Pete Rock and CL Smooth’s “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)”

Listen positive vova negative for the woman a master mother queens rising the chapter They javu tell you what I'm going to do when they reminisce over you my god My god, you know, it just it didn't hit like other hip-hop songs of the time. He's not talking about Nothing nothing every hip-hop song at that time was about that, but he's not talking about clothes. He's not talking about You know that typical street life stuff like this is a this is a song about family But their songs were like about a party having a good time and isn't there's a place for that? There's a there's only a place right there. I wish that there was more hip-hop that was about that now But like every everything about this is just painting a picture about life As really lived in life, you know, he's he's telling a story I'm actor writer director and sometimes DJ Diallo Riddle and I producer DJ songwriter in music college This luxury aka the guy who whisper is interromation and this is one song the show where we break down the stories It stems behind iconic songs and tell you why they deserve one more lesson You will hear these songs like you have never heard them before and you can watch one song on youtube and Spotify While you're there, please like and subscribe. We've also got a patreon Like two big boys Subscribe to get one song episodes early and at free with bonus deep dives We had to cut for time. That's right. Just go to patreon.com/onesong subscribe today. It's absolutely free Today's episode is made in partnership with Spotify. There's song DNA beta is available on the Spotify premium mobile app And that feature will be guiding us through some of the sample rabbit holes. We are going down today All right, today we're discussing a hip-hop classic absolute hip-hop classic and we're gonna ask the question Is this the definitive song of 90s hip-hop? That's right This is one song and that song is they reminisce over you Troy by Pete rock and seals I think they reminisce over you. I'm so excited to talk about this song man This is like this is one of those hip-hop songs. I feel like it's just it is hip-hop. It can't be any other genre It is it's bedrock of the genre absolute absolute stone cold classic hip-hop Like it feels like it's been around forever But when what it hasn't been around forever, which begs the question. When did you first hear when I first heard I think it was probably rap city Yeah, you know a lot of people know you know MTV wraps, but rap city was BT's daily rap show I know it sounds corny, but we would get so excited the very first time we would see like a brand new hip-hop song from like p-rock and seals move gang star black moon black sheep plays. It's the early 90s. It's definitely 1991 Like this was a time y'all like, you know brand new trap called quest videos just out everybody would be talking about it the next day And you know every day it was either I think in the beginning it was the it was a guy named the mayor And then it was prime, but then Prince De jour, you know, he'd always be like well the rap city is Prince De jour You know like Kind of like no kind of like Brooklyn New York like okay Yo, this is Prince De jour, you know actually accurately French though Well, De jour sounded French, but you know big last Joe Claire big Tigger in later years like this was where everybody got Your first taste of like a major hip-hop song. It was really exciting. I can't really remember the first time I heard Troy, but like so many songs um the p-rock was producing at that time He always was started off with like a part that had nothing to do with the rest of the song Like I noticed that yeah intros and then the song with fade in you just like a little 10 second another sample Kind of a flex like hey, I could have sampled this one. I'm gonna sample a different one There were some great intro that we like you we could do a whole episode about p-rock's intros Yeah, like the little parts you would sample before you got to the major part of the song But the fade in fade out thing is also so distinctive. It's cool Like this is a CD era so like if you weren't up on your game you might go right past Troy You know I mean you might be like I want to hear track 10 but if you let track 10 play Then you get into Troy. I never thought about because this is it's an interesting choice that that wouldn't be like an Interlude like it's own skippable listen 20-second track. It was the canonical track He'd been premiered to the same thing like a lot of the songs on the group home album, which was just an absolute classic Uh, they started off with like a song here or maybe like a long, you know, wordy intro before they get into the song You know, and that was just you had to be enough of a head to know. Oh my songs coming up P rock is saying I have so many ideas I so many great samples. I'm gonna not cram them in there I'm gonna find a creative way to not cram them in right because the track actually doesn't like it isn't overly bird And so to speak is only got two or three samples by the way before I think a CD you could actually just make that an interlude and and leave it Chopped off that's what I was saying like that's that was interesting choice that it wasn't just a 20-second separate choice It was something about like let me set the mood. Yeah, now the mood is set. Let's start the song. It's part of the song. It's part of Troy Is that interlude? What about you? Do you have memories of this song? If I've been completely honest with you This is one of those tracks and go back we have it We have another shocking moment on an earlier shocking episode where I reveal the saying I won't say what the song is This is a song I ought to have known because at the time in 91 92 I would have been listening to a lot of you listen to the Tribe Cobb us the New York stuff But somehow this one missed me and in 91 92 to be fair I am also starting to turn off sources of music that are coming outside like from radio and and TV I'm living in DC. So I'm shopping at smash which is this great like punk rock record store And I'm getting and I'm also getting into like all the sound garden and mudhead honey kind of sub pop stuff the grunge stuff And in retrospect while I did have a parallel thread that was obsessed with the meters Yeah, and that was obsessed with sampling. I also missed stuff Yeah, that's fair and I missed Troy unbelievably until probably we started this show really when we started this show I started to supplement areas that I just had missed and one of them was like kind of the 90s 92 and beyond hip hop. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff I was like I got a supplement my knowledge and this was one of the ones I would have learned around that You know, I think it's a function of MTV and BET that like I really was into hip hop like Deep into hip hop. Yeah, but I was also into sound garden. I was also into like, you know, Pearl Jam and a lot of the grunge that was coming out then So I think it's a function of like that was the nice thing about having a little bit of gatekeeping back then because You definitely got a sample of like a lot of different genres of music. Totally. No, it's it's it's not obvious to me Why this huge song would have not been on my radar in the same way that like scenario was definitely on my radar So anyway, that's me being super vulnerable. Please please don't judge or feel free to judge, but listen The lesson is like you can't know all the songs you can't know everything I I make an effort to know as much as I can and to be knowledgeable, but like I'm also really aware that like I will never hear all of the music Yeah, and then on this show we get to learn together in tt shot of the steps I'm gonna learn a lot about Troy today from you absolutely and I've learned so much from you my friend Yes, I will say it is a little hard to believe that you didn't hear this when you heard so many other great 90s hip-hop songs It's just arbitrary. It's the it's the luck of whoever had the ox back in the day, you know just didn't play this one Yeah Well, let's say they remit us over you. I consider this a foundational track in the history of hip-hop This song was released in 1992 and immediately set a standard. It is the bar for which Wrap and hip-hop of the 90s. I think should be compared I always say that if the aliens came down and you wanted to explain different genres of music to them You know, you'd probably give them Bob Marley for reggae. You'd probably give them. I don't know Van Halen or or Sabbath You know if you were trying to explain hard rock But to me Troy is the record you give to them if you're trying to explain Hip-hop and 90s hip-hop. I'll be the alien today. It's perfect. Yeah, I'm happy to do it Listen, I always felt like this song is vibrant. It's rich. It's different from anything that came before It's a song that's always included on most people's top 10 hip-hop songs of all time. Does it deserve to be number one? We're gonna ask the question and is it one of the greatest dedication songs of all time one? So that question and many more as we unpack this wrap classic from 1992 So they reminisce over you or T-R-O-Y Troy by Pete Rock and CL smooth was released April 2nd 1992 It peaked at number 58 on the hot 100 and it is a song about loss. That's right. Pete Rock wrote this song as a tribute to his friend Troy Dixon aka trouble T Roy who's a backup dancer for heavy D in the boys He tragically passed away after falling off an exit ramp While they were on tour in Indianapolis Heavy D as some of y'all know is Pete Rock's cousin So Pete Rock supposedly new T-Roy really really well and is still processing real grief with this song And it becomes a song that teaches an entire generation of hip-hop Basically something new how to mourn. You know, I was saying how like you know when you're that age There isn't a whole lot of people died around you from yeah, definitely not from natural causes So at some point you usually in high school maybe in college like you experience that that moment of grief and mourning from somebody who's gone way too soon Yeah, I mean it never leaves you. I'll never forget. I'm still grieving the loss and I'm still in shock about people who died when they were like 18 19 20 that I remember it's still I can't believe that it happened that we lost them only because I was just talking about the store smash the record store in Georgetown Yeah, like literally my friend died in the crosswalk crossing the street from I think um it would have been Dean in Zaluka Um in Georgetown Jen fornos. I want to say her name because Jennifer fornos. It's crazy that she didn't make it to this age She died at 20 and it still shocks me to this days You know, I was recently there in Georgetown and whenever I walk past that crosswalk, I think, of Jennifer Fortness. It never leaves you. - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah, this is, you know, every now and then we do a song on the show and it really affects the mood in the studio. - Yeah. - And this is one of those was where I'm like, gonna kind of like try to keep it together because it'd be really easy to go down some of these grieving rabbit holes. - But it's important to say like in the DNA of this song is this feeling, is this emotion. And Pete Rock actually talks about that. There's a great quote that I wanted to share 'cause it gets to the emotion he was feeling in his beat making process. He goes, "When I found the record and we'll talk about what record that is in just a moment, I just heard something incredible that touched me and made me cry. It had such a beautiful baseline. I started with that first. I heard some sacks in there. I used that. The next thing you know I have this beautiful beat made when we mixed the song down, Charlie Brown from "Leaders of the New School" was in the session with me and we all started crying. - No. - I can feel that, man. I feel that. - You can feel it. By the way, I used to love Charlie Brown and "Leaders of the New School." He was definitely one of my favorites. Everybody now just, they think it was like, "Oh, that was Buster Rhymes for his group." But no, we liked all those guys. Big O'Dee, Charlie Brown, the whole group. - And they all had feelings, you know? They could break down from the beautiful flip of a sample just like the rest of us do. - Absolutely. By the way, that's not something we've ever really had a chance to discuss on one song. And that's an area of, you know, basically where music plays a huge role in people's life, going through a processing loss in my life. And I imagine many of our listeners' lives when you're going through a rough time, music can be a way to process that. - Yeah, man, listen, I can a little bit relate to just reading that quote out loud. It's like, I have been there where music was what I did with the deaths of two of my friends. I've talked about my friends Theresa and Jeremy, Theresa Duncan, Jeremy Blake, with their names to be out there. They were like older brothers and sisters. I have a whole record dedicated to them, but what I put into making that record was something I have never put into anything else. It was a very specific thing. It was grief. It was missing. It was unfairness. It was confusion. It was like, why did this happen? This is I had just seen the two weeks earlier and they're gone now forever. So I can really relate to using music as a vehicle to process. And really what's incredible is how on the other side of it as a listener, it can really translate. You can share that feeling. And that's the beauty of the power of music. - Yeah, I know that when my father passed, there was a song on towards the end of the Avalanche's album. It was called Extra Kings. And for whatever reason, I lashed onto that song and sort of like, you know, this is the last song that I'll, you know, this is my grieving song for my father's, totally random, you know. But for whatever reason, Extra Kings always reminds me of it. - Why do you think you connected with that one? - I was listening to a lot of Avalanche's at that time for whatever reason, the Extra Kings song, sort of in my head, it became Extra Kings in heaven, you know. And so I sort of thought of him, you know, sort of being an Extra King in heaven. So by the way, it's all about Extra Kings, not Extra Kings in heaven, but you know, your brain sort of makes these connections for you to this day. And anytime I think about this, I think about the week that he passed. (upbeat music) You know, it's just a, it's just a beautiful song. - That's powerful, and there's no lyrics? - No. - It's just sound and a title. But I could piece it together. I once you gave me that story of yourself and your father, I can see it. - Not even a song he would have bested out of the light, but. - It just brings up something. - This is why we love music. This is why we love music. Can I ask you a question that might get us out of this mode in a good way? - Yeah. - Sometimes I worry that I'm a psychopath or perhaps a sociopath and I have no emotions. And that music is the only way to access those. - Is it possible that we share this or sometimes that is a thing with music? - Yeah, I sort of pride myself on like, you know, staying, like if things start going crazy, I'm very level headed. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Very level headed and. - I think I'm capable of emotion. I'm obviously kind of making a joke about it. - I'm capable of putting emotions off until like, I'm ready to experience some, so you know. - I think that's a good way to put it. I can kind of a little bit control them. But then when the port is head hits me, I'm a puddle. - But I would have the car by myself and like, okay, see if I look at you. - I was playing cocktail twins cooking the other night and I just lost my mind. Absolute puddle, puddle, puddle. - Yeah, if you get a second, let me check out another podcast, The We Are Fans of a sad song, Queen. - Absolutely, shout out. - Yeah, seriously, really good podcast. We went on one time. I think it's a really interesting podcast 'cause what they do is they invite you on. You listen to a song and you're told to feel things. I know it sounds probably really California. - It's cool, but man, that was quite an experience. - Yeah, it's like a seer factor, but with a couple of very nice music supervisor ladies. - By the way, I just want to point out that like, while we're talking about songs, helping us grieve, this song sort of set in motion, it's own genre of '90s R&B and hip hop. Because you know, it's easy to forget, but until this song, and also it's so hard to say goodbye, - Oh wait, last time. - Bye, bye boys to men. Like all of a sudden there were so many songs. - Yeah. - You know, there was a two pocket thug life that poor out a little liquor. (upbeat music) A lot of people don't realize R&B by the lost boys. Another big hip hop hit among the heads is also about somebody who's gone. Maybe fictional, but still a morning song. ♪ 'Cause I'm the real, this is what we're set ♪ ♪ I got a love, it's the know that we live by ♪ ♪ Hey, why can't you, I wonder why I'm a sure he had to die ♪ ♪ All right, minutes of 'em, I got no friends here ♪ ♪ It's every day, give it up for my show ♪ - And probably the most popular song in this genre, came out in 1996, "Bone Thugs in Harmony, Crossroads." ♪ Rolls ♪ ♪ To you, I can crossroads ♪ ♪ But you won't be lonely ♪ ♪ So you won't be lonely ♪ ♪ But you won't be lonely ♪ - We all miss Uncle Charles. ♪ I mean, I miss Uncle Charles, y'all ♪ ♪ And I'll take my memory ♪ - Sean Stockman thinks you can't sing that. - He was right. - But he was not right about me. I sang that kind of that song. Thank you for y'all in the comments who were like, "Y'all, are you saying that great for Sean's?" - Did you sing? - No, I sang, I sang a different one. - There was a different one. But he was just like, he's through shape. - He was not polite. - He was direct. - You know, for the record, let me just say that I found out from several singers afterwards that like, as a guy coming to another guy who's famous for singing a song, if I sing his song, it's basically like making that with his girl. You know what I mean? There's no way he'd be like, "Oh, you did a really good job, Sean." - Better than me. - I didn't, I wasn't even looking for better. I just wanted to say like, we could've used you. - Yeah, yeah. - Out there, we could've used you. - Boys need five members. You know, that's all I want to hear. - Well, we wouldn't have a podcast if we weren't seeking approval. That's just the nature of the game here. It doesn't always work out. All right, we're about to jump into the stems, and this song comes from the era of digging through the crates for samples. So we're gonna talk about how Pete Rock pretty much masterfully, this is a masterclass in building the song around just a handful of fragments of a very obscure recording and building an entire world around it. - And looking for us, we've got that entire sampling history in our pocket with my new favorite way to nerd out for hours, Spotify's song DNA. Song DNA, it's a beta feature for premium users that gives you access to a song's entire musical history, including the creative team and musical inspiration behind it. And for a song like today's song, today, you know? We can see the entire sample makeup. So literally, I'm just gonna look on here. I'm gonna type in Troy, Pete Rock. It pops right up. They reminisce over you. But then by the way, also popping right up is today by Tom Scott and the California Dreamers. So, right off the bat, I'm already finding out so much, but then I go down here and I hit song DNA and look at all the information that I've got. Like I see Pete Rock and Seals move, obviously. I see composer Maxwell Dixon, Peter Phillips. I see a lot of things that we're gonna get into in just one moment. But it's just, listen, if you've got time and you really wanna nerd out, like song DNA, it really does provide you, isn't it an abler? - Yeah. - Is it an abler of music effects? - If you have the problem that we have. I mean, yes, song DNA, it scratches that itch, like that information that we all seek about, endless deep dives into music, rabbit holes. - Absolutely. - That we adore, that's what song DNA does. - Everybody who contributed, everybody who worked on a song, the songs that samples, the songs that sampled it. - Right, and to your point, the credits as well, those names that we're always given unsung hero credit for, it's all in there. - I honestly wish there's a bit around when we first started the show. It made life really easy. All right, we're gonna take a quick break, but when we get back, we're gonna dive into the stems and see how Pete Rock and Seals move, basically create an entire environment from one forgotten track. Stick around, we'll break it down, right after this. All right, welcome back to one song, Luxury. Let's get into the stems, where do you wanna start? - Let's start with the drums. And this is a song from 1968, and if you've been following the show as you should be watching every single week, you'll be familiar with a little bit of what we're about to talk about, but let's listen first, and then we will talk about it. The song is "Say It Loud", I'm black and I'm proud. ♪ What's your bad stuff ♪ ♪ Say it loud ♪ ♪ I can't, I can't, I can't ♪ - So that is Clyde's "Double Field" on drums. - There you go. - The funky drummer, go back and listen to parts one and part two of our funky drummer episodes. - We give a lot of flowers to Clyde. Shout-out to his estate who reached out on Instagram. - Absolutely. So Clyde is playing that beat. I'm gonna play it again, and then I'll show you a little bit how it got chopped. ♪ What's your bad stuff ♪ ♪ Say it loud ♪ Obviously, we've got it. James and the drums. It's, it's not a clean break, there's not a clean loop in there. Right. But there are clean hits in there. And I'll call attention to each of the chops that I was able to replicate. And of course, Pete Rock, if you're out there, which we know you want to show. We would do an episode with you. We would love to find out what we're getting right and getting wrong. But this is my best guess. I'll point out the break that got chopped up into smaller bits. Here we go. Right there. So that's how to full beat. But that is one isolated snare. And then a couple of high hats with a snare, a kind of a ghosted snare. We talked about Clyde Stelts left hand doing some jazzy ghosty stuff in there. And then an isolated kick. So here's the snare. Here's the two sixteenth notes of high hat with a little snare also. Wow. And then there's this kick. And what I believe he did, because what I hear chopped up. And then repurposed back together as a new beat are those three elements. And what's interesting is I put them, I mapped them to my Akai MPK mini. And I'll talk in a minute about what Pete Rock used because he didn't use an NPC. But by chopping those three elements, you get this. Oh, I'm glad my failure is your joke. That's part of the episode. Leave that in there. So what I'm hearing is this kick. And what I have done is I've tried to recreate with and I've done a terrible job. Some of the effects. So there's a lot of transformation that went into taking those snare hits, not just making a new beat, but also transforming the sounds. We'll talk about that in a moment. For now, just getting the pattern down. So that's unprocessed. Yeah. I only pitched it down one step because I think that's what Pete rocked it with a whole sample. And so you get the kick, the snare, and those two little sixteenth notes. And what's kind of fun about this is that a lot of times if you chop up beats and then you make a new beat, you might go boom. But because that high hat are two sixteenth notes, it makes it a little interesting to go. Like as I've been trying to play the beat, I'm kind of getting it wrong a lot of the time because I would expect to put a high hat kind of, you know, regularly in between the kick and snare on top of it. But he's doing and he's varying that throughout the track. You know, I really love how Pete rock, you know, uses his drums until you just did that. I didn't realize that he really did master that, you know, it's almost like a hip-hop drop. Like everybody talks about the drop in like electronic music. But the way he brings in his drums, yeah, they're always like an epic moment in the song. Absolutely. Can I play a song? Another Pete rock is he else's move song that I feel like sort of like that. Like this, this is Troy. This is amazing. He also did a song. I've got a love which I feel like he brings in the drums in a really cool way. Let's listen. It's like there's a bill. There's an anticipation. Then when that beat drops in, just like, ah, it's the, but it can't handle it. It's sort of New York boombap at its finest. That boombap. Absolutely. You know, so what would be common to do is to set up a kick, a snare, a hi-hat, among other things. So you can do beats like this. Right? You've got that hi-hat going. That's a, I just did a real cheap chop to make the point. So oftentimes when you chop up beats, you're going to chop up a kick, you're going to chop up a snare and a hi-hat so that you can recreate a trap drum kit using those isolated elements like something like this with a hi-hat going to some eighth notes and then you can do, but basically you might kind of use your finger, your right finger like a right hand, like a drummer would use on a hi-hat. But because Pete Rock's hi-hats are, and they really show up in the song kind of always together. Totally. With a different dynamic either. Also, it's like, did that. Did that one's a little bit more louder? Yeah. So what he's doing isn't the typical, yeah, which he could have done. I just chopped that from the same song. He's not using his right hand to play the cymbals. It's a little bit more like this. So he's almost only playing the hi-hat when you're not playing a kick and snare, interestingly, which is very like kind of Zigaboo, Motel E say from the meters. It's this sort of linear style of drumming. So it's interesting. It's almost like playing the drums with one hand. Yeah, because he's not, like you said, he's not like putting those cymbals all over the place. They're just coming in for that little last bit of the metal. He's kind of only doing one thing at a time. But that doesn't happen through the entire song, but through an awful lot of it. But let's listen to what he actually did do. This is his drum track, isolated from Troy. From Troy. So there's a kick track which sounds like this. And you can hear a little click at the end, a little artifacts of the sampling phenomenon, which in the mix you wouldn't have heard that. Today with Pro Tools, you'd clean that up. But it doesn't matter. But I like that. That's one of the things that makes the 90s so good. It's so gritty. Yeah, it's so gritty. It's so gritty. And then on the other track, you can hear the other two elements, the snare and the hi-hat. And you can hear a little bit of a kick in there too. It sounds like there might have been a fourth sample. Together, they sound like this. But as you can hear, he's varying, and I believe he's playing it in real time. It sounds very much like performed. And sometimes you're hearing the hi-hat a little overlap. But for the most part, that little 16th note, didda thing is happening in between the kicks and the snares. It's really cool. I hadn't noticed that until I broke it down. I love that. Can we hear the track with the drums in it? Just because until then, I don't know that I knew what the drum track was. So here's that same portion of the song with everything in it, just for context. I love how that snare hits on the downbeat sometimes, and I'll play it for you again, just isolated so you can hear that. One, not yet, three, four, one, two, three, four, one. There it is. It does just isolate that part, and I'll go. This snare hits on the one. This snare hits on the one sometimes. One, four, one, two, three, four. So there it's hitting on the downbeat, on the one. Yeah. And I wonder, by the way, this is totally Pete Rock, if you're listening. I'm just speculating, you're probably, you don't make mistakes. You're probably like, oh man, come on. Yeah, yeah. But I kept making mistakes, and I was trying to make the beat because of this whole hi-hat thing. So I wonder, I mean, what I kept doing is, I kept hitting the snare too much, because I'm so used to like hi-hat style, right finger only doing hi-hats. So when my right finger had to go between the two. Right. I don't know. That just happened for me that I hit the downbeat snare accidentally, because of the unusual nature of the hi-hat chopping. He could have also gone back in and just done just the snare. 100%. Like I'm probably wrong. But he might be like, you know, like no, I did all that shit really. Yeah. It sounds really cool too. So it gives this real stop-start feeling throughout the whole beat. I also think it's worth noting that like, because he left so much of the artifacts in there, like you were saying, it's like he uses the drums as drums, but he also samples the drums almost like just another part of like a soul sample. Yeah. You know, like it's almost like just another instrument along with the bass line along. It's a sound. It's not just a sound, right? Yes, exactly. That's what happens when you use drums from a chop from a sample, as opposed to from a drum machine. A drum machine obviously has its own flavor in character, and you can tweak it, but there is baked into that drum performance recording Clyde Stubblefield in 1968. Totally. Such character, such tone. That's why he doesn't just bring in his own drummer to say, hey, why don't you play this? There's something in that '68 recording that's really special. Every bit as much as the saxophone that we're going to give him to a little bit. That's right. And just because I alluded to it before, Pete Rock wasn't using an NPC. A lot of people know that. Yeah, I want to talk about gear. Let's talk about gear a little bit about the toolset. So Pete Rock, not everything's about the NPC, although it became very much so in the '90s, but at this point in '92, go back and list the all 140 episodes of the show, if you haven't already, but we've talked about Sinclairviers and Fairlites. Those are real expensive. And then we have the NPC, which becomes sort of the drum of choice in hip-hop. But in this in-between phase, late '80s, we have the NPC 60, it comes out in '88. But there's other tools out there. One of them is the EMU SP, first the 12, and then the 1200. That is what Pete Rock used on this track, the EMU SP 1200, which is also used in a lot of like French touch, a lot of like some of our favorite stardust and daft punk kind of stuff was using a similar machine. But this has eight pads and sliders. It's really low-fi. You only get like 10 seconds of sample time in 12-bit. The point is the grittiness and darkness of the machine goes into the samples. There's something about the sound of the machine because it has a real character with how you can treat the samples. You have these sliders, so you can pitch it down. There's a grittiness to the 12 bits instead of 8 or 16. So that also plays into my inability to recreate exactly the downed of those chops just now when I was recreating it. I didn't get it right. Because Pete Rock dialed in very specifically with his ears and his taste. And this machine, exactly the level of EQ cuts and added some reverb to it, et cetera. Pete Rock is a huge fan of this machine. Another important thing is that it's an all-in-one workstation, so you can have multiple samples and multiple loops and sequence them. You can basically build a whole track within this machine, which is really a new capability of the time. - All of the tools at Second Samples. - Oh, and by the way, a little LCD display. Like you're not even seeing the waveforms. You're just seeing letters and numbers on late '70s, early '80s tech. Some other famous users of this device, public enemy used it on Nation of Millions, NWA, Dr. Bae used it. - Probably the bomb squad. - Bomb squad used it, NWA used it, tribe used it. And Pete Rock loves it so much that in 2019, he put out a record called Return of the SB 1200. - Oh, I love that. (hip hop music) ♪ I'm like a chimpanzee ♪ ♪ Ha, ha, ha ♪ - ♪ Think of the little week ♪ ♪ I know that I am ♪ - Before we get deeper into the stems, you showed me this before the record. The files also had some really cool, other documents buried in them. - Totally, like this is a joy. Like sometimes I open up the stems. - This is a treat. - Sometimes I go into the dark web and I do my thing. And I come back with extra special stuff. In this case, somebody had thought to go ahead and scan and upload along with the music, along with the stems you're hearing today, the isolated parts. We actually got the sort of archival track sheet from the recordings to the-- - Amazing. - On the day of the recording. So we'll put it up on the screen. But you can see on this track sheet is that each individual stem has its own separate path. You can see things like kick and snare and hi-hat and horn loop and all that stuff on the screen. You also see stuff that we don't talk about, stuff like sympathy, the last track number 24. And before that, it says click. These are things that you had to use back in the day to get everything lined up. - I've heard that term before, "Simpty," what is "Simpty?" - Simpty is time code is sort of this international standard so that all machines could speak to each other, kind of like, like, midi ended up being a little bit later. But it's a way that you can, it's literally a sort of a, it's like a click track, but it's a machine sound where you can synchronize other machines. And so you put it on the actual recording so that everything gets lined up during the recording process. And then you mute it when you spit out the final mix. - Amazing. - But it's in there and it's just this annoying sound, maybe we'll play it. I actually deleted it from the last one. I actually delete them from the files whenever I get them, but we'll play it for you here. This is what "Simpty" sounds like. (crickets chirping) So what the other things we learned from this is that this song was recorded at Green Street recording in New York, which at the time, on 112 Green Street, it closed in 2001, but back in the day, this is where Shannon's "Let the Music Play" was recorded. (upbeat music) ♪ You don't need it ♪ - So many people. - "Curtis Blows the Brakes." ♪ On the brakes, break it up, break it up, break it up ♪ ♪ Break it up ♪ (upbeat music) - Run DMC, it's like that. Fight the power was recorded here. Public enemy. - Tribe called Quest, ice cube, LL Cool J. - All of the above, shocker, con, sonic youth. We got so many great, so much great music was made here. - And it's not there anymore, right? - It closed in 2001, that's right. But you can still go to Soho and buy, you know, expensive clothes at Gucci, that's what it's turned into, I'm sure. And one more thing you'll notice, it says that at the top of the page there, it says, "Client Untouchables." So let's talk a little bit about Unsung Hero, a gentleman called DJ Eddie F. Edward Farrell, who was in "Heavy D in the Boys." He was producer, DJ with "Heavy D." He created this sort of untouchables management idea, 'cause he loved the music, all of his buddies were making. You have to remember "Heavy D" and "Pete Rock and CL Smooth" all went to high school together in Mount Vernon. So he just wanted to get "Pete Rock a Deal" with Uptown. So he's like, "All right, I'm a manager now." And then ended up basically signing them and helping them get this recording done, and goes all the way down to putting up the music with them. - Yeah, we look at that, that is super cool. I love all the data that's on there, recorded, on January 9th, 1992, 24 tracks. - There's so much to decide for too, like I'm looking at it going, "What is this mean?" And then I, 'cause on the far right, you can see it says V25C, you know what that is, I think? I think that's verse one, chorus, verse two, chorus two. I think that, I think those are the sort of, the marking points on the tape, where those parts of the song happened. I think that would stand to reason. - Yeah. - But you've got, back in the day, you had to do all this on tape. There was no screen for you to look at. - And in pencil. - And in pencil, because it might change, right? 100% right. - All right, well, let's jump into the stems and because this is a hip-hop song, it's almost like a collage. - Yeah. - Let's talk about some samples. The very first thing you hear when you hit play on your compact disc for this song is a little bit of an intro, and we use song DNA from Spotify to discover that that is, when she made me promise the beginning of the end, let's hear a little bit of that. (upbeat music) The beginning of the end, a group formed by Frank Munnings, Ray Munnings, LeRoy Munnings, a lot of Munnings in that group. - It's three brothers. Fred Hempfield and Livingston Colbrook from 1971. - When you say something like that, you've got to have a story to back it up. Tell us about Livingston Colbrook, 'cause we know you guys go back a long way. - Well, we do. Yeah, Livingston, oh, come on, man. - Really cool song. I mean, like so much of what made '90s hip hop was sampling late '60s in the '70s. - Yeah, that's a funk quartet from the Bahamas. Nasa Bahamas, yeah. - Yeah, so it's from their album, Funky Nasa. (laughing) You see, this is what we would be doing normally anyway. It's a song DNA is now. - It's just who we are. - It's just enabling us more. - They just sometimes wheel cameras and microphones into us, but this is just us all day every day, yes. - Exactly, we can't escape. All right, but now let's jump into some individual elements of the song, because now we're into Troy, 'cause that intro comes in, it fades out. When you think about this song, you probably think about a certain saxophone solo, and I wanna hear what made P. Rock Cry. So it was a track by Tom Scott, and why don't you tell us more about Tom Scott? - Tom Scott and the California Dreamers, song is called Today, The Recording is from 1967. So he actually chopped four sections from the song, four little pieces that come and go throughout it. - I really think that today by Tom Scott, it's just a great song. Can you just play us a little bit of the beginning of that song, because this you won't hear in Troy, but like let's just hear a little bit of the beginning of the song. (upbeat guitar music) - You're a fan. - A fan of the California Dreamers, are you? - I am, man. This makes me wanna put some flowers in my hair, drive down the PCA. - I was gonna say maybe get on a bus with the rest of your family. - Yeah. - Now we're going to San Francisco, man, 'cause that's where it's real, it's happening. - Not for no reason, by the way, 'cause the California Dreamers, also known as the Ron Hickland Singers, they're literally the singers in the Partridge family recordings. - I didn't realize that. - Oh, man, the Partridge family gets a lot of love from 90s hip hop. Let's play a little bit of nicest smooth hip hop junkies. (upbeat pop music) - Alice the Goon. (laughing) - I bet it's nice to smooth, man. - It's going in in the 90s. (laughing) - Oh, Alice the Goon from the Popeye cartoon. They had nothing to do with the current meaning of that one. - I love nice to smooth. This is classic '91. Why was everybody sampling the Partridge family? - That's just felt like the thing to do. In New York City, they're dreaming. They're California dreaming in New York. It's like right, the other coast, this more flowery lifestyle, maybe. - I think this generation is surprisingly grew up on a lot of TV. So in 90s hip hop, you hear a lot of references to cartoons. Then we just heard Alice the Goon. There's a lot of Rocky and Bullwinkle references. There's also a lot of TV-like insidication at that time, the Partridge family, the Brady Bunch. All that stuff gets thrown into the pot. - Yeah, 90s hip hop. Maybe there's a little bit of a hippie. I mean, there's hippiness built into just the use of like the 12 string guitars and the sample. It's interesting that that is such an attractive choice in that moment for-- - Especially apparently in the art, because as we talked about on our day last soul episode, they often got tagged with, "Oh, those are the black hippie guys." Just because they wore the piece of medallions. I had a piece of medallion. I definitely rocked the late, the early 90s piece medallion with my long baggy shirts. - Bring it back, man. Those things are dope. - I think they're fly, fresh, and funky dope. - They're rough rugged and raw. - Funky fit back into the California dreamers. So this came out in 1967. - Songs from 1967. Let's play a couple of the fragments that got flipped. - Yeah. - All right. Here we go. - Here it comes. - Two, two, three, four. - And one thing I want to point out about-- - It's so good, man. - It's just a two-bar loop. Right, so he's looping that part. I'll show you where it is in the track. So he took that, put it over here. By the way, pitched down, I hope it's half-step. (upbeat music) ♪ Two, two, three, four, one ♪ - Oh, wow. That's the sample. ♪ Two, three, four, one ♪ - It's interesting how you loop it right here. - Yeah. It's a really interesting choice. A lot of the choices in here are kind of-- - Oh god, they're so really interesting, yeah. - I'd be so curious to know, because back then you've gotta realize if you slowed something down, you were slowing it down, maybe not even just for the pitch difference. - Yeah, 'cause it gives it a heaviness. - And grace, which I think is an accident. I don't know, I don't know this, but I'm saying that like nowadays, like you know, the technology is such that you can slow songs down while maintaining the current pitch. - That's correct. Then, a lot of these samplers, if you slowed it down, you just had to accept the new pitch. - Oh, 100%. - And so the song by Tom Scott is a little bit faster than Troy. And so when he slowed it down to make it a more acceptable hip-hop BPM, like 93, 94 BPM, not only was he slowing it down, but like you said, the lower pitch makes it a little bit more heavy. - It's a little slower, it's a little pitch down, not by much. Like I said, I just pitched down a half step, but it's a little slower. It is also going through some filters on the SB 1200. And the overall effect to me emotionally, with such a small move, is it makes it sadder. Like it's interesting, like it went from being this cal-- - Sort of, this is a melancholy tune to begin with, like this. - Little bit. - The california dreamer wins a little vibe. It's not super, it's not just happy. - Exactly. - But just a half step down, a little bit slower, and through those SB 1200 filters, it actually makes it a little bit more melancholy, a little sadder. - So it fits the theme of the song. - It's the theme of the song. So that's the first loop. The second one happens just a moment later. So I'll play from that loop into the next one. - Yeah. - And can I just say that like, as somebody who's lived with this song, like the entire song, sort of the brilliance of sampling, and a p-rock is that, you just kind of have to listen to the whole song. It starts off with like that harpsichord and like, you know, the sunflower sound. - Yeah. - With this part of the song comes in. It kind of comes in out of nowhere. - It does. - And it's like a second song. - And he, it's like a second song. So with that in mind, yeah, start us off with the old loop and then let's see where we go. (upbeat music) - Now we're out of the loop and into the next one. That's second and right there. It's a little, little blip that we hear throughout the song and I'll point it out in a moment. But here's the sample source. So it's really interesting when you get into like, what gets used in the song is from the original. Is that it's really Tom Scott. He's just soloing. He's just soloing on the sax and the piece that gets taken out and flipped and looped so that it becomes a hook only happens once and it comes in goes really quickly. - E-Rock, you are genius. You've done this on some way. I'm a glaze a little bit. - Yeah, go for it. Do that glaze. - You've done this so many times and it's so impressive. You'll take something that happens once in a song and you'll make it, it's all its own song. We talked about this so many times on a, I love music by Ahmad Jamal, which you flipped into. I feel like we're having a conversation one person. You flipped it to the world is, whose world is this? The world is yours by Nas on Elmatic. (upbeat music) - Same thing here, like you just said. This happens once. So if you could just play us the solo that Tom Scott has in here, you'll hear the sample. But I just want our listeners to appreciate everything that's going on in the solo. - There's lots of kind of sampling genius. One is noticing something that repeats in another song and going, "Oh, I'd like that to repeat in my song as well." But sometimes it's a moment that just comes and goes and you're like, "Wait, that could be something if I loop it." - And we know that this trigger tears in our man. So like, let's hear a little bit of that solo. - Okay, so we're gonna go into the first loop again at 136 and then the main one is two seconds later. I'll play the whole thing. So we're soloing. (upbeat music) - First one. - And one. - And we're out. - There were so many chunks of there he could have used, but of course he went with the right one. - We went to a new section for our changes. He never plays that riff again. - No, never. - In the entire song. - Tom could never have known (laughing) that that little bit of air, that little bit of, you know, the two seconds of time would generate an entire, you know, just an entire phenomenon in hip-hop. - Well, let's listen to that horn loop. It's what starts the song. Here it is, isolated. (upbeat music) The reminisce, the reminisce. And you can hear there's a little skip in the loop 'cause that's where it kind of loops back to the beginning. And it's also got like a high pass filter on it. So you're hearing the lows have been cut out so we can separately get the lows, get that bass line in there, which he does on this other track. So I can play them together. Here is where the bass is. - Yeah. (upbeat music) - And Simultaneously we're hearing this. (upbeat music) So he's layering two different pieces of the same song. Two different samples from the same song. One is functioning as the bass line and other content. And the other is that horn hook on top. - My father, who I talk about a lot on the show, was a collage artist. And this is collage art. - It's collage art. - He's taking one part of the song. He's putting it over another part of the song. And it tricks you here to think he's like, "Oh, this is the sample." But like that actually does not happen in the actual song. - It doesn't. And don't forget that we're also collaging on top of it, a separate kick, a separate snare and a separate high-hat. So we have five things that are entering into this collage. I'll play them all together for you. Here's kick plus snare again in case you forgot. (upbeat music) And then we have the horns come in. (upbeat music) But it's missing something, the bass line. Let's hear that. (upbeat music) Let's take out the horns now. (upbeat music) - So all those elements are coming and going. - They're coming and going. - It cursed to me now that when we would listen to this song, like obviously you were vibing out to that saxophone, but most of us were just going, "Ooh, like that ooze the vibeman." - Let's talk about the ooze. You went there. You went there. - I wonder if there's a secret of the ooze. - Well, the secret of the ooze you've already revealed is the California Dreamers, aka the Partridge Family Seniors. But here are those ooze isolated. And that is a sixth layer for counting. Since we have the three drum elements in the collage, this is the third sample from the song today that is being layered at the same time. And I'll play one at a time. Here are the "Just the Laws." (upbeat music) With a little delay. And that actually comes and goes, I think every four bars or so. So then you hear it again. (upbeat music) And then a little later it's, (upbeat music) I'll give you a little context for that because what's happening in the bass line loop is this. (upbeat music) And then we have the horns. (upbeat music) To hear, they're sort of cascading a little bit. So we have the horns come in and then a moment later the laws. I'll just isolate those two. - Sure. (upbeat music) It's about to cycle back. Give it a second. I'll bring the bass back. (upbeat music) Here they come. (upbeat music) Let me give you that with the drums for context 'cause it's hard to hear the beat. (upbeat music) Just that little tail on the horn delay. And here comes just the horn delay right now. (upbeat music) So he's bringing, you know what I, the bass is there the whole time and the horn hook comes and goes and then he's got the horn hook delay tail periodically and the Oz periodically. - Getting emotional, man. I'm thinking like Trouble T Roy. He had no idea that like in death like he would inspire something so beautiful. - Yeah. And each of those elements by themselves are really kind of, there's a huntingness to them, right? - Yeah, man. You know what's weird? I heard something in the drums that time that I did hear when we were playing it, isolated. - Okay. But it's like sort of like a sort of like a drum roll at the end of the bar. - Let's listen to that. (upbeat music) - I didn't hear it there. I'll just play through until we hear it. (upbeat music) - That. - Yeah? - That, is that from. - That looks like you could do that in a couple ways, you can literally do it. So this is, I'm trying to think, I'm not Pete Rock and it's not 1992, but one thing you could have done at the time 'cause that snare is very digital sounding. But these not, it's not digitally processed in the SB 1200. My point is on a screen, you would put those three snare hits right next to each other. - Right. - To get that 30 second note. - Got it. - Whatever that is. Like like that. You could just play it like that. - Got it. - I'm not sure how he did it. - We think that's still, we think that's still quiet. - To me, I'm hearing the same snare with the same processing. He might have also layered it. - Sure. - We don't know for sure. But the sort of tell tale aspect of that sample being used are those two sixteenth note high hat things that come together that are baked together. That's very clearly from that James Brown, from the Clyde Stubblefield sample. - It's so good. - It's so good. - What can you tell us about the sample discovery? - Well, Pete Rock tells the story that he was hanging out with large professor digging in the. - Great. - They're at the record store. - That's like my dream. - Let's say hang out. with these two. - In 1990. - Freakin' one for that matter. - Like a madhouse. - Imagine. It could happen now. It could so happen. - Yeah, maybe so, maybe so. - So they're hanging out and large professor, I don't know who finds the record, but one of them finds the record and large professor's familiar with it. And he mentions that black sheep had used the same song, but sampled the different section. And by the way, I was doing a little more digging. It turns out large professor had actually used the track. He had actually sampled today already in 1991. This is Slick Rick, the It's a Boy remix from 1991. And again, uses Tom Scott's today recording, but not the same way as Pete Rock. - And it's a boy, a boy, and it's a boy. - That horn. - I like it. - I like just that little frogman as a loop. - And it comes from this. (upbeat music) - I didn't isolate the two notes, but it is. - It is that same. - It doesn't appear to be coming from there. - So you're telling me that black sheep had actually sampled. - What, black sheep sampled for the song "Simulac Child" from 1991? - One of my favorite songs. - Is the song today, but it's the original version? Because it's actually a cover. - It's not the Tom Scott version. - It's the Jefferson airplane version. Let's listen to that. - Okay. - My mind is officially blown. - Here is today by Jefferson airplane, the original recording that Tom Scott covered. - And now here's "Simulac Child." I hear it. - Here is "Simulac Child" by black sheep. (upbeat music) - I never drew that connection. - And you know what's really awesome is that that guitar is Jerry Garcia from "The Grateful Dead" who happened to be guesting on this Jefferson airplane song. - I didn't know that I listened to it. - I didn't know that I had ever actually heard Jerry Garcia on anything. - You have not listened to it. - You have definitely heard Jerry Garcia now because we just heard him both on that Jefferson airplane original and the black sheep song which sampled it. - "Simulac Child" which by the way, and almost nobody knows this, one of my absolute favorite remixes of the '90s. I had no idea we were going to somebody for rabbit holes. - I'm going to say something I've never said on the show. We are in the middle of absolute wonderful chaos. I try to be organized. I'm a Virgo. Not like a document and I don't know what's happening next but I love it. - It's pretty good. - This is the rabbit hole, the song DNA. - What is happening? - It's wonderful. - What is happening between song DNA and our research and everything else. We actually are hanging out with large professors and Pete Rock listening to records. - Making discoveries, sharing swapping stories. - Swapping stories then. - Swapping sample flips. This is crazy. - This is nuts. And by the way, if you don't know large professor, BKA, extra P, he's just one of the greatest hip hop producers, luminaries. You've got to go back and listen to "Fake in the Phone." ♪ Next when fake is trying to run ♪ ♪ The gettin' smoke like drums ♪ ♪ My rhymes can't attract laces ♪ ♪ Girl, get your word up ♪ ♪ I think they're fakein' up ♪ ♪ You're raking the phone ♪ ♪ Yes, I can stop ♪ ♪ Yo, you're fakein' the phone ♪ ♪ You're raking the phone ♪ ♪ Yo, you're fakein' ♪ - Staring at the front door. ♪ I can't put my gauntlets ♪ ♪ You shouldn't have to be so raw ♪ ♪ I'm lookin' at the front door ♪ ♪ I'm lookin' at the front door ♪ ♪ Lookin' at the front door ♪ - Those are two songs that he did with the main source. And then he also did one of my absolute favorite rebixes of all time, "The Extra P Rebix" of "Resurrection" by Common Back When He Was Common Sense. ♪ Much, they got too many white boys ♪ ♪ The million black men walk ♪ ♪ It's awards one direction for show ♪ ♪ The cream of the planets ♪ ♪ Resurrection ♪ - So Pete Rock says that when he heard the bass line up, he ended up buying the record. He bought the Tom Scott record. And when he heard the bass line in the horn, the horn quote stuck to me, it turns out CL Smooth already had the lyrics and just needed the music. - Wow. - And Pete made the music and they were just like, this is the connection here. This is the sound that these lyrics needed. - And I'm gonna say this again when we come back to the lyrics, but CL Smooth just underrated. Like I just feel like, you know, people, people just don't realize how powerful his delivery, his voice, his breath control, his lyrics. Like he's one of the best emcees of the 90s. And, you know, I feel like he gets left out of the conversation. So I just want to get, to me, he's an unsung hero, absolutely. So CL - Absolutely. - Love you, dude. You know, you paid it so many great moments in my life and I appreciate you. - And while we're talking about unsung heroes, let's talk about the bass line you're hearing is played by a human being who's a bass player. Often forgotten and we always talk about it on the show. I like to call them sample phantoms. This is a term I invented for the people that are in the music, whose names don't always make it to the final because they aren't considered songwriters. So they're not in the publishing. In this case, they're just session players. - They're session players. And this is one of the greatest session players of all time. Who you're hearing on the bass is Carol K. Famous bass player from The Wrecking Crew, which is a term that was given to the group that backed up recordings by Sinatra, Simon and Garfunkel, The Beach Boys, Pet Sounds. She's on 10,000 recordings. - Female bass player. Female bass player in Hot by Design. - By Design. By Design. For the record, she isn't crazy about the expression, The Wrecking Crew. She always likes to sort of correct people and say, "Well, we weren't called that at the time." But for what it's worth, people do know them as The Wrecking Crew. And she was on 10,000 recordings, my God. - She made it seriously. - And today by Tom Scott is one of them. And therefore, so too, is she's also on Troy by Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth. So that's where the bass is coming from. She uses a pick. If she mutes the bass with a piece of felt on top of the string, it's very distinctive sound. And you hear it across the monkeys, Barbara Streisand, Stevie Wonder, Supreme. - Well, you hear it, it's that 60s bass. - It's very 60s, California bass. I think of it as a very California sound as well. - It's a very California sound as well, that's right. - So one last thing about her, she was inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but she turned it down. - What? - She just didn't, she had reasons that she did not believe in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. - Oh, okay. - So she ought to be in there. And technically, she is. - Well, she turns it down, at least. At least she had the opportunity. Still trucking at 91. Carol Kay, this one's for you. - Are the ooze that we hear, the ooze. Are those from the original recording or was it supplemented by some ooze of the studio? - It's a little bit of supplementation in the studio. - I feel like, yeah, I feel like the ooze are very pronounced. - The wonderful thing about having those track sheets, those historical documents, again, this should all be in the Smithsonian. - You're like, yeah, we're together. - The logs of the museum. - It belongs in, and you see, what's wonderful is that we can see on track 18. It says, Pete, oo, and then tracks 19, 20, and 21. We have, it looks like-- - So it's probably Pete Rock doing the ooze. - It's Pete Rock doing the ooze, 'cause that's what I would interpret, Pete, oo, in this track listing. Let's listen. We have four tracks. Here's the first one, and then I'll build them. - Oo, that's what we do. - Oo, oo, oo. - It goes up and octave, and then there's a third one. - Oo, oo. - And a fourth one. - Oo, oo, oo. - Oo, oo, oo. - So I'll give you all that again. - I didn't know that the ooze got so complicated at the end. I just thought it was it. - Oo, oo, oo. - I thought that was it, but like, you know, it's buried under so much of stuff. - Yeah, that's right. Well, I'll play it for you in the context of the song. Here's the canonical recording. ♪ Take back a re-cola man off the family ♪ ♪ Treat my right hand, Papa Doc I see ♪ ♪ Took me from a boy to a man ♪ - It's really buried in there, but it's there. - It's really, it's buried in there, but it's there. - I like the Pete Rocks stand, like the little like, woo, yeah, like, people forget like, that was not a common thing for producers to jump on the track like that. - Oh, that's right. - Yeah, but you like seriously about that, yeah. - This is 1991, like, that was Pete Rocks, you know, kind of contribution. - We're not getting tags so much yet. - We're not getting tags yet, and if you think about it like, pretty soon Puffy's gonna be all over his artists' songs. And, but even like, if you think about like, walk a flock of like, they're like, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, like, you know, Migos, bum up. Like, all that stuff, like, it kind of, I can't think of anybody who really did it before Pete Rock with, you know, come on, you know, crazy fat, you know, like all that. - The producer or the DJ doing that? - The producer sort of, like Dan Masterjane's not doing that. Yeah. - Nobody's really doing that before Pete. - I'm sure the comment's gonna be like, I don't like, I wouldn't go that far. - That guy always shows up. - That is the voice of the commenter. - And I like him, 'cause I like to be correct. Find me in the comments, y'all. - Here's some Pete Rock ad-libs. - I'd love to. - Come on. (laughs) - Yeah. - Uh-huh. - That's dope. Listen, I, the man could do no wrong. We, we can't talk about the song without the lyrics. C.L. Smooth. It's amazing to know that he already had the song written. He was just waiting for the beat. - He was writing for the right musical, bad. And that's what Pete Rock delivered. - These are the poignant, you know, crazy lyrics of C.L. Smooth. - After 10 years without no spouse, mama's getting married in the house. Listen, positive, vote for negative for the woman of master. Mother Queen's rise in the chapter. They javu tell you what I'm gonna do when they reminisce over you. My god. - Oh my god, my god. - You know, it just, it didn't hit like other hip-hop songs at the time. He's not talking about, not that every hip-hop song at that time was about that, but he's not talking about clothes. He's not talking about, you know, that typical street life stuff. Like, this is a, this is a song about family. He's talking about, you know, people making decisions. Like, you could write a whole movie. - Yeah, based on that in a song. - Yeah, based on, you know. - You got the main character. - She gets married in the house. - Right, we have settings. - Well, there's the first, you know. I mean, there's just so much going on, and it felt like a very mature song, you know. You know, I love, I'm not gonna throw it away. but like there were certain songs you know I love kidding play for example right but their songs were like about a party having a good time and there's a place for that there's a there's only a place like that I wish that there was more hip-hop that was about that now but like this was a song about like a family going through it Grand Andy's trying to say sober you know everything about this is just painting a picture about life as really lived in life you know he's telling a story he's telling a story let's listen to those Pete Rock whispers at the very top of the song and then for some reason I labeled something a little chunk a little later during the ooze I labeled it 90s I don't know what I meant by that let's listen yeah so lovely that's how we like to do it in the 90s oh there we go make rock and see a smooth coming at y'all everything about that is just so lovely so beautiful I love how he talks about I love how he talks about meeting Trouble T Roy out in front of big lose yeah he tells the story about how it was like they were there was like a contentious moment and then they became lifelong friends funny randomly you know I was talking to a quavo from megas and he literally meets takeoff I want to say because he was like hey I heard you're a rapper and somebody said I got to fight you I think that's it's so funny how that comes together I want to talk about Pete Rock's outro because I think in some ways it's just as important as a verse in this song it just it says so as soon as he says listen p-rock comes in with this outro and I think it's just as every bit it's flask is the beat this song we dedicate to the one and only never be another he was my brother Trouble T Roy it's like that y'all there's a little more just listen just listen okay just listen just listen just listen just listen just listen just listen to one song peace peace that is 1992 right there in a bus peace it's just a great song and I just think it you know when we talk about if you I don't believe that you should rank art really but if you're going to rank hip-hop songs that's got to be the top 10 it might be the top five and it may not be number five and it's definitely I think just the definitive 90 song from the from the sampling to the verse to the producer stepping out from behind the scenes a little bit like there's just so much going on there so they reminisce over over Troy but we reminisce over this song it's beautiful gorgeous song all right now we come to the part of the show where we talk about the splits and publishing so what can you tell us about this song pretty big use of a sample cleared obviously what can you tell us about the splits all right in the splits we have Peter O Phillips with 50% and Corey Brant pen with the other 50 percent which tells us a couple of things one they between the two of them as a duo they split it down the middle 50-50 and the other thing it being 1992 and we know that the song's been cleared because we have our sources here at Spotify and they did all that for us what that tells us is that they licensed the sample and in my opinion this is how it should be I'm not a big fan of sampled recording and publishing owners having a share of songs that use those samples because it is so rarely the case that publishing names get added who actually participated in the recording because in this case it would have been the Jefferson airplane songwriters right it wouldn't even be Tom Scott who if you're doing if you're clearing in modern terms what would probably happen is they'd have to go to the publishing owners of the Tom Scott song who would say sorry this isn't our song anyway and but they would obviously pay for the recording reuse they they clear the master side but on the publishing side you might get grace slick in the mix here and that to me I'm not hearing the the songiness of today isn't as it was originally recorded it's not even there at all in the Troy use of the sample yeah so old school clear it pay a few hundred bucks probably call it a day that feels fair to me I've done this show so many times with you but I'm gonna ask do you pay a one-time fee if it's like like in this case like the use of the saxophone which was a cover is that a one-time fee and the publishing comes out forever or or do you pay the person who played the instrument Tom Scott forever and ever like like like like a certain type of publishing so the way it works with publishing just like 101 is that you've got the recording is the master that you have to clear and then the publishing the songwriting is separate yeah both of those need to be cleared in order for a sample to be properly licensed and clear yeah and what that means is you're going to the owners of the recording nothing to do in general instrument player I mean generally the record these are the labels and they generally got those records made maybe they threw some points here and there to the occasional big artist but from the clearance of the master no musicians it's almost safe to say like almost never will be paid from that it's just going into a big record label coffers it goes into you know universal or warners is like bank account basically on the publishing side sometimes you get a situation where the song writers who were credited for writing the song were also the performers that are used in the sample yeah in this case not to be Tom Scott was not a songwriter right Carol K not a songwriter everyone we've talked about today even those like vocalists it's all like they're being punished for having brilliant solos I mean look I this is an argument that I would go to the map for but like back in the day we didn't know sampling would ever exist in 1967 these guys at the time were making a pretty good live in I just told you 10,000 recordings Carol K so for her her life is going from one gig to the next pretty happy with the hundred bucks two hundred bucks per song she's making there's no thought that I should be cut into the publishing for the song I played based on but that's her baseline like that's what we're hearing so it's kind of crazy to me how all this works it's it's a little arbitrary and at least in this case we're not getting you know it would have been kind of an injustice for Grace slick to get paid on the song that would make no sense to me absolutely sorry I got a little crazy there and this is a little bit of a soapbox topic of mine it's very complicated and the good news is that Troy the song that we heard was properly licensed and the proper to me creators of the music we heard essentially the storytelling that we've been talking about this entire episode Peter Phillips and Corey Brandt Penn aka Ciel smooth and Pete rock they get paid on this song I love that me too can I just say I've had so much fun with this I'll meet you this has been crazy I love it it's been it's been chaotic in the best way we could have gone down we can continue to talk about just Pete rock as a producer there's so much to talk about there's so many discoveries we were making in real time so it was a lot of energy here oh my gosh that black sheep song yeah I think that that again makes the case that this song not just a loving tribute to a real life living person but also just you know the the the the beauty of what it is created when you take a set is it's the beauty of sampling yeah it's the beauty of mature you know actually is trying to say something lyrics and storytelling it's just everything that I love about 90s hip-hop in one song and in some ways just everything I love about hip-hop with hip-hop really does it for me it's usually it'll in some way remind me of Troy all right we hope you enjoyed the show as always you can find me on Instagram @Dialo DIA LLO and on tiktok @DialoRiddle and you can find me on Instagram @LUXXURI and on tiktok @LuxuryXX also we have a Patreon finally go right now drop what you're doing because 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producer DJ songwriter music ologist and every Friday night from 10 p.m. until midnight KCRW DJ Luxury I'm actor writer director and sometimes DJ Diallo Riddle this is one song we'll see you next time this episode was recorded that's Spotify with wrist Thomas was produced by Eric Kicks and Damian Kindle it was edited and mixed by Eric Kicks