One Song - The Pharcyde's "Runnin'"

Episode Date: December 5, 2024

On this episode of One Song, Diallo and LUXXURY break down The Pharcyde’s “Runnin’,” the track from the legendary hip-hop group that brought new flavor to the West Coast sound in the ‘90s. They dive into the group’s introspective lyrics about vulnerability and personal struggle, how they met and collaborated with soon-to-be legendary producer J Dilla (at the time known as Jay Dee), and how Dilla’s genre-reinventing beatmaking style – blending old school hip-hop and bossa nova samples – helped The Pharcyde popularize the alternative hip-hop movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Luxury Today's song is from a hip-hop group that brought a new flavor to the West Coast in the 1990s. They challenged the norms of hip-hop right at the time the gangster rap is really taking a whole. But this song went number three on the Billboard U.S. dance sales singles chart in 1995. And more recently, it landed at number 20 on one magazine's list of the 100 greatest West Coast hip-hop songs of all time. With its introspective lyrics about vulnerability and personal struggle, it's blending of old-school hip-hop. pop with new wave boss and nova samples and a genre reinventing beat making style from a soon-to-be legendary producer this song helped popularize the alternative hip-hop movement that's right it's one song and that song is running by the far side soon as in here there comes a time on his own i'm actor-writer

and sometimes DJ Di J. Diallo riddle and i'm producer dj songwriter and musicologist luxury aka the guy who whispers interpolation and if you want to watch one song please go to our YouTube channel and watch this entire episode. And while you're there, please like and subscribe. All right, let's get into it. All right, y'all. So before we dive into breaking down and running, I wanted to ask you, how did you first get into the far side and how did you discover the song?

I have a really special relationship with the far side because I feel like as I was really coming into my own taste in hip hop and like sort of finding like eventually when you like any genre, you find like that one ars, you're like, oh yeah, they 100%. Like I'm 99% there with them. You just identify. You just identify with them. see something in it. And like Public Enemy felt like my uncles, you know.

InW.A felt like the kids at the back of the class who, you know, I was not tight with. Okay. The far side felt like the guys who they were sort of like the original backpack rappers, along with the native tongues crew. Like they felt like. Yeah, they felt like the smart for the lack of a better turn. The kids who were kind of nerdy. Yeah.

In fact, you know, we'll talk a little bit later about how the band came together. But I love the story about when, um, The other three see Fat Lipp at a show before he's a member. And they were like, who's this guy dressed like Carlton? Because apparently he was wearing an Argyll sweater, some Argyll socks, and some glasses with no lenses in him. And I'm like, yeah, that sounds like... The guys that would do this kind of music. That's some stuff that I would have done if I was like five years older at the time and thought I wanted to be a rapper.

Everybody has that phase in probably like high school where you're like, I could be a rapper. You know, and so me and my friends, we formed the dog pound, and I was D-Dog, and my friend Sheed was Sheed Dog. I say all this just to say. Did you spell dog with two G's? No, no. Pound with two D's? We weren't as innovative as soon. Okay. Yeah, we just probably just put DOG. I say all that just to say that the far side, I feel like they were there from my earliest, this hip hop is my primary genre love. When I say I love this group, I love this group. In fact, one of my favorite memories from this time in my life was that Tower Records used to to have the Japanese pressings of a lot of CDs. And I had heard on college radio in Atlanta a version of passing me by that I had never

heard before. And I was like, what version is that? It's not as hard to find nowadays, but it's another example of like the remix being a completely different song. They re-sang their verses. Actually, a lot of the words stay the same, but they all sing their verses. It's almost like a cover of the song. Yes.

It's so freaking cool. It's called the Fly is Pie Mix. pass me by fly is pie mix by the far side so i was a huge fan of their first album when this album came out bizarre ride to the far side bizarre right to the far side we're going to talk about it yeah it is an amazing amazing creative feat yeah it didn't really sound like anything out there i mean yes the native tongues connection i i hear that too but like it was a really it was really popped off on its own page it was really on its own page and then lab cabin california comes out and there was there was such a high level of like oh man what are they going to come back with next

And this is at a time, I'll say, a lot of hip-hop artists from the early 90s were struggling in the mid-90s because by the mid-90s, you felt like the culture had drastically changed. Like this album comes out in 95. By 95, Biggie's about to drop the One More Chance remix. Mob Deep, Nas, like the sound in East Coast. We have the West Coast. We have Dr. Dre. It just happened Snoop Dog. I mean, like, Dre and Snoop and Warren G. like they've taken over regular radio stations.

Like the West Coast is running it. And the East Coast has gone into a, I guess you, for the lack of a better term, a East Coast version of gangster rap, which is talk about, you know, you talk about, you're from Queensbridge, you talk about, you know, this is Nas, this is Mob Dee. There's a war going on outside. No man is safe from. You could run, but you can't hide forever from these streets that we have. This is, you know, bad boy records.

This is Wu-Tang. You know, the, the, the music of the East Coast has gotten darker. Yeah. And the music on the West Coast is like pop. And I feel like that the hip hop that we knew at the beginning of the 90s is sort of starting to drift away a little bit. Or it's at least going more underground.

So you get a different sound out of De La Sol in this period, a different sound out of the tribe called Quest. And artists as diverse as black sheep and black moon and the far side and diggible planet. You slicker this year. Murder app. A train. Got the pick in my head. Like everybody's dropping these second albums that a lot of people are falling off.

Some of my favorite artists are falling off. Oh, but oh, that second diggible. Oh, you cannot beat that. I love it. And I loved it at the time. But let me tell you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it didn't, it didn't go off as hard.

That's another second album. It didn't do as well. Where I feel like they, they knew where they were going, but like the audience for a lot of us were not quite there yet. Yeah, blow it comes. Blowcom is so perfect. That's a perfect record. A wolf and sheep's clothing was huge in him.

Hip hop, Black Sheep. Yeah. But then nonfiction came out and it sort of left a lot of people's head scratching. I mean, there must be some distraction happening. It's like these artists that established kind of a sound and sort of established themselves with the first record. And suddenly they're like hip hop is relatively in it. I was going to say new.

It wasn't new in the early 90s, but it was in a new, I suppose, era. It was entering a new phase. It was post hip hop. You don't stop. Maybe we could call it. Oh, for sure. I mean, look. But then the other things that are happening that we just mentioned could be a

potentially confusing distraction if you're in the studio in 19, 94, 95, and you're like, we have our artistic drive. We have our ideas that we started with on that last record. But all this other stuff around us is making a lot of money and there's pressure from our labels. I can imagine it being confusing in the studio knowing what direction to go in. I think, look, I think, as with all creative endeavors, when there's a brand new inflow of a lot of money.

It's confusing. When before, it was more of an artistic entity because there wasn't a lot of money to be made in him. People saw like how play and the rest of them were living. And I think that that probably did influence what was happening. what was happening to what had formerly been called alternative hip hop. And so the native tongues crew is going through massive changes. Someone like MC Hammer shows up on death row and now he's rocking a skull cap and like black,

you know, black, you know, Timberlands. Let's not forget about MC Hammer and even vanilla ice like these chart topping in some cases quote unquote hip hop, but like the sound of hip hop is suddenly chart topping. And what does that do you? It's chart topping and everybody's trying to figure out what their lane is. And also that's the macro. The micro is just that a lot of these groups. groups were experiencing internal conflict.

The far side was Emani, Booty Brown, and Slim Kit Trey, and sort of Fat Lipp joined on. By the time they go into record Lab Cab in California, by all accounts, Jay Swift, their producer from the first album, isn't there anymore. There's a lot of internal tension that's going to lead to Fat Lip actually leaving the group after this album. And there's also the introduction of an artist in his own right, who will greatly influence the later 90s. Talk about Dilla, who, you know, produced some of the most memorable songs on Lab Cabin.

So we're going to get into all that, I guess is what I'm saying. It's going to be a very fun bizarre right to Lab Cabin, California. Lab Cabin, California. So let's talk a little bit about how the Far Side comes together. Like I said, the initial members of the Far Side are Slim Kid Trey, Amani, and Booty Brown. And they were basically dancers in the Los Angeles scene. They met an underground club and they started dancing together. they'd actually served a very brief stint.

I didn't know this. They served as some of the fly boys on later era in living color. Who knew that? That's kind of nuts. Fat lip, like I said. Well, yeah, they were mentored apparently by Tony Basil and Rosie Perez. Well, yeah, that makes sense because they were part of that same group.

But being mentor, can you imagine being mentored by those? That's amazing. What an opportunity. A lot of people coming off of that. Good job, Keenan Wayans. You put a lot of people on. Like I said, they go to a show where they're, meet Fatlip and he's there in Argyll sweater, Argyll socks, linsless glasses and they're like,

who is this dude? But he's nice. He's nice on the mic and he has like a crazy, he'll go from crooning to rapping and they're just like, oh, this is really cool. And Slim Kit-Trey is also one of those people who's known for like really sweet vocals on the mic. And so they put them together and these these two things went well together. Yeah. Luxury, that's just a little bit about their origins. What else can you tell us about the origins of the Farsight? Well, I want to bring up unsung hero of this episode, one of a couple, and his name is Reggie Andrews. Reggie Andrews, take a bow, sir, the high school music teacher at Locke High School here in L.A. That's the one. That's right. Alan Leroye Lock High School here in the L.A.USD.

It should be said that there's, if you want to deep dive into this gentleman, KCRW has a great podcast called Lost Notes with our good friend, friend of the pod, Novina Carmel. Check that one out. But also a fun fact about Reggie Andrews. I think I know you're going to do. Let it whip. He sure did. How cool would it be if your high school music teacher worked on Let It Whip? So cool. Yeah. The bottom line is that he is a school teacher in the Watts area, in the 70s, basically.

He has an incredible number of now famous musicians who've come through, Patrice Russian, Thundercat, some members of Earthwind and Fire apparently. Terence Martin. Who, by the way. Tyrese. Tyrese, yeah. Well, listen, the reason why Reggie Andrews factors into this story is because he created this entity called the South Central Unit.

SCU. SCU got some seed money from A&M Records to basically set up a studio for developing artists in South L.A. One of them was a gentleman called John, L.A.J. Barnes, who later changed his nickname to Jay Swift. We're going to talk about Jay Swift because he did an amazing job on bizarre right to the far side. So Jay Swift is basically given access because thanks to Reggie Andrews and I suppose the A&M funding from A&M Records, there is access to an MPC60 and not unimpec. importantly, this is actually an underrated thing. We've talked about it on some other episodes,

but not just the MPC, but Reggie Andrews is collection of vinyl. That's actually a big part of this because when you have a sampler, you need to sample stuff. Yeah. And when you have a collector and lover of music and musician himself, it should be said, Reggie Andrews, who has a record collection that's very filled with tasteful gems that are like, he's got jazz, he's got funk, he's got this incredible record collection at his fingertips. Yeah. Which is sort of like having a mountain of instance. instruments by your fingertips when you're talking about making sample-based music. So he has the taste, he has the environment, the studio in this case, and he ends up meeting a dance

crew called Two for Two. And, you know, once they add Fat Lip, Derek Stewart, to the group, they come together. Yeah, so he puts these guys together and then they put together a demo of three songs. And I think one of them is the classic, your mama. The demo gets like a lot of good buzz And they sign with Paul Stewart, a buddy of mine. He also worked with Cypress Hill, De La Sol, House of Pain. Paul Stewart basically takes them on as a manager.

They meet Mike Ross at the delicious final. Yep. And they signed with that label in the summer of 1991. And it's through that label that they have their first song featured on an album by the brand new heavies. Yeah, no, the brand new heavies are sort of an unsung, like in the early 90s, we have, we have Giles Peterson and we have talking loud and we have this like acid jazz movement, which I was super into and mohacks, right? And they're one of the premier bands that were basically taking 70s kind of funk, James Brown inspired stuff and doing it again in the 90s with a

little bit of a hip hop flavor because that's what they would have said. They would have said with a hip hop flavor in 1991. But that was the idea, a post hip hop version, like what if James Brown had happened in the early 90s, like after hip hop existed. And so they made this wonderful record, which is really good, where every cut is the band playing with the different rapper on top. Brand new heavies and the main source. Yeah. Guru. For all my siblings, just follow when everyone sing. But they were great. No, they were really great songs.

And how crazy is it in this pre-roots era? Yeah. Right. That was a live hip-hop band. There was like a weird thing. That was a live band playing with hip-hop artists. That was so innovative. It was revolutionary. It was really revolutionary and it sounded so cool. But this is definitely a time when like the idea of like rappers rapping with bands is like the edgy, you know, crazy thing. Right. And brand new heavies is born out of that.

I think brand new heavies is done in such a wonderful, cool, tasteful way. Yeah. And Soulflower's on there. Oh, what the heck? Niggas just want to get wrecked to the track. It's brand new and heavy as a Chevy. And in fact, the far side is coming and I hope we're not whack. And by the way, that album was put out by Delicious Vinyl.

The Farsight's debut album, Bizar Ride 2, dot, dot, dot, dot, the far side. It was just so groundbreaking in terms of establishing an alternative hip-hop sing for the West Coast. I mean, like, after this, like there were all kinds of artists who were clearly influenced by the Farside. I remember another level, which I think was Ice Cube's group. It was like a group that he was mentoring. Another level, they had a song called What's That Chesaa. I mean, it sounds like the Farsai, right? It's awesome, though.

I really love that. No, it was a good song. That's a cool song. Another level had a good album. I bought that album. I bought that CD. This is the CD era. So if you wanted to hear it, you have to buy the entire thing. You got to buy that thing. Sometimes they're singles, not always. The Farside teamed up with Jay Swift to produce this album. And I just think the bizarre right to,

to find out, you know, many years later that one guy produced essentially this entire album, except for the song of The Fish, is incredible to me because it's every single song on that album. It sounds so good. significant that this record is a singular vision of those of those five artists but of the one producer it is maybe more of a cohesive record as you were kind of pointing out before maybe because it's it is j swift who is the singular producer from beginning to end of that record bizarre ride has the jazz influence sampling of the east coast native tongues uh crew talking about a tribe called quest d'ela soul but it also has something this distinctly californian

about their sound you know listen this album was not a smash which is just a surprise to me because I feel like it was so big among me and my friends. It had bigger influence in hip hop and in the world. Yeah. People know it more than it sold. You know, the innocence of the age, we didn't know and we didn't care to track how much albums were selling back then. It's so discouraging when I hear kids now talk about like, yo, Jay Cole, his opening

week numbers are crazy. Like all of our kids talk like sales figures. Like executives at record labels now. Moving units. I hate that expression. Yeah. Like, you know, when you hear rappers like Drake and other people like brag about how much they've sold and you're just like, guys, it's not a, do you enjoy the album? You enjoy the music.

Right. Right. That used to be the rubric and that's not the rubric anymore. Yeah. And so I was a little bit, you know, shocked to find out bizarre right too. Not a smash commercial hit. But everyone knows it. But everybody knew the single passing me by and it did earn the far side a gold record. Can I just say even all these years later, like that song comes in.

just on a different level. It's like a different level of cool. You know what I mean? Like, if you just allow that song to wash over you, it still has an effect. It feels like the 90s to me too. It has this 90s.

Interestingly for me, because I was there at the time. But it's like a New York 90s. Well, it's summer in the city, right? That's the name of the sample. It's summer in the city. That's what I think when I hear this song. It feels like a New York,

but bathed in sunlight. So it's summer. Wait, is it summer in the city? It's literally summer in the city. I did know that, but the title has influenced. my experience of the song.

And this is the first episode we've done since Quincy Pass. So I do feel like, you know, for Quincy, let's play a little bit of summer in the city. Did you hear how the music, how the drum section changed up a little bit there? We're going to talk a little bit more about like how Latin, Cuban, and Brazilian rhythms get into the mix whenever we talk about the five-sum. You know, a fun deep dive on all that Brazilian stuff a little bit. But I want to say one other thing about Jay Swift before moving on, which is that, because we're going to give a lot of love to another producer who goes by. by Jay. But Jay Swift, you know, he doesn't live in America anymore. He actually got deported. He's had a lot of legal issues and some addiction issues. But if, if nothing else, he gave us one of the

most complete hip-hop albums of all time pretty much on his own. I want to play one of my favorite songs from the whole album. It's a track called For Better or For Worse. But, you know, to those who can stomach some very, let's just say, politically incorrect humor. Because the humor on Bazaar Right 2 would not fly by today's standards. But if you go back and listen to that album, I just, I got to ask that you think, man, just one kid. Because he really was still a kid at the time produced this entire record. Here's a little snippet from For Better or For Worse. One of those classic 90s hip-hop songs where they talk about hip-hop as if it's a lady.

But in this case, he's like, do you want to wed Rima Linda? That's great. I love the, that one has such a great bounce to it. We come to Lab Cab in California. I can spend a whole day talking about BizarRite 2, but we come to LabCab in California, their second album.

Like I said, like so many artists are struggling with that second album, you know, that sophomore slump that we hear so much about. And the Farsight knows that there are going to be big expectations on this second album. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, look,

again, the album Bizarre Rite 2 did not sell as much as they thought it could, which is still a mind-blowing thing. So the thought was basically like, look, Jay Swift, he took his money from Bazaar Right, too. He starts living a very fancy lifestyle here in Los Angeles. And the label is like, I think we can do better with the Farsight if we put them with a different producer. So J. Swift and the Farsight sort of go their separate ways.

Right. But they want it for their next record and with Jay Swift, not in the picture anymore. They're looking for a producer to replace him who. And at this point, they're like, we went the best. They went the best in the biz. Yeah. And in their minds, that's Q-Tip from Crib called Chris. Exactly.

So they go to New York, they meet with Q-Tip, and Q-Tip says he is too busy, but he's got a guy. He's got a guy. He's got a guy. And enters into the story, the guy. And it has to be said, Aunt Fiddler, you know, great Detroit musician, you know, touring guy with Clinton, with George Clinton and the P-Funk. He comes across this kid in Detroit out of Conan Gardens, who is amazing. Like, you just got a real good ear for music.

And he's just like, and the kid is like, hey, I want to be a producer. He goes to Q-Tip. He's like, hey, you got to meet this. You got to meet this kid. And, like, apparently, like, all that tour, he keeps telling Q-Tip, you got to meet this kid. You got to keep, like, he's like, every tour date that he sees him. You know, he's just constantly telling him this. Eventually Q-Tip meets J-D.

And he, too, sees that, like, oh, this guy's got something special. And it's an example of, like, how artists influence each other that, you know, I would argue that the Q-tip and Alicia Heimohama' sound changes around this time, I think, because Jay, J.D. comes into the mix. Yeah, he changes all of their ears overnight. Yeah, that's as the story goes. You get the firsthand accounts. It should be mentioned, by the way, that there's a great book about Dilla called Dilla Time. It's by Dan Charnas. It came out a couple years ago, and it was one of the best music books of the year. It's a really deep accounting for, with 200 interviews, like investigating this man's life, but also, musically speaking, it's like an investigation

of his practices, what he did to change hip-hop. I was going to say, the New York Times did an outstanding hour-and-a-half-long documentary about Dilla that compiles a lot of great stories and talks to everybody from his mom to the members of Franken Dink and the people who know him for extremely long time. It occurs to me, and this will connect to the next little funny anecdote, by the way. It occurs to me. So Dilla, I think we've made it clear that Dilla is also J.D. He just hasn't become Dilley yet.

Anytime we say Dilla in this episode, let's be. clear we are talking about JD. James DeWitt, Yancey, yes. But in this moment, he's still J.D. He's JD. And that factors into this story because going back to the Farside asking Q-Tip to help and him saying, no, I'm sorry, I don't have time, but I like this guy, JD. Yeah.

The story goes that they go back, they listen to the tape of beats that J.D. actually had made that Dilla had actually made. But they're listening. And at some point, according to the story, Trey, apparently from Farside, he's probably joking when he said this, but he's like, wait a second. Q-Tip's real name is Jonathan Davis, or it was it that's his birth name. JD. Wait a second.

Is this Q-tip with like a fake alter ego being JD? So I think he was probably joking, but there was some question as to whether it was ultimately formed the Ouma. Yeah. The production squad, the Ouma. And at that point, it's really opaque because you don't know. Who does what? Did Tip mainly produce this one? Did J.D?

Like, who actually was the producer? Was Ali Shahi Muhammad? Like, you don't actually know who produced. Well, and the Charnis Buck I mentioned. in Dilla time goes into a deep dive into that and how that starts to become something that Dilla is not crazy about that he's not getting the credit he deserves. This is a great time to dive into J.D. We can easily spend a few episodes diving into Dilla's career.

The man was prolific. But for the sake of time, let's talk about Jay Dilla, aka James DeWitt Yancey, born and raised in Detroit in the relatively middle class neighborhood of Cohn and Gardens, in a family that pushed him to get involved in music. And very early on, he learned how to play several instruments, the cello, keyboards, trumpet, violin. He connected him the most, though, with the drums. And we like that because we're both drummers. Dill started to get into production as well.

And at the end of 1988, he formed Slum Village with his high school friends, Batin, and T3. Great band. Do you think we should listen to some Slum Village? Oh, absolutely. It's the 788 D-E team, just like Jack T's Snake. Actually, we don't participate. But if you do, then I'm a see you at. Here's something that I only learned recently.

That song's called Players. And so like everybody else with ears, I thought that that sample says, players. Yeah. He sampled a song where the guy sing Claire. He does that a lot. And he does that a lot because on the sound of the sample, like it just becomes sound. Yes. And you can transform it.

But he also specifically will have you thinking that the lyric is different. I'm thinking about a tribe called Quest, Find a Way. Another Dillis song. Yeah. He's got a sample where the lady is singing in Portuguese, but he's got Fife rapping or singing a song over it. So you think that's what she's singing, but when you take it all out, you realize that's not what she's singing at all. Now you caught my heart for the evening. Kiss my cheek moved in.

You confuse things. Should I just sit out or come harder? Help me find my way. Which is a sample. Which is, of course, a sample of that's Tau-T-Tay featuring Bebelle Gilberto. And the name of the song is Tech Nova, as in Bassa Nova. So we're already into the Brazilian stuff. And obviously, you wouldn't even have Bossa Nova if you didn't have Gets Giorberto.

And by the way, if you haven't already, go back and check out our D-Light episode. We talk about that then. Great episode. One of my favorites. Go deep into our archives. We've got a lot of great stuff in there. So Jay, J. Dilla, flew from Detroit. He played some more tracks to the band when he was in L.A.

They liked the Brazilian one and started writing to it. This is his first trip to L.A., by the way. And he doesn't have his famous MPC yet, his MPC 3, that's in the Smithsonian. But he has a friends borrowed SP-200, the sampler we've talked about on some other episodes, very famously part of the French touch, all the French touch Dapunk guys used it. So the Farsight is holed up at a place called Soundcastle in Silver Lake near where I live. and it's right around the corner from a house they shared, which they called the Lab Cabin. There you go.

And one thing I want to actually say about Lab Cabin, California, as an album, is that I feel like, much like Blowout Come, I don't know that the hip-hop community loved it as much than as we do now. Like, it's one of those albums that has since, just you go back and listen to it now, and you're like, oh, this is a fantastic album. Right. There are so many good songs on there. So many songs by other songs produced by the band members themselves. There's a song on there by Slim Kid Tray that I absolutely love. That song is called Hey You. And it's relevant to what we've been saying this whole episode.

Like that was, Dillet did six tracks on this record. He did drop, right? He did bullshit. And these were actually the first JD tracks. Remember, he's not Dillie yet. These were the first JD tracks hit the market since this is the beginning of his career. But the other half of the record is, the other guys in the group.

And tensions are already forming because they're getting their own gear, they're starting to come up with their own ideas. They're not always meshing together. It does lead to some tense moments, including some actual fisticuffs regarding things as mundane as the kick drum. Well, I love that. After the break, we'll get into fistfights. We'll talk about how running was made and how Dillet produced this song. Stay with us.

Welcome back to one song, Luxury, walk us through it. Tell us how did running get made. Okay, let's talk about running. Starting with the songwriting splits, always a good place to start. Half of the song publishing credits goes to the far side. We've got... Yes, rappers got some publishing. Let's go.

Rob's a great start. Each of the four band members get 12.5%. Adding up to 50, it's equal, equal, equal, equal. Even though only three of them are actually rapping on and dawns on me. They still split it four ways. I'm sure that when they got to the Booty Brown song, they all still got 12.5. They also got 12.5. That's right.

Jay Dilla gets 25%. Good for him. The remaining 25% of the pie goes to Maria de Toledo, which is interesting because 0% goes to Luis Bonfa. And we're going to be talking about Luis Bonfa in a second. We love Luis Bonfa. A really quick introduction into why Dilla is such an important figure in hip-hop because of what he did to transform the nature of beat making.

So really quickly, we've talked a lot on this show. We've had many episodes where we've talked about the concept of swing and then straight. So there's kind of this like binary, but there's actually a lot of gray area. in between. So there's dunce cats, dun dun cat, and then there's done, da, da is jazz, that's swing. But there's actually a lot of gradation in between. I think the best way to explain that is actually show you. So just here's a really basic beat. And what's kind of cool if anybody has a dod, like a Ableton Live or something, you've got something called the groove window. You can change the groove by percentage points. So this is a basic beat. Just eighth notes. And listen to the

high hat. That's what matters in this. Those eighth notes are groove at 50%. So a 50% groove is essentially straight. Here is 60. This is swing at 60, so it's a little bit of swing. You can hear that it's starting to get all the way to that extreme. If you add a little more, here's 67. It sounds like this.

It's starting to be a little more delayed. And now let's hear it at 75, which is the maximum. So that swing kind of gives it a sense of stuttering. But it's also literally, that's, the swing is what makes it, we would call it sort of a core rhythmic component of jazz is generally considered to be swing. So one of a handful of things that Dilla did was the use of swing, but that function, not necessarily to get everything to swing. He would have multiple things happening tempo-wise in the same song. And they would potentially clash. Like there would be a high hat

that's straight. There might be a snare drum that's a little early and maybe a kick drum that's a little bit behind. But what he did was wonderfully combine them in a way that didn't sound chaotic to your ear. But it did sound different. So swing is one of the ways he did that. The other way, and this is more relevant to this song, because it's what he's doing. Now, he doesn't, what's called quantizing beats, if you make a beat now. I love this part. Yeah. Yeah. Quantizing is when you have the grid of, like literally the math of the, of the tempo, automatically line up all of the elements. So your kicks are always perfectly. Everything's perfect. Perfectly across the song evenly spaced.

You know, as a DJ, you know, when you try and mix music from like the 60s and the 70s, it's not always good because there's a live drummer there. There's human beings that we're not playing quantized. Exactly. Like he's going with the feel. He may not be a perfect robotic machine. And I love it when I think it's Jazzy Jeff talks about when he saw, when he saw, you know, JD working. Like everybody has, you know, the ability to, you know, just. click a button and your symbols and your drums, everything's gonna line up perfect.

And what JD would do is that he would sit there and play each note the way that he felt it. And he would not quantize it. And that's why it has that bit of life in it. Yeah, it feels not perfect. It feels human. Yeah. And a lot of what JD is doing is adding some of this,

like a new, by mixing these different things from the samples from the drum machine where there are different rhythmic things going on at once. And I'm going to play it for you in the mix, and this will all make sense actually perfectly in this song because it happens. Yeah. There are elements that stay straight. And there are elements that are a little ahead and behind sometimes. They're syncopated. They've got some swing. But the point is that they're not perfect. Let's listen in the mix. So here is the beat for running. I'm going to play you one element at a time because that perfectly explains what I'm saying.

So here is the hi-hat. And as you'll hear, they're straight. They are perfectly on the grid. There's really no variation going on there. And the snare has a little bit of syncopation in it. Yep. And you can kind of hear a little bit of the kick in the background. But it's basically going, da, da, da, da, da. Little variations, but for the most part, fairly consistent. Now the variety in this song, what makes it very dilla, is in the kick drum.

So here's what happens when you add the kick. And if you're listening for a pattern, a two, four, eight bar loop, you won't find one. because it's inconsistent. Yeah. It's 20 bars. You can hear the inconsistent. It's a 20 bar loop, which I wouldn't even call loop anymore. But nothing repeats for 20 bars.

That's awesome. So I'll just play that. I'll take out the high hat. And now what I don't know for sure is if he did that with an eighth note running as a loop, you know, those eighth notes in the high hat, and then he just programmed the kick and snare. Because when I tried to do it, to get the high hat perfect and the kick. imperfect and the SNF is so is hard I couldn't do it but I'm not Dilla so you're not

I'm not him fuck I'm not that guy but it here's me trying to do that so I'm trying to be perfect with my hi-hats and then I'll do no wait wait you're fired I'm fired go back to working with the wascles real hip-hop is no lascles look it's hard But he's extremely skilled. He might have done it all at a lifetime. He might have done it all at once or he might have programmed the hi-hat and then gone back to just do the kicks. I'm not sure. When I saw Jazzy Jeff doing this, he was able to do both of the same time.

Oh, is that right? By the way, when you see Questlove do this at a different guy. At a drum kit. Yeah. You know, I think the larger point is that as you said, it's a 20-bar loop and they left in the imperfections and that's how you feel the human in it. Yeah. And I just, the whole time that I'm like, you know, preparing for this episode this week, I'm like, isn't that a wonderful way to work? There are times when I'm working on a script and I'm like, I know what they think is going to happen next, but I'm just going to do something both unexpected.

And even I don't know that this works, but like I'm going to try it because I'm willing to make some mistakes. Yeah. And I think that what Dilla challenges all artists to do is, hey, don't push the perfect button. Yeah. Don't push the perfect button. Don't quantify. That's the quantize your creative output, bro. One of the other things that makes Dilla time in quotes, again, the name of the book, but that's why it's its own distinct thing.

Because it's mostly not quantized. It's mostly played by hand. But he also uses. And it's mostly landing sort of a little bit behind the beat. There's a little bit of a slowed down sort of I'm too cool. You know, I was thinking about the 80s versus the 90s also. Because like if you look at old Michael Jackson videos, Michael in the hyperactive, coaked out 50s, he's always a little bit. bit in terms of choreography ahead of everybody behind him. So choreography-wise, if you really, really pay attention, Mike's just a little bit in front of his back-out dancers. And I feel like it speaks to the 90s with our sort of grunge and alternative and like definitely by 95, we're full on into like sort of a darker hip hop than we had had, you know, just five

or definitely 10 years earlier. There was something so 90s and late 90s about landing just behind the beat. So it's like the opposite of the 80s. It's like, nah, man, I ain't doing that. Yeah. Yeah, I'll come along for this ride, but I got to be dragged. I'm the snare. Yeah, but I'm the kick drum.

And just building on what you're saying, it's that, but also there might be other elements that are ahead of the beat. So when he builds a beat, and it must be said at this point, this is. Yeah, it's not a Carmen copy of the same for every song. It's not the same every song. And this is early Dilla. Again, this is his first ever release. He doesn't even have his own MPC yet. The MPC 3,000, which he's famous for, which is in the Smithsonian.

When does that come out? He buys $94, but he hasn't bought it yet because he hasn't made the money from this record yet. So from the success of Run and from the success of this Farside record, he ends up buying that MPC. But he doesn't have it yet, which means he doesn't have all the functions that that device has. For example, the time shift function, which is the other thing I was alluding to. So part of it is swing. He actually is programming that kick by hand. But later when he gets the MPC 3,000, he's able to place, again, it's not quantized,

but it's not played by hand anymore. He starts to place the notes on the grid and then move then, nudge them slightly behind, slightly ahead, and to make choices across the song where it's not a four-bar loop, where it's not perfect, where it's not the same, and where different rhythmic elements are doing different things. And that is what DILA is,

is that type of beat programming where he's making these micro-decision of nudging it a little ahead, a little behind. That's the time shift function in the MPC. So these really, tiny subtle adjustments ahead of the grid. Tiny choices, a little ahead of the grid, a little behind the grid, but never, or sometimes directly on the grid too.

Like sometimes he would make that choice. So that comes after this song, though. He doesn't have that device yet. So he's doing this. He is programming it. He's programming that kick, which leads us to kind of a funny story. I mean, funny in a, in retrospect, at the time it sounds a little scary. Apparently what happens is the band members go to lunch or go get a meal, except Fatlip,

who stays behind with the engineer, whose name is Rick Clifford, and the two of them decide to change the beat. They decide they don't like the kick drum. They decided for whatever reason, they're like, no, let's make it more normal. I mean, Dilla hasn't happened yet. This is the first song they've ever heard by him

and the world hasn't heard it yet. So it's still unusual for this 20 bar loop of wonky sounding a head behind kick drums. And they wanted to just be normal, for lack of a better word, I suppose. So when they come back from lunch, Trey's like, why did you do that? And Fatlip goes, it just didn't sound right.

So not only by the way, did they change it, but they erased the original. So like it was wiped from the tape. It wasn't even there. So apparently Trey and Fatlip have kind of a fight. There's Fistakuffs that ensue. And Trey does win the fight. I don't know if they won because there was a mediation going on. Fatlip, I think listens to the show.

So Fatlip, if you chime in and let us know, did you win the fight? We'd love to know. Apparently, Trey asked Dilla to redo it exactly the same way he did it. So I'm not sure if he got exactly that 20 bar. Like, what sounds almost random to me, he may or may not have done it exactly the same. But, yeah, apparently there was some contentiousness about this unusual choice of having that kick drum be, unlike anything that we would have heard in hip hop up to that point. But that shows you how much Diller really trusted, you know, his devices. And I actually heard a story that he, when he would buy a new device, one of the first.

first thing he would do is he would throw out the instruction manual because he didn't want to learn how they wanted you to use it. He was like, you just got to get to know your own device on your own, in your own way. That was Am Fiddler's advice, I think, was to do just that, just to treat it like an instrument, to treat it like to find your way into it and have your intuition guide you and therefore maybe do something that other people wouldn't do that wasn't by the book, literally. All right, P.M. Fiddler, he just recently passed. Put it down And again, this being one of the first

released tracks that the world had ever heard by then-J-D later Dilla. He doesn't have the device that would get him the ability to chop and rearrange samples, which we know him for later on in his career. But one of the core things he's inspired by, apparently, and I heard this on an interview that Dan Charness, who wrote that book did with Rick Rubin on Broken Record,

he says that he was inspired by a Sapel singer's song, called Peace of the Action. And when Dan Charnas did his homework, went down the rabbit hole of trying to find out what he was talking about, he discovered that there's the Sydney Poitiers, Bill Cosby, James Earl Jones movie from 1977, where it ends with a party and they play that song. And you're watching a group of people dance to the music at a party and clap along to it, but they're not quite clapping on the beat. Here's the song, it's called Peace of the Action by Mavis Staples. I hear it, right? It's a little ahead. A little early. A little early. Wait, a couple of things.

Number one, there's nothing more awkward than when like a crowd tries to clap along with a song and everybody's finding their own rhythm. It doesn't happen so much nowadays. I just saw an outcast video from like 2002 when Andre and Big Boy were performing the whole world in the whole world. And it's all white people. Like to a distribute degree, it's like somebody's like were they like playing like a Mormon, Chapel? Like, why is there nobody black in this crowd? And everybody's on the one in three? No, I mean, like, it makes no sense. But here's why I bring it up. Okay. It's because when I was, I was playing this week, some Dilla songs for my kids, because, you know, they're the age where they

want to produce music. And they were like, yeah, I like what, I like what they're doing with handclaps and snares in here because even they can tell that there's like a little bit of humanity. There's a little humanity. Yeah. And it's coming in a little bit late. And what I pointed out to them is because you always hear like you know without dilla there'd be no Kanye without dillard there would be no there'd be a couple of producers who wouldn't have had the same sound and the reason i found that interest is because and i can't describe it maybe you can but like even there it sounds like three claps okay it's called a flam yeah like a drummer will do that too where they have their two like brum brum broom broom yeah it's a little off but it makes it thicker

it makes it thicker it makes it um cooler for the lack of a better term but But it's not like a hard 80s like clap. It's like a br-br-br-br-br-b-b-b-the-best claps. And I say this as a producer who has spent so many days of my life just listening and auditioning claps for my music that I want to use. Like this clap, no, this clap, no, this like hours and hours, like going through claps of chopping other claps. And like the best claps have a little bit of a flam to them because it makes them, it makes them

wider. It can be stereo even. Yeah. And it makes them like just bigger and more human sounds. Would you clap? Would you clap like with your hands? Well, you need more. I think it's a... Well, let's try.

We got two people. So one of us clas like this, the other one claps like that. One. No, it's just a little bit timing-wise. Oh, okay. One, two, three. We're both trying to be late. I'll be early.

Okay, one, two, three, four, one, two. We got it. We got it. You get us in the studio now, son. Listen, the importance of Dilla's sound and the... I'm trying to think of a better word than Wonke. or drunkenness, but the time is multiple. In fact, the term he used for it,

apparently J.D himself called it simple complex. That's how he described his own beats, was there as like it's simple, I suppose, in total. But what's happening beneath the surface is multiple rhythms and multiple timings. Part of why that was so significant, you have to remember this is 1994, this is Q-Tip has heard this demo

and he's telling everyone with an earshot, this is the future of beat making. and he's bringing it to the far side. There's a story that Questlove tells about how the roots were opening for Farside in North Carolina. And Questlove has to leave for some reason. But as he's leaving, he hears, I guess, coming from the show that he's walking away from jumping into a cabby. Here's the kick drum on the song, Bullshit. And he calls it, quote, the most life-changing moment I have ever had.

He had to run back into the club. as he said, because it sounded like the kick drum was being played by a drunk three-year-old. And as he puts it, he's like, he wondered, are you allowed to do that? So as he put it, that was the most liberating moment and clearly changed the trajectory of how he listened to and began to play drums and goes on to the DeAngelo project obviously benefited from this moment for him. Let's finish up the beat. So in addition to the drums, the kick, snare, and hi-hat, he also had this cabasa, which

is a sample. I love it. And that is a sample of this song by Woody Herman called Flying Easy from 1969. I went looking for this song and I could not find it. I'm so glad you found it. May I have your attention please? All passengers with tickets for flight two.

So of course that's a, as everyone knows, that's a quique. Everybody knows. Everyone knows. That's like we were tuning out because it's so well known. It's a little insulting to some of our core listeners, but you just heard a khabasa and a kui-kha. That sound. So also importantly, we have this sample from 1984's Rockbox by Run DMC. Run, Run, DMC.

So just that little snippet of run, which sounds like this in the mix. Run, run. And then he added some scratches, which add to that texture. So it's like this. Run. And when you add the cabasa Those are live scratches, right? They sound like live scratches to me

And I imagine we were speculating that Dilla probably did that. Yeah, I would imagine they live. Because he would have had the vinyl. That's how he would have gotten the sample from the Run DMC record. And then when you add that to the beat, it sounds like this. It's not all day.

It's so good. And I feel like, you know, real Dilla fans know that he's actually a big fan of like this sound, like this Bosanova sound. Years later, he releases a song called Rigo Suave Basanova, where he just goes full on into the sound of Bosanova. And here's a little bit of that. That's Rico Suave Basanova off of his album.

Welcome to the... Which is, of course, an interpolation of this song. By the absurdly named Milton Banana. And his Milton Banana trio. That song is Ciudade Vatsia from 1966. Nailed it. Okay. Well, you mentioned Brazil.

So let's get into the... Brazil that's at the heart of the song, which is the sample. The main sample in the song outside of the beats is this four-bar loop of guitar, which is, by the way, performed by the same Luis Bonfa I mentioned earlier, who has zero credit on this. But the album is called Jazz Samba Encore, 1963. The song is Saudage Vem Corendo and its bystand gets with Luis Bonfa. As I mentioned at the top, when we started going into the stems and the songwriting splits, he is not credited himself, ironically, which is a little crazy, but I did a little more digging. And it's because the person who is credited in his stead is Maria Toledo.

And what's interesting is that she's the singer on this song. Right. And it's one of those crazy sampling copyright law things. Yes. Or the person who's credited in the credits, their name is not on the record. Their voice is not in the sample. They're not the element that was actually sampled. They're not the element that was sampled.

But I was able to get to the bottom of it because it turns out that Malia Toledo, who's the vocalist who gets 25% and the guitar player that you're hearing doesn't get anything. They were married. So I wonder if as some part of their like just financial arrangement, they're like, look, we share the publishing,

we share our life together. I'm not really sure. That's the closest I can get to an answer. Are they still married? But then they got divorced later. So I have no idea. The crazy world of music publishing, it's like,

Who kept the far side publishing money? It's crazy that far side song gives 25% to the estate, to the estate of this woman who has nothing to do with what we heard. What's crazy is this reminds me of the Nause Sting conversation. We had a couple episodes back where the part that he sampled in the message is not the part Sting contributed to the shape of my heart. And yet Sting is the one who got the publisher.

Exactly. And Sting actually gets 10% of the publishing on this song. On everything. Sting gets 10% of everything. Yeah, Singh gets 10% of everything. He's the 110th% on this song. There's always something so magical when you're just listening to a song. And then it's like this part that you know is sampled just sort of.

peaks his head over the wall like, by the way, did you hear that? Are you listening? I'm here. And it like goes away. I also think that's an important part of the genius of Dilla because that moment in the song happens too much in and it never happens again. Yes. I think, listen, I feel very strongly about this.

As you can tell, from daft punk to DJ premiere, my favorite producers are often those people who would take the tiniest liver of something and build it out into this big, beautiful world of music when it's over that quick and you're just like, man, they knew there was something special in that tiny two seconds of music that could build out an entire song. Right. So there's no right or wrong way to be like a sample finder, to be a crate digger. But so often what one does, and I speak from my own experience and I do it one way and other people do it other ways, is you go through potential sample sources. You buy a record at a garage sale, whatever it is, your parents record collection. And you're needle dropping usually from the beginning of

the song and maybe there's a breakbeat, maybe there's something interesting and unusual. And after 10, 15, 20, 30 seconds, maybe you move on to the next thing because there's five songs per side and there's a bunch of records in a stack that you want to get through. But it's a real testament to what a listener and what a patient listener and what a deep digger of records, a crate digger of records, that Dilla was because that's two minutes in. It only happens the one time. He heard it and it popped out to him and he, that's what he chose to loop was. those four bars.

Listen, it's unusual. You do it for a living, and that is more than I've done. I will say as a, what could I call myself, like a sample critic? I have a great love and respect for people who find those samples that are buried like in the middle of the song. You know what I mean? And by contrast, like Warren G. Or like the needle on the record on the Michael McDonald, keep forgetting.

And that was the right sample, was right from the top of the song. But for a four bar a loop that begins that song. So there's no right way and wrong. They're just different ways. There are different ways. But I do have a special love for people. Like there are a couple of Kanye songs where he sampled like a really random part to the end of an Isaac Hayes song in particular. Those of you who know flashing lights know what sample I'm talking about.

That comes like eight minutes into that song. And the fact that he looped that and made flashing lights is kind of incredible. I always think that that's like an extra layer. And you're right to point out that for us, the listener, the sample spotter going through life. That gives it kind of the extra resonance when we're listening, and it surprises us seven minutes deep into the song. It's like, oh, that's where they got that. That's where it came from? That's always fun.

The Imajimal sample that P-Rock sample for Whose World is This? Like, that sample is a tight, it's like a raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Like, how did he find that two seconds that makes such a classic song? That to me is like the magic of inspired sampling. So let's move on to the bass. And one thing I want to point out to you is that when I play you the bass, you'll be like, that sounds familiar. Now, if that sounds familiar to anyone who has EQ settings on their stereo, it's the same loop, but it's a low-pass filter.

And the guitar part was the same loop with a high-pass filter. In other words, he's just broken up the sample into two chunks, and the base content is boosted a little bit. But it's literally just the sample with that baseline emphasized and the high part cut out. He has a sample in there twice, but he's EQed them. It's the same sample twice with two different filters, basically. Two different EQ. He's got him on the gangster setting, as we call it on this. That's right.

All the way up, all the way up. And the mids down low. I was doing that when I was like 13. I was like, you know what? The music, all music sounds better when the bass is all the way up, troubles all the way up. And then the mids are all the way down. Yeah. By the way, all of us had really shitty headphones at one point.

And shitty headphones are always like, the mids are in your face. Yeah. It's the last part you want. And the bass can be found. And it's a nightmare. You don't want that crap. One thing I love about this song is that it's got, you know, these elements of Osanova.

The movie Black Orpheus plays a big role in, American jazz and what was seen as cool in the American, like, you know, black hip community. Black Orpheus, for those who don't know, as a retelling of the Orpheus legend, during Carnival in Rio. And it's a beautiful movie. I believe that it won Best Foreign Film the Year came out.

And it has this amazing Samba Jazz soundtrack. The soundtrack was also an introduction to a lot of the American audience. to an artist by the name of Antonio Carlos Yobin. And between him and Luis Bonfa, who we've talked a lot about, whose song Morning of the Carnival is sort of like one of the big songs off of that, they really did establish that like, no, there are all these fantastic, you know, Afro sounds coming out of Brazil. You know, people don't often mention it, but like there were far more Africans

taken to Brazil than there were to North America. But it was almost like a discovery, you know, as the 60s dawn that, oh, we're making great music all around the world. And the soundtrack was an introduction of that sound. I'm going to play a small clip from that soundtrack. Even in the 1990s, Bossa Nova and jazz and these desperate sounds from across the African diaspora were like sounds that people were trying to bring in and to varying degrees of success. But one thing that I always liked about running was that. that it sort of drew a connection and a through line from this cool music that my parents were really into in the early 60s. That's so cool. All the way to like that very contemporary,

yeah, the very contemporary hip-hop sounds that were coming on the mid-90s. And look, just a very simple, simple, oversimplified description of what this music is. So it derives from Samba and anyone, if you go back to our beef episode from the summer, we talked a little about the origins of Samba, some of the earliest beefs in the 30s in, in really. or between the sambistas. And it comes from that, but it's, when I say it comes from that, what I mean is rhythmically, a lot of what you are hearing in Basanova is essentially a slowed down version of the samba.

Now, the samba starts life in the slums of Brazil, as it were, but ends up being the national music of Brazil. And so in the 60s, there's this desire or this instinct to kind of transform it to make it a little bit new. And so in Basanova, which literally means new trend or new wave in Portuguese. Gies is kind of a transformation by slowing it down, by kind of actually importantly, adding some European elements of harmony and melody. That is also a big difference.

The core changes in this song are pretty unusual. They're not something you would have heard in the Samba, for example. And one last thing that draws a parallel with Dilla and with the song is that the rhythmic innovation that's coming from Bossa Nova, which inspires so many American jazz players like Stan gets like Charlie Bird. Like Quincy Jones. Like Quincy Jones. Like Dave Bruebeck,

I'll be quoting in a second. Is they're very excited about having a new rhythm, having a new beat, having a new way to work with rhythm. Latin rhythms had been a thing already in jazz since the beginning. But this was a new Latin rhythm. It was a different way of doing it.

It's not an accident that the sole Bosanova by Quincy Jones comes out in 1962. That's right. This was very much in the sauce at that time. Which is the same year that Dave Brubach puts out a record called Basanova USA.

In the liner notes, he says, quote, we had long waited for Basanova. The search for a different beat was apparent in my own work and that of other jazz composers and performers. So part of what makes the beat unusual, we were talking about swing before. There's no swing in Basanova. It's actually, if you listen back to these early jazz records,

ostensibly jazz records, what you're hearing is a da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. But you're not hearing a da, da, da, da. This is a pretty straight rhythm. It wouldn't be rap without vocals. It wouldn't be vocals without Fat Lipp, Slim Kid, Trey. Where do you want to start? I want to start with Fat Lipp.

You know, he's the first person to come on the track. And this track, very obviously, called running because it's about, I love the far side. They're so funny. It's a song about fighting, but it's also a song about not fighting. Yeah, it's about avoiding fighting. It's a talk about choosing not to fight. Right. So, you know, can we hear a little bit of fat lip on verse one?

For no reason at all, I can't recall. Niggas roll a sees in my face. Down the hall of kicking it in the back of the school eating chicken at three. Wondering, why's everybody always picking on me? I mean, first off, I like that you can hear like, he's syncopated. Like, he's not landing every line. No, he's got some swinging there too. Absolutely.

He's coming in off the beat. I like the fact that you feel like you can like hear like his spitty delivery a little bit. I don't know, that's a weird thing to say, but like, it's part of, again, what makes him human. You know, I think that that's pretty cool. But also, like, this is, like, something I could really relate to. Like, I never gang bang. But, like, he says the line about I could recall, you know, brothers throwing seas in my face. You know what I mean?

Like, talk about the Crips. Like, he's a dude in Los Angeles, but he's not rapping for the point of view that an NWA raps from. Like, he's like, no, I'm being terrorized. Like, I'm trying to get to class. Like, can I please get to class? Why is everybody picking on me? Exactly. Charlie Brown.

Which is from the coasters. A lot of people don't realize that. I grew up thinking that song was about the cartoon character. It's not about Charlie Brown. It's not about the peanuts. Nope. Who's it about? They just thought that they just thought that Charlie Brown was like a funny name.

It also works out well because why is everybody picking on me is something that you can easily see Charlie Brown saying. So you know what I want to say about Slim Kid Trey. from the first time you heard passing me by you realize like this dude's got a great voice like he is a singer and you hear um yeah and every rapper's got their own style and some definitely have a more staccato thing like this like buster rhymes but like his always sounded more like a jazz saxophone like you know like the placements there's the syncopation you're talking yeah i hear that too unusual placements and rhythms in there can't depend on friends to help you in a squeeze please they got problems of their own.

Don't for the count on seven chicken shit. Don't get to heaven till they face these fears and these fears. You know, like, I'm even thinking about the part, you know, as a victim, I invented low key till the key, whole itself got lower than me. As a victim I invented low key, till the key, whole itself got lower than me. So I stood up and let my free form, form free said, I'm going to get something before they knock and not me. I also think it's interesting where he chose to double up on his voice, like just

just sort of like put an asterisk or an exclamation mark. Emphasis. An emphasis on the line. So like give it up to Slim Kit Trey, like even the songs he produced as a member of the group are some of my favorite songs in the group's canon. He's just clearly a genius musical motherfucker. Is it okay that my favorite voice though is Imani? Let's hear about it.

Imani with the high voice. Let's go. 1995 and now that I'm old. The stress weighs on my shoulders heavy as boldest. But I told y'all until the day that I die, I still will be a soldier. You know, the thing about Amani, which is amazing to me is that he, obviously, he's the one with the high voice. I always thought that he was sort of doing the far-sized version of Chuck D.

You know what I mean? Like it's a little bit more of like a demonstrative, even though he's singing a preacher, too. Kind of like. Yeah, it's a little bit more up there, which is ironic because now that I think about it, the one they directly referenced Chuck D in their music. It's actually on the song called Officer off of Bizar Right 2. And it's actually Fat Lipp who does

the Chuck D. But yeah, Amani's great. I mean, like all these guys are great. Oh, by the way, I think Bouti Brown is on the song. I think he is on the chorus, yeah. Well, why don't we hear that chorus? Can't keep running away. Can't keep running away. A little bit of a harmony there.

Yeah, I love that harmony. I love that. I mean, that was one thing that I can say, you know, every time we do a song, I don't always know every song by heart, lyrically. This is one of those I've heard, you know, 10,000 hours. Yeah. Well, let's talk about the chorus, by the way, because it's, so the original, remember the original beat. So Dillop puts together this beat. He's got the high hat, the kick, the snare.

But he's also got that run DMC sample in it, right? So what they get, run, run. They hear the word run. And it obviously inspires something in the songwriting process. But what's interesting, and I don't know if this is a coincidence or if, like, Dilla intended this, but he's using this loop of a song, which is called Sodage Vem Corendo, which means sodage, which is very loosely translated. It's a complicated Portuguese concept of sort of nostalgic sadness and longing.

But it means that word sodage comes running. So the word running is baked into both of the samples, interestingly enough, including the one in Portuguese. So do we know if the Farsite had the idea for? a song about running first or did he come to them with all these elements? I haven't read any report interviews or reporting about it, but in my, my guess is they were inspired by the beat that had the word run in it. It would not surprise me in the slightest because it's been my experience too to bring. I've worked with songwriters before, for example, lyricists and I'll have a instrumental, but I'll give it a title. And so often the lyricist

will springboard from the title I gave it, like a placeholder name. And often a line or a chorus comes from that inspiration because it's baked into the first thing you're hearing that inspires you. So I don't know for sure, but it would not surprise me if that run DMC sample led to the song. You know what I could see

and obviously there's pure speculation. I can see Dillard bringing them this track. They're saying, what's the name of the track? He tells them. They're like, what does that mean? Someone finds out. And they're like, yo, running.

What if we did it about running? And then they do that. And then after they've done the song, then he goes back and puts in the run, run. You know what I mean? That is possible. I was not able to find. We don't know.

I wasn't able to find the original demo. Obviously, Fat Lib, if you're listening, get me up and let us know. We'd love to hear the original demo. We'll let the people know which came first to chicken or the egg. Oh, we've got to do the outro. Can't keep running away. Can't keep running away. Can't keep running away.

Can't keep running away. I love that little like just variation on the chorus hook at the end. Like a little outro. Koda. The far side have left their mark on many. hip-hop and R&B artists. A number of artists have actually sampled running in the years since it's released. We're talking about Maya, Wiz Khalifa, Juice World, JPEG Mafia. I think you have a story about the Maya song Fallen. Yeah, let's listen to it. So this is Maya song Fallen.

It's somewhere between an interpolation or interpulation and a cover because the hook is straight up the hook from the other song. Yeah, it's almost like you took an instrumental of a song with a prominent sample and just wrapped over it. This is one of those interesting stories where when I did the deep digging into the publishing, both Luis Bonfa and his then-wife Maria Toledo are listed separately in the credits. They both get 25% of this. But interestingly, none of the Farsidewriters, or Dilla for that matter, are themselves included. So it's this confusing.

They may have been paid outright, like just a flat fee for the use of the material. It's unclear to me. It's an unusual situation because it's not a sample, which is normally where you get a flat fee. It's a publishing situation where you would expect that they would be included in the publishing for mailbox money for life on that song, but apparently not. You know, the same way, we think it's a little weird, this thing gets paid for a song where he didn't provide the element that got sample. It seems a little bit weird that they would be able to do fall in and not have to pay the estate of Dilla because he's the one who found that little section of a Brazilian song. And again, to be clear, that may have been in the mix. That's just not publicly available records.

But what's confusing and unusual is like suddenly we have both Bonfa and Toledo popping up on this song, whereas, you know, it's the same material. It's the same guitar loop that's replayed. It's the same hook. And on the far side version, one of them is and the other isn't. This world of copyright and music publishing, it's, there's no consistency to it. There's something predictable. I reminded the David Bowie movie, Labyrinth. It is Labyrinthine.

Labyrinthine. That's a little bit weird because that Maya song is clearly using a part of that song that. The entirety of the hook? Yes. That vocal hook is right in there. We wouldn't know that that song was there without Dilla. It's the chorus of the song. We're saying chorus, but I think what we're saying,

we're saying that the musical bed that is there is there via Dilla's, you know, creative genius. And it seems, we would hope that he's getting sub-publishing because he's the reason why that's there in the Maya song. But I think that all gets towards Della's legacy. It cannot be overstated. He's easily considered one of the greatest beat producers in hip hop history. Even though he only lived to be 32,

He has influenced so many people on earth. And we could do a whole episode on what he did, you know, in the late 90s through 2006. But just touching on a little bit, you know, he becomes a member of the Uma. At some point, he wants his name on the albums more. And so he becomes, you know, Jay Dilla, this artist who gets signed to MCA. That album actually never even gets released. But he continues to turn out music. One of my favorite albums by him is an album called Welcome to Detroit.

In addition to the song I played earlier, here is a song, a big favorite of mine. It's his version of Think Twice. He will continue to work with the Soul Quarians, which is a collective of people who include Questlove and Erica Badu and Common. Dilla's work on like water for chocolate is just insane. And without Dilla, we wouldn't enjoy songs like The Light by Common. Also this one, which is one of my favorite, this is Thelonius. That bass there. Now, see what I was talking about before?

Now he's starting to do funky stuff with not just the beats, but that bass is a little bit like unpredictable, shall we say. He'll continue to work with everybody from Buster Rhymes to Janet Jackson to DeAngelo and eventually will come to an album that had a huge impact on all of us, in part because it literally debuted three days before he died. That is the album Donuts. And as was said by one person who knew him, they were like, you know, to me, Donuts is special because it was almost like he'd gone back to making the mixtapes that he'd made for his friends early on his career. And that really does when you think about it like that.

Donuts is less of a proper studio album. And it's more like this amazing farewell mixtape from the album artwork to the music on there. It's just one of those albums, whether you were there for it at the time or whether it's inspiring new generations of people to make music. It's just, it's remarkably special. I really can't hear this song, Lightworks, without thinking about like, thank you, Dillard. Thank you for providing my life with these beats that just absolutely just cut to the core of who I am as a person. And before we move on, I also want to say that like this episode has been. You know, it's been a lot about Dillow.

Because on this show, we talk about songwriters. We talk about producers. Like, that's just what we do. But we have these amazing lyricists also at the heart of this story, the far side. And though, you know, after Lab Cabin, we don't really see the far side a lot in their original iteration as the four guys. They came out with another album, but it was only two of them. But by that time, like, Fat Lips not there. Slim Kutre is not there.

Right, right. It's technically the far side, but in name only. Listen, to this day, I think, you know, you can go see. them you're always going to see slim kid tray fat lip and Imani I don't know what the current status of booty Brown is as far as the other members of the group we'd love to have them on a future episode of the show because we're big fans to Diallo what would you say the legacy of the far side is look they had a lot of copycats in the immediate in the immediate wake of their success with the first album and this

album to a certain degree but I think that they were one of those groups that really made it okay to be, you know, you can be cool, you can be nerdy, you can be yourself, you can be vulnerable. They made it okay to avoid fighting, running from your problems, if you will. Look, you could go out like a punk and a chump or a sucker or something to that effect. And it's still okay. And it was all okay because the Farsight had your back. They were like your boys, they were your friends. And they made it okay to just be a nerd. Like he said, I got a letter from the DMV the other day. I opened it and read it and said they were. They were like, were suckers. You know, they were talking about the public enemy reference. It's a public enemy

reference, but they're talking about the very mundane side of life. And I think that that mundanity is where a lot of comedy is truly born. The far side made it okay to be funny. And I think that that's a very strong legacy on which to stand. Okay, Lexingtonmy, stop for what we're talking. This is the segment where we share a deep cut or a hidden gym with you, the one song nation, and with each other. Okay, you go first. Well, as we discussed earlier, Basanova never died, should it have. We still love it. There are some recent Bosanova songs, and one of my favorite Bosanova songs of the modern era is by

Luevae, and it's called Falling Behind from 2002. I mean, it's baked into that. That's 1962 in music. Like, it's just, to my ears, that's what it sounds like, but it's a gorgeous, that's not a bad thing. That's a gorgeous song. And I think there's something really cool about like bringing back genres that we haven't heard in a while and bringing it into a new modern

context. I think that's right. And I think that for my one more song, I'm going to do something quite similar. Keeping with the Dilev at all, I would like to play a song from another song from his album, Welcome to Detroit. And it is a song that

takes something that was already a little bit old by the time it came out, but it's sort of tried to update it. And I think you'll hear some of the musical references that he's making. This is Big Booty Express. Sounds like a cabasa. We're just a shaker.

I mean, that song is epic and long, and we can only play a snippet of it, obviously. But he's, you know, it's with the word express and the title. It's very crafty. It's very crafty meets Basanova. But he's also from Detroit. And I think that's Dilla basically saying, hey, by the way, I'm from the home of Techno. Detroit Techno is something that we came up with. Electric Legacy and Bosanova.

It's all combined there in a really cool way. I love that. By the way, Dilla was the first hip-hop DJ to really go big on daft punk and sampling daft punk. So that's, you know, something also part of his legacy. As always, if you have an idea for one more song, you can find us on Instagram and TikTok. You can find me on Instagram at Diallo and on TikTok at Diallo. And you can find me on Instagram at Lux, L-U-X-U-R-Y, and on TikTok at Luxury-X-X. You can also watch full episodes of One Song on YouTube right now.

Just search for One Song Podcast. We'd love it if you'd like and subscribe. And if you've made it this far, I think that means you like this podcast. So please don't forget to give us five stars. Leave a review. Share it with someone you think would like it. It really helps keep our show going. All right, Luxury.

Help us in this thing. I'm producer, DJ, songwriter, and musicologist Luxury. And I'm actor, writer, director, and sometimes DJ Diallo Riddle. And this is One Song. We'll see you next time.