would think I said I was a Satanist.

You know what I mean? Like, that's how, I mean, like, it's understood that Jesus is your friend. And I think that in his effort to be shocking, when he said, I'm stuff of Jesus. Like, I'm telling you, people heard that line. In fact, I think I read some. Blossomis. Dude. Oh, by far.

Sacrilege. By far. Okay. I mean, in some ways, like, you know, hip hop is a rebellious form of music. We always thought, oh, those white kids, they listen to rock music. They're Satan worshippers. You know, like, that was the way to be rebellious in the white community. Being rebellious against Jesus and God was not necessarily a thing in the black community

in the same way. It was enough to just be like, yeah, forget these, you know, forget the government, forget the cops, forget the, you know, like, that was the rebellion. The rebellion wasn't in the church. That is such a helpful answer because in 1991, I'm hearing nothing but Satan. I'm hearing nothing but, nothing but Metallica. So it was true. The rumors were true.

You know, the Aussies stuff. like his worship machine. It's so interesting that a line like that did not jump out of the speakers to me for being so like transgressive, like you're saying. It wasn't subversive transgressive. It was something that was like pedestrian to my heavy metal, you know, rattled ears at this point. Yeah. By the way, I don't think DJ Premier, the person who ends up working with Nas famously for the last 30 years,

reacted any differently than the rest of us. I think I saw so where, you know, he's from Houston. Yeah. You know, originally. And like, he was just like, we couldn't believe he said that. You know, so the mission was accomplished. Nause wanted to, you know, let everybody know he had arrived on the scene by saying a lot. I mean, like, if you go back and listen to this song, there's a lot he says in this verse that is quite edgy.

There's also like a weird dichotomy at work here. On one line, he says, kidnap the president's wife without a plan. So, like, he's clearly like anti the government and establishment. Very next line, he says, and hang more, you know, black guys than the Ku Klux Klan. Which, like, whose side are you on here? You know what I mean? Like, you know, you got to realize in 1991, Public Enemy and Keras won and all the, like,

the very pro-black, you know, rappers are still very much in vogue. And yet here he seems to be jumping all across, you know, but what it almost heralds is this future, this sort of 90s thing where, like, there's going to be a lot of championing of street culture where there is a lot of black-on-black crime and he doesn't turn a blind eye to that. Okay.

But he's also not like pro-Bush administration. So he's carving out a lane that's like a little bit of what came before, but a little bit rebelling against him? I don't even know if he's carving out a lane. I'd actually say he's turning a mirror to the sort of mentality, the sort of street mentality that, you know, is a part of where he's being raised. He's being raised in Queensbridge, New York. And he's seeing things every day that are by their nature contradictory. You know, you see the people who wear the African medallions and are speaking about black empowerment alongside, you know, for the lack of better terms, to stick up kids. who are, you know, selling drugs at night

on the same bitches in front of his apartment. So he's sort of like trying to show all of it. Okay. And I think only Nas could ever be able to say, how did I at that time justify the line about the president and also the line about the Ku Klux Klan? It might be something that, you know, he can address on a future episode of this show.

So after this, an A&R by the name of Faith Newman, took notice a really wanted to sign Nas literally based on this one verse off of the main source album. She spent a year looking for him. I mean, like this is before the internet. It never happened today. I'm serious. She spent 10 minutes looking for it.

She has to drive around. She has to go like, hey, do you know nasty nods? Like, she has to go places and ask questions. Yes, a whole year goes by. Finally, MC Search. I'll say it. One of the best white guys in hip-hop history, MC Search of the group third base,

was able to actually introduce her to gnaz. So she meets him in 1990, beginning of 92 maybe. And El Maddo did not come out until April 1994. To me, this is what makes this a uniquely 90s story because the record labels aren't waiting for artists to produce their debut masterpiece. They give them time. There's this idea that we're going to find talent and we're going to nurture it.

And then once it's ready, when the incubation period is over, then we're going to release it. So I will give it to face. She's definitely an unsung hero for having the patience to let Nas grow before releasing him onto the... And what was Nas doing during this time? Is he recording a bunch of tracks? He's recording other songs. He released the song halftime on the Zebrahead soundtrack. And I think part of the delay is in the fact that Nas really wanted to work with Large Professor.

One of my favorite producers of all the time. I try to bring him up every episode somehow. But, you know, Large Professor at the time was getting more into production. And also at the same time, the main source was in the process of breaking up. So you didn't really have the time to devote to Nas' album. What's interesting about this, and I think we both read an article by No ID this week, which says it like, oh, this is one of the first albums with multiple producers. It may not have worked out that way if Large Professor just said,

sat down and done what the bomb squad did with Public Enemy or what Pete Rock did with C.L. Smooth and just produced the whole album. No, Large Professor was kind of tied up. So, Nas ends up essentially compiling like an album of all the best producers in hip-hop. And this is exceedingly rare at the time. I think you and I did some, like, research and some talking. We could only really find the comeback album from Run DMC down with the King as being an example of an album. with A-list pedigree producers all throwing in their best one or two pets.

It was more standard prior to this moment that you'd do a producer with one either group of producers like the bomb squad. Sure. Or with just a single producer, but it was sort of an O-Tour vision. It was sort of across the record there'd be a uniformity or rather a consistency of style that came from the fact that the same team was doing all of it. And I don't know if that was ever a conscious thing that people didn't go against. But the idea of actually expanding your colors and your options and the patterns. of what the album sounded like, and by the way, doing it more quickly because you're working in parallel, was kind of a relatively new idea at the time.

And by the way, I just want to say, I don't know how conscious it actually was, because if you think about it, usually the producer, whether it's MC Search or it's Dr. Dre or it's DJ Premier. They'll want to have the whole album. Yeah. That's usually a member of your group. So it would have seemed almost disloyal to be like, hey, you know, Dr. Dre, we think you're great, but we really want to go get this beat from this other guy over here.

The producer was usually a member of the group. So that was almost like... The separation of the functions was starting to happen now that we take for granted. That producers work with lots of artists and artists work with lots of producers was relatively new in this moment. Absolutely.

Even at the time I remember in the hip-hop community, it was always understood that rappers would occasionally have a cipher. Getting in a circle and everybody would spit their best freestyle. Well, this always felt like a producer cipher. And I remember people were calling it at that time. They were saying like, yo, he's got a beat from DJ Premier. He's got a large professor beat.

He's got LES, who I definitely love... LES produced. one of my favorite songs on this entire album. Stillmatic, keep static like wool fabric, pack a formatic to crack your whole cabbage. But also Pete Rock and Q-Tip, all giving some of their best material to this artist who they're not technically

in the group with. It definitely set off a new thing in hip-hop. One of the tracks that Larg's Professor produced for Nas is, it ain't hard to tell. It was actually the first single off of the album, and it dropped in 1994. It samples Michael Jackson's Human Nature. Check this out.

It ain't hard to tell. The mic is contacted. I attract clientele. Can I just say one of my favorite elements in that song? Yeah. Is the sample the guy going, hi! And it's been in so many hip-hop. I mean, like, literally, I think it's in thousands of hip-hop songs.

For those who know what I'm talking about, it's this part. That is taken from a group called Mountain, and the name of the song is Long Red. And here's where it comes in. It's been sampled so many times. Yeah. It's one of the classic hip-hop break. And what I love is when you're chopping a beat, you know, it's not always going to fit exactly within the bar. Boom, two, three, four. And sometimes you get something that's coming in early on the other side.

But when that loops, it becomes this hypnotic kind of unexpected, happy accident. And that's a big part of sampling. What sampling does that, quote unquote, regular musicianship or pre-hip or pre-hip Sampling musicianship wouldn't have chosen to do is to put something that was accidentally there and leave it. And then it becomes this hypnotic, again, I keep saying happy accident. But that's part of what makes sampling so cool is when you have these artifacts that weren't intentional, they weren't part of what you were needing. You were needing the kick and the snare and the hi-hat, but you had that sound and then it makes it super hypnotic, ultra-hypnotic.

And I also love the fact that guy said that thing one time and yet now it's been said millions of times. It's been heard millions of times. Leslie West, I'll bet that was, from Mountain, the guitar player. There you go. Also, there is an early demo of it ain't hard to tell this out there. It still contains the Michael Jackson sample. Let's hear it.

My God. Wow, so many different choices there. Different lyrics. The horn saxophone is doing a lot, as opposed to in the version that we love. holy smoke it's a very different song and just to build on what we were just talking about with the mountain sample how right at the end of the drum loop which is what was required there was a little thing that they wanted to not use probably but they kept it in they're like oh wait that's dope keep that in it's in that bar that we're looping let's just leave it there yeah so too with this combination of samples in there like i actually would want to sit with that to break down how the sounds relate to each other like what scales and what notes are being used because in theory like literally in music theory theory, you'd probably find some cacophonous moments,

but as a listener, you're experiencing something that sounds really interesting. And it sounds really different, and it sounds unusual. And that's what really matters is that you connect with a listener, not get bogged down on, am I allowed to use this note?

And if so, must it comport with the harmony in this next section? It's listening to that just now, both of those samples, I was like, man, that horn doesn't really fit with the baseline, and yet it sounds so cool. It does sound cool. I will say that I think there's something about sampling, whether it's, you know, compromising

musically, like, hey, we're going to leave in that little musical artifact. Right. Or compromising with the artist. As the story goes, Michael Jackson was only, he only cleared the sample because Nas promised not to curse. We're going to continue to try and find the source of this, you know, story that's been going around for years. But, yeah, I mean, it's very believable because, you know, Michael Jackson being a devoutly religious Jehovah's Witness, I believe. Yeah, he was probably like, hey, you can use the sample, but just keep it clean. I want to play one more track from this album before we get to our star attraction.

This is the song The World Is Yours. This one was produced by Pete Rock. And it's actually the first beat Pete ever played for Nas right there on the spot. Nas comes up with the hook, whose world is this? It tells Pete, I want you to sing it. And, man, I think we all benefited from that. Pete was hesitant at first, but Nas was so confident about it that he finally said, all right, let's hear a snippet of one of my favorite non-the-songs, the world is yours.

The world is yours. Smud, it's fun, and sma, whose world is this? Can I just say, Pete has a way of both producing and rapping and singing off the beat. So the fact that he's a little bit slow on the, whose world is this? He's not, whose world is this? Like, it just makes it that much cooler. Also, singing on a hip-hop track just still wasn't that common. You know what I mean?

Like, we're still dealing with the fallout from M.C. Hammer and people say that, like, what he was making was pop and it wasn't hip hop. When is bone thugs? When are they around? They come out the, actually, they dropped their first single in 94. Okay. So it's like right around now, though. It's starting to happen.

And by the way, they're not New Yorkers. I mean, again, this kind of goes to the fact that, like, the East Coast felt like they had a really high bar for what hip hop was being the home of hip hop. And some could say that they were exclusionary a little bit. But it was not a. a thing to necessarily come on to a track and sing. So it kind of worked for Pete Rock that he sounds like, yeah, I guess I'll say

whose world is this? You know, like he's out like anxious. He's not like trying to sell you on the idea of it. But it's also a little bit Biz Marquis, like, you know, if you go further in that direction. Yeah, Biz could sing because he was in on the joke. One of the reasons why this is my one of my favorite non-sons of all times

is literally my favorite jazz sample in the 90s, like, you know, you always get on these lists and you always see people you know, debating music like in sports, which is stupid. But if you have to rank and put on the spot, I always say that this is just by far one of my most mind-blowing samples of the 90s. Let's play a little bit of the song and samples. This is the Imajimal Trio's I love music. I mean, genius. It's not a pure loop. Like, who hears that song and thinks, oh yeah, I'm going to take this and I'm going to take

that? It's just so smart. Can I just say whoever mixed this record? I just love how that piano sounds. Like there's something so pure in how those notes come off the keys. That's why I was like, well, don't cut it off yet. Don't cut it off yet. If you don't know this song, just go out today and find it. Amad Jamal Trio's I Love Music. All right, we're going to take a quick break.

But when we get back, we're going to get into Nazist Street poetry. It's peak hip-hop. It's peak production and peak sampling. This is peak. This is a peak episode. Stay tuned. We'll be right back. Hey, guys, luxury here.

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26 with Monarch, the all-in-one tool that makes proactive money management simple all year long. Use code one song at Monarch.com for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year at Monarch.com with code one song, O-N-E-S-O-N-G. All right, welcome back to One-S-Sog. Let's get into the Stim's luxury. Let's do it. I think one of the best things about this song is the beat and you've got the drums. All right. What I love about the song is that it's super simple. There's a two-bar loop of the drums. Let's listen to it. That's it. Back to the A. B. Just a little variation in the syncopation, syncopated snares, a couple syncopated kicks. And that, boom, boom, cat. Like, that to me feels like so 90s, boom-back. Hip-hop. Yeah, 85 BPM. It's all you need. You don't need more complexity than that. Yeah. It's beautiful stuff. So let's talk a little bit about where that beat comes from. So the same. sample source is this song from Cool and the Gang's first live record, their second record. They did a regular record, like a studio record, then two live records in a row.

This is the first one, live at PJ's 1971, and the song is called NT. Breakbeat. Now listen right here. You just heard it. Yeah. I love that sample. It's been using so many samples. I immediately heard Gangsta Gangster by NW.

Just like we're here what I have to see With me and my posse stepped in the house Just like we were saying Yeah That becomes part of what makes it special We just wanted the beat Oh no, should we take that ooh out? No, leave it, it's cool

Especially when it gets repeated Because it's like mantra For those really paying attention Here's another song that uses that sample So that stop for real And give it what you got And just off Breathe and stop for real

And give it what you got And give it what So that break beat We're going to talk about it in a second and how DJ Premier used it differently from all the songs he just named. But first, let's give the drummer some. This guy's a sample phantom.

We're hearing him throughout this entire song. He's not in the credits. He didn't get paid. He's one of the founding members of Cool and the Gang. It's George Funky Brown. There you go. George Funky Brown salutes, sir. That's right.

That's right. But the songwriters on the Cool and the Gang song, he's not listed as a published songwriter of the song. But that is who you're hearing in the beat and in the recording itself. So George Funky Brown, unsung hero, sample Phantom, all in one. Now let's talk a little bit about how the transformation went down.

So here's the section. Once again, I'll play for you so you can get your ears ready to listen for just the kick and the snare. I'll start a little early and then I'll point it out. Kick, snare, end. Listen for the hi-hats as I play that section one more time. Okay. So the chops he made were to take that kick. kick, slow it down from 100 to about 85 BPM, and to reduce it in pitch, about two whole steps,

four half steps. And that sounds like this. So here's before, and here's after. Did the same thing with the snare, again, 100 to 85, and pitched it down two whole steps. So here's the original version in Cool and the Gang. And here's the snare. It gives it this heaviness, right? And kind of you long, gates it. So I'm pretty sure that he used his MPC to play, but in his own words, quote, this is DJ Premier explaining that sometimes he plays it and sometimes he programs it. I tend to program my drums, but a lot of the time I'll turn off the quantization and play it live so it sounds like live drumming. To my ears, throughout the song, this beat is so exact all the way through. Pretty sure he programmed this, but in any case, he definitely changed the pattern of the beat,

and it sounds like this. And if he did actually perform, which he may have done. I'm not saying he didn't do it. He might have done it like this. And I'm doing it imperfectly so you can tell like that I'm, you know, I'm definitely making mistakes on purpose. And to appreciate what DJ Premier did that much more. There's so much expert layering and sampling of this song. I'm always in awe of how Premier is able to like put these collages. Yeah. These audio collages together. Tell us about the Donald Bird sample. You're absolutely right. It's a Donald Bird sample. The song is called Flight Time from 1973. and let's listen to a little bit before

and a little bit after the part that got used and then again I'll show you the transformation. It is so like 70s cop show coded, right? It almost sounds like Broadway by Who is that? Is that George Benson? It is George Benson. A little Papa was a Rolling Stone in there too. I can hear that too. Definitely, it feels very

1973, which it was. What you're hearing, I'm pretty sure is Freddie Perrin on synthesizer. I'm pretty sure that's what that high-pitched, very urgent sounding, insistent, single-note stab. It could be a guitar played by Dean Parks or David Walker. Pretty sure it's a synth, though. Freddie Perrin would be the sample phantom here.

So some of the artifacts of the sample are the sound of that kind of airplane noise, that sort of big white noise. Totally. So listen to that in the beeps. You may not have noticed that before, but that remains in Nas' song. That's one of my favorite parts of the song. But now do you hear that white noise? the jet engine noise.

I thought it was a train. I thought they had taken that train that we heard in the, you know, the Genesis Subway theme part. Totally. And they just brought it over into this. I thought it was brilliant. This song segues right into that one, right?

That ain't no train. That's a plane. All right, planes and trains, maybe automobiles come up. We get the whole thing. Every mode of transportation is in the Elmatic if you just know where to listen. Absolutely. Here's that loop again,

and then I'll show you how it was transformed. This is the Donald Bird Flight Time, 1973. So just those first few beeps. And again, this is my speculation. I'm not sure how many of the, the beeps he used because there's a few ways you can do this. You can take that loop four in a row wholesale and lay it out, as it were, in his MPC. He might have done that as a loop.

Or he might have done what I did a moment ago, which is to chop just one of them. Can I picture this is definitely a chop? Because what I hear is a four on the floor. Beep, beat, beat, beat. And then on the song, it's got a... That's exactly right. In the song, it's a clave rhythm. It's virtually...

Return of the clave. It's close to being a clave. But you're like there's syncopation in that fourth note. I think the clave is like a freaking like people, people don't know they love the clave, but they be loving the clave. It's one of the most important like rhythms. You'll find it across the board once you know listen to it. Syncopated rhythm. Yeah, we've talked, the word clave and has come up in like 30 of these episodes, not for no reason.

We haven't even done a Calvin Harris episode. I feel like he used the clave all the time with his. EDM dance music is all the clave rhythm. Yeah, totally. or trace COs, if you will. All this to say that that was transformed because in the original, it's just D, D, D, D, D plus an insistent.

It's like Morse code or something like that. It's literally quarter notes. One, two, three, four. Okay, so that gets transformed into this. That's definitely a clave. Totally. Definitely a clave. And I think he might have played it,

except he took more time to have it not end like minded. He just timed stretched it and did more processing to it. Apologies. the recreation's imperfect, but that's the basic idea. So you get, yo, black, it's time. I can't even hear that sound without thinking about the lyrics coming in. And yo, black, it's time, word. It's time, man.

I am not going to try and do a Nause, dude. Straight out the fucking Dungeons is a rap. We're trying, we're both, I'm trying to be premier. You're trying to do Nass. Hopefully, it's coming across. They're ashamed of themselves right now. They're like, oh, man, they figure this out. We seem very charmingly.

Nileve, sweet. they are and they're not quite getting it. You missed it. Faith Newman, you need to find us in 1993. All right. I didn't place that on it. Nailed it. Okay, I'm really good at this.

One of my favorite details about New York state of mine is how it even came together. Nass said he and Premier didn't start out with a plan. They just got together one afternoon. They dug through some records, vibing together, waiting for something to hit. And in that pile of records, they came across a song by Joe Chambers

called Mine Rain. I just want to say in a time before YouTube being a source of like music, so to speak, I searched for years for this song. This is not an easy record to find. But it's Joe Chambers, Mind Rain. Let's hear a little bit of that. Right here. That's it.

You know what I love? This kind of goes back to Pete Rock's work on The World of Jure. It's like this isn't the beginning of the song. You know, like I'm not saying that that's wrong when your sample was at the very beginning of the song. But there's always just something so impressive when you're like, you know, a couple of, you're like into the song a little bit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then this just, this little sneaky part kind of comes out. And then somebody hears that and they're like, I can build a whole other thing around that. I mean, that gave me chills. Yeah. That's like, I love hearing the sample

when the sample comes in, sort of like a person through the door you didn't expect. That was very cinematic, this song in that part of the song in particular. And to your point, like there's as many ways to sample records and to dig through the crates as there are producers. Yeah.

But to your point, it is relatively common. Just if you've got a whole stack of records and you're listening through it, you might do some random needle drops. You might start from the beginning. But the fact that they found that portion of the song with that particular little splash of a piano, right, because that's part of the loop. Whether or not that's an artifact may be lost to time. Yeah.

No, I think to give them credit, I think that that is absolutely intentional. They're like, that's the loop. That's the sweet spot. I got to say this is one of those times where the sample sounds largely in touch to my untrained ear. It sounds largely untouched to my ears as well. So what you're hearing is literally the piano, I'm calling it a splash because it feels a little bit like a little bit of a bling. And then you add the meat to that.

I just want to say one more thing about that last note on the piano. It doesn't sound like evil in the original jazz sample, but in the Nause version, maybe it's just because I know what he's rapping about. It sounds dark. It sounds like evil's not really the word I'm looking for, but it sounds like you're really the word I'm looking for, but it sounds like you're watching a movie and like there's like some bad stuff. No, it's a dark sounding note. Let's talk about this. This is an important note. This might be one of the most important notes in the entire song.

Okay. So let's talk about it. Why does this note, why does this baseline first of all sound like you said dark, maybe exotic? Sinister. Sinister is the word I'm looking for. 100% of it. It's a great word for it. This is a flat two. I'll play it for you. This is the baseline. And it contains a flat two, which is a note you don't hear very often in popular music. In this moment in 199, 94 in particular, you hear that sometimes, but not that often. I would say maybe 95% of Western popular music would be using either the major or the minor scales, maybe one of the varieties like a Mixalidian or a Dorian. But for the most part, outside of classical music and metal, it's really, it's relatively uncommon. The flat second that I'm referring to is this note,

which you're hearing here. And when I say flat second, I mean that we are playing with basically a mode called the Phrygian mode, which means that the second scale degree is a half step up from the first scale degree. So the scale would sound like this. Here's a major scale. And a minor scale would be... But this is Phrygian, which is... Which we don't hear very often in the canon of popular music.

The Frigian mode contains the flat two. It's the scale I just played for you. And it contains a tritone. And that's important because what I just played for you with the riff... That's a tritone. No, no, no, right? We've heard tritones on this show several times. A couple times now, yeah.

From Lady Gaga to Don Penn, Jimmy Hendrix, Purple Hayes episode. So it's been coming up a lot. It's also in this song because it's part of the scale. So that top part of the riff, we hear a tritone basically throughout this song. So we're getting this devil's interval throughout the entirety of the song

because that loop is going through the entire song. Some other examples of songs that are Frigian, just so you'll start to hear like, oh, that's what that is. Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit. Okay. If you go chasing rabbits and you know. Calise, milkshake. Montel Jordans, this is how we do it. That's a half step up.

That's going from F to F sharp. That's right. So it's Frigion because you have that flat half step, that first, that flat. second, da, is the rude, flat second, back to the root. And it really, your ears like, please take me back home to the root. This is uncomfortable. It's tense for a moment when you go, dun, da, da, da. Like, that's home base and we're cool. We can chill here for a while. Yeah. Dun, da, da, da-da-dan, to dun, to-dun. Tom. That's so funny that you bring up, this is how we do it, because it famously samples Slick Rick's a children's story. Yeah. He went out to starve,

There was cops all over Then he dived into a car A stolen over And one of the things I always liked About New York State of Mind was that it told a story Kind of similar, you know, in terms of what happens in the story

To a children's story Except the Slick Rick's version Tells a very sort of like Funny, silly version Right Of what happens to the kid And Nas is like The 1990s David Fincher version

Of what happened. Much darker, much more dark, Yeah, yeah. Much more dark, not played for any kind of laughs. And so let's talk about the lyrics of the song because I think that Nas is one of the great storytellers of hip-hop.

A lot of rappers have had great moments in storytelling. Obviously, Notorious BIG with I Got a Story to Tell, Ice Cube, my summer vacation. You know, there's some that always stuck out to me, but this is definitely one where he painted so much imagery and he's so descriptive. Nas said that he wrote this song wanting to give listeners the feeling of New York at nighttime.

I actually wore today's sweatshirt. it's John Carlo Esposito's character from Do the Right Thing, because New York was coming out of a dark time. You had the crack epidemic that had ravaged their communities. There was so much violence. You see it in movies like New Jack City and some of the other films that come out at this time. And this is the New York that I feel like Nas describes so well,

even though he uses the first person and says I and me and all this kind of stuff, you never got the sense that it was actually him selling drugs or shooting people in the back. Like you always got the sense that he is a street poet describing what he has seen. And you really get a sense of that right from the get-go. Let's hear a little bit of his first verse. So now I'm jetting to the building lobby. And it was full of children probably couldn't see as high as I be. So what's you're saying. It's like the game ain't the same. Got young and pulling the triggers bringing fame to their name. Like there's so much just going on

there. You know, like I'll never forget the first time we all heard. So I'm jetting through the building lobby and it was full of children probably couldn't see as high as Abbey. You know, like you have to have a New York accent at first, you know, first of all to even pull off that line. What is the line high as Aby? As high as I be. As high as Ivy. Yeah, but to make it rhyme with lobby, he doesn't have to go very far because New Yorkers just do that with their with their vowels. But like, you can just sort of see like how committed he was to telling the story about him on the run, you know, being chased. Let's come to the chorus because I will say as a person who was absolutely into this like from day one, the chorus didn't do what I expected the chorus to do. There's no

The world is yours has a chorus. This song doesn't have a traditional chorus. Yeah, you're right. There's only two verses in the whole song. Verse one is a minute 52. Yeah. Verse two is a minute 30. Two long verses, no features.

You got A-Z and like, you know, so what you're saying? Like, you got people joining in things, but like just him. Yeah. Painting these long pictures and yet you're never bored. It's like an amazing movie. But you come to this chorus and there's not a traditional chorus. Can you play us a little bit of the chorus? I want to call your attention to the knocking in the sample?

Do you notice that? No, I didn't know. And there's a little bit of sort of the horn sound at the end. Hear that? Right here. No, I had never noticed. All I heard was Rakim saying, your state of mind. But what is that running?

This is the sample artifact episode. Let's listen to the original song that it is being sampled from which itself has an embedded sample, which is what you're hearing. So that's a third layer. Here's Mahogany from Eric Ian Rakim, 1990. This is where the New York State of Mind comes from. But as they were grabbing this sample, they grabbed what was also in the sample. So listen to that New York State of Mind moment.

There's two side sticks, like snare side sticks, but there's also a horn at the end. Listen again. I said, everything's fine, but I'm in a New York state of mind. Right? Those are embedded in the sample. Now, what I can take out of the sample with EQ is all the base stuff. So you hear it like this. But all that high-end stuff, you can't EQ out.

Right. And in 1994, the technology was relatively limited, how deeply you could clean up a sample. So now listen back to New York State of Mind, the Nas song. And you'll hear that knocking thing and a little bit of the horn. Right here. Here's the horn. Do you hear that? It's really buried deep, but definitely those knocks. I would not have noticed those knocks before.

Isn't that cool? And here's where it comes from. This is embedded from the Al Green sample. I'm glad you're mine, 1972. Drums by Howard Grimes or Charles Hodges, and now you'll hear them. That's the beat right there. And by the way, this is another one of those classic samples. that you've heard in so many hip-hop songs for the notorious B-I-G to MC Light. Yeah, Massive Attack uses that beat.

Yeah. And now you're going to notice that side stick, that little snare tick that they couldn't get out from EQing it in New York State of Mind by Nas. Like I said, such a unique song, two verses, painting pictures of life in Queensbridge at this time. Let's play the second verse, because this is probably, I think, Naz it is the script of best. and also shows how he uses words and the actual vowel sounds to play off one another. Let's start about halfway through verse two.

The smooth criminal on beat breaks. Never put me in your box if your shit eats tapes. The city never sleeps full of villains and creeps. That's where I learned to do my hustle, had the scuffing with freaks. He's sampling Rakim, thereby tying a direct link from probably the most revered MC, you know, before him, in addition to like a Chuck D or KRS one.

But on top of that, like, there's so many lines in here that give me chills. He says, don't put me in your boxes. The shit eats tapes. He's talking about, don't put me in your boom box if it eats cassette. So there was a time when you put a cassette in a boom box. And if you push the wrong button, it would spit out all the, it would spit out all the cassette tape.

It would eat that tape. You know, there's so much that he's got references to Bieber's. He's an addict for sneakers. Like, he's encompassing so much of what hip hop culture was in 94. but he's like flipping it in words. I remember the line, my ramen is a vitamin hell without a capsule. Like, he's flipping it in such a unique way.

Yeah. And such a good way that like we knew from that start that like he was going to be a force in hip hop and everybody wanted to do music with nods at this time. Well, I don't sleep on and sleep is the, I don't sleep because sleep is the cousin of death. He says twice in this song. So it's kind of a refrain.

It's almost like a pre-chorus. Yeah, yeah. It's something consistent or a refrain. And it's such a great line. And it's like, I think it comes from something. I mean, it certainly goes back to like Greek mythology or something like that. But I think in the popular parlance, like, Nas kind of owns that line. Like, I think people think of that as being a Nas line.

And it kind of is the cousin of death. Yeah. I heard that Nas did this in one take. And he was like, feel a little bit shy about it. I was like, was that good? And Primo was like, bruh. No notes. By the way, at the very end of the song, after the Rakim sample, we come to what a lot of his hip-hop

pants at the time thought should have been the chorus for the whole song. It was like, oh wait, you saved that to the end? I think you know what I'm talking about. Can you play a little bit about a, I guess we'd have to call it the coda of the song? I love what you know the exact record scratch moments. You knew exactly the motions that matched to the sound

of the DJ. And correct me if I'm wrong, that's Nasty on one of his previous songs. It's from Live at the Barbecue. Let's listen to the origin. What the hell is nothing Jesus? Nasty Nasty Nause is a rebel to America. Yeah, man, it's just, it's just an amazing song. He had the record, he records scratched it. I don't know if Premier did that.

He probably did. Oh, yeah, Premiere. On the last episode, we had that quote from him where he was like, I actually like being a DJ more than a producer. That's why he's DJ Premier. He certainly would have scratched that himself. Premiere is one of the great scratching producers. Like, he doesn't, you know, like...

He's got the MPC and he's got his turntables. No diss to Mani Fresh, but it's always funny when people do like, your girl is my... I can't even baby mama. Like, it's like, it doesn't sound the same as actual scratch. And by the way, we're talking about lineages in hip-hop. It's not just samples, right? It's also references and uses of the phrase, such as the title of the song itself,

which, of course, is a Billy Joel song, right? New York State of Mind from 1976. I'm in a New York State of Mind. And then it goes on to be, I think, alluded to in the chain when Jay-Z and Alicia Keys do Empire State of Mind, which always confuses me a little bit. Well, first of all, New York State of Mind is spelled out, but this song is NY's State of Mine.

And then we have Empire's state of mind, and I definitely conflate the three constantly. Absolutely. All right, lecture, now that we've heard the song, tell us how the splits break down. Well, the splits are pretty interesting because we have Nasir Jones at 50%. There you go. Chris E. Martin, aka DJ Premier, gets 25%. Do you care to hazard a guess, knowing, as you know now, all of the different sample sources in the song, who gets the last 25% or how it's allocated?

Joe Chambers? Final answer? Final answer. 25% is Eric Barrier and William Griffin, aka Eric Ian Rakim. Wow, just for the York State of Mind. Just for the New York State of mind, which again, as we just mentioned, is a Billy Joel lyric, right? But it's sampled, so it's their vocals.

It's from that recording. But 25% of the publishing to that, and none of the other samples, we believe we're all certainly paid just on, you know, as a one-time Fias was pretty common at the time. So there was no kind of effort to obfuscate anything. But nothing in the publishing. You know what's funny is that they agreed that it was important enough to have Raqim virtually co-signed on Nas as like the next, you know, the next great rapper that they were like, okay, it's worth that. I think it's very intentional. As we were saying before,

it can be very intentional the use of samples and interpolations and references for the, for the artist, it's a connection to what they're using. It's an effort to say, hey, this is something that meant something to me. I want to be a part of the lineage and sort of carry it on and bring it to the attention, by the way, of people that may not have known about it. One last thing I want to say about the publishing splits, it does occur to me that in 1994, Eric B. and Rakim would have been pretty hip to how sampling works with regards to publishing. It was still new enough in hip-hop that sampling rates and percentages were pretty wild west. We're only a few years out from the Bismarkey decision.

And it's quite possible that the Jazz Cats were happy with the one-time payout of maybe a few grand, which frankly, I think ought to be how things go in general. I think the world would be a better place if sampling were less expensive. and more along those lines. Yeah. But I think Eric B. and Rakim had obviously had situations where they were forced to pay out.

So now they sort of create the situation of like, well, look, I've had to pay out, so you're going to have to pay me too. Yeah. Listen, when this album came out, it got a rare five mic rating in the source. I always thought the source was always like a panel of guys in hip-hop who were like, you know, sitting around a table.

And they were like, gentlemen, we were about to give this album five mics. The Star Chamber? Yeah, like I didn't come to find out that sometimes those ratings were a single person on staff and sometimes not even an editor. I never knew this. The reviewer of Illmatic for the source, the person who gave it five mics and set hip-hop on a new trajectory, was a Korean-American intern at the famed magazine. And not just any intern, it was Korean-American now journalist, then intern, Minya-O, aka Miss Info. yeah she was an intern at the source they thought that she had who's great by the way

she and by the way she and nods hosted an incredibly good podcast a number of years ago absolutely binge listened to every single episode it was called The Bridge and it's interviews with like seminal hip hop like yeah they were there but it does blow my mind I mean like she's from Chicago

okay so by this point she's actually a student at Columbia but I mean like the the anonymity of who gave that album five mics I think kind of helped because like Hip-hop was overwhelmingly male, and she was female. Overwhelmingly, I would say, the gatekeepers at that time were overwhelmingly black. She's Korean-American.

And she wasn't even an editor. She was an intern. So it kind of blew my mind to know that she was savvy enough to know that this is special. And it's going to get the five mics. That blew my mind. It's a proud of Miss Info. But I guess it's also surprising to me because this is not like some, you know, low-level album coming out. I'm like, oh, let's just give it to the entrance to see what she thinks.

We know she's got content. No, this was illmatic. This was like a huge album that everybody was waiting for. And the fact that they entrusted it with her, I kind of want to ask them why. I'm glad that they did. I bet you she had like passion. And maybe the fact of her being younger, the rest of the board at the source might have been like, man, maybe we're getting out of touch here because we're not necessarily hearing what's coming up on the street.

It's like me with my 14 going on 15 year olds. If you like something that I'm like, I'm not sure what this is, I'm going to like listen to more. Carefully, because he's hearing something that I'm not hearing. By the way, my 16-year-old, one of his favorite rap songs of all time, New York State of Mine. So Diallo, what do you think the legacy of NYU's state of mind is? Like we said, Raq Kim had been the ultimate MC Gold Standard up to the end, along with Karras I, Chuck D, Big Daddy, Kaine, so many others that I just don't have the time to name right now. And to a degree, Naz's flow represented the best of all of them.

You know, he had some of the politics of Chuck D. He obviously had the rock him in his street poetry. You know, there's just, there are elements of everything that came before Nas that Nas presented in a very 90s kind of way. I feel like the history of 90s hip-hop can't be written without mentioning Nas. It's just he's so important, I think, to where hip-hop went after 1994. What about you, Luxury? What do you think the legacy is?

I think it's interesting contextually in 1994 to consider that in this moment, to do a whole record with multiple producers. is that being a new phenomenon really kind of, I'd forgotten about that. That was like a new choice. And now we take it for granted. Not only do we take it for granted, it is the norm. When you hear Olivia Rodriguez and Dan Nigro work together on the whole record, you're like, wow, that's unusual.

Or like when Gagne did a whole album with Push a Tea. It's, it is reversed what it used to be. Exactly. It used to be unusual for there to be multiple players. Now that's the news that the producers stay the same. It's interesting to think about that. And then getting down to the song level, just specifically New York State of Mind, like we had two grades working together.

Like the production, not only is the vocal and the lyrical and the delivery, not only is everything Naus on the top line, incredible and legendary, and still 32 years later has resonance. But the production is next level and 32 years later. This is not only peak emceeing, but it's also peak sampling and producing. And all of it coming together in this one song. And both of them kind of throwing back and forth because, you know, now that we know that it was, you know, Nause was there when they chose that song.

You can sort of see why. He actually is the cohesive part of the album. And let's not forget, last but not least, the flat two, that note that at the time was so strange and jumped out of the record that they chose to sample in that moment between, you know, perhaps gin and juice at the same time. But the Phrygian mode becoming kind of common in popular music in the next 30 years a little bit begins around this time. Now, there are examples that people will find of the flat second in the Phrygian, but not as prominently as it is in this song. it starts to change the listener's ear when it's used this bigly, right? You start to get used to a new mode, a new note. And just for like the really deep music theory, musicology nerds out there, there's a great paper by Aaron Smith at Oberlin. It's actually a video. It's called, quote,

the flat two as hotness in post-millennial pop. When you hear it used in a song, it's often correlating to lyrics and videos, for that matter, that are about confidence, sexuality, or the intersection of those two things. And so, as a bunch of examples, Justin Timberlake's sexy back, which I think might be the Uber example of that. I'm bringing sexy back. Dun, dun, dun, dun, done, done, done. So you hear how it keeps on going that half step up.

Yeah. And I think the sexy fact. It doesn't resolve. It doesn't resolve. It does temporarily, and then you write back to it in the next part of the loop. But Beyonce, Rihanna, Shakira, Miley Cyrus. If You Seek Amy by Britney Spears, there's a whole bunch of songs that starting around in the early 2000s

start to use this previously unusual interval. I think it's in no small part because hip hop had started to do it a little earlier with this song with Nause New York State of Mind, but also don't forget Snoop Dog's gin and Juice from also from 1994 is in Ephrigian. And then it starts to become really kind of normalized in hip-hop. It gets your freak on, Tyler, New Magic Juan,

Kendrix Humble, Kendrick's DNA. These are all songs in Frigian. It's part of the hip-hop vernacular now, 30 years later, to have a flat second and or for it to be in Frigian. This album blazes a lot of trails. As always, you can find us on Instagram and TikTok. You can find me on Instagram at Diallo, D-I-A-L-L-O, and on TikTok at Diallo-R-R-Y.

And you can find me on Instagram at L-U-X-X-U-Y and on TikTok at Luxury X-X. And you can follow our podcast on Instagram and TikTok at One Song Podcast for exclusive content. You can also watch full episodes of One Song on YouTube. Just search for One Song podcast. We'd love it if you'd like and subscribe. Also be sure to check out the One Song Spotify playlist.

For all the songs we discuss in our episodes, you can find the link in our episode description. And if you've made it this far, you're officially a part of the One Song Nation. Show us some love. Give us five stars. Leave a review and send this episode to a fellow music fan. It really helps keep the show thriving. Lecture helped me in this thing.

I'm producer, DJ, songwriter, musicologist, and every Friday night from 10 p.m. till midnight, KCRW DJ Luxury. I'm actor, writer, director, and sometimes DJ Diallo Riddle. And this is one song. We will see you next time. This episode was produced by Melissa Duanyas. Our video editor is Casey Simonson. Mixing and engineering by Michael Hardman. This show is executive produced by Kevin Hart, Mike Stein, Brian Smiley, and Eric Wild.