The Pharcyde’s “Runnin'”

Hey everybody, it's Diallo, and I am here at the top of the world. I'm in Juneau, Alaska. I'm having a great time. Blake and I have both been on vacation the last couple of weeks. We will be back in the studio recording a new episode this week. So by the time you listen to this, we're back at work. But in the meantime, please enjoy this. It's one of our favorite episodes of all time. We cover a hip-hop classic, and we track the career of a hip-hop musical genius named Jay Dilla. This is Running by the Farside. 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 that gangster rap has really taken a hold. 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, its blending of old-school, hip-hop with new wave bossa 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 Farside. Up on his own. Propel Fitness Water. With Gatorade. Gatorade Electrolytes, zero sugar, and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water. To help you get the most out of your workout. And get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade Electrolytes. I'm actor, writer, director, and sometimes DJ Diallo Riddle. And I'm producer, DJ, songwriter, and musicologist Luxury. A.K.A. 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. Alright, let's get into it. Alright Diallo, so before we dive into breaking down and running, I wanted to ask you, how did you first get into the Farside, and how did you discover the song? I have a really special relationship with the Farside, 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 artist, you're like, oh yeah, they 100%, like I'm 99% there with them. You just identify, you just find something, yeah, you see something in it. And like Public Enemy felt like my uncles, you know? N.W.A. felt like the kids at the back of the class who, you know, I was not tight with. Okay. The Farside felt like the guys who, they were sort of like the original backpack rappers, along with the Native Tongues crew. Right, I was going to say JLSO, maybe. Yeah, they felt like the smart, for lack of a better term, 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 the other three see Fatlip 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 Argyle sweater, some Argyle socks, and some glasses with no lenses in them. And I'm like, yeah, that sounds like. The guys that would do this kind of music. Yeah, 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 Gs? No, no. Pound with two Ds? We weren't as innovative as them. Oh, okay. Yeah, we just probably just put D-O-G. 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 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 the remix being a completely different song. They 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 more than a remix. Yes, and it's so freaking cool. It's called the Fly As Pie Mix. Pass Me By, Fly As Pie Mix. So I was a huge fan of their first album when this album came out. Bizarre Ride to the Far Side. We're going to talk about it. It is an amazing, amazing creative feat. It didn't really sound like anything out there. I mean, yes, the Native Tongues connection. I hear that too, but it really popped off on its own. It was really on its own page. And then Lab Cabin California comes out, and 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. Right. Nas. It's like the sound of the East Coast. We have West Coast. We have Dr. Dre. It just happened. Snoop Dogg. 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. The West Coast has gone into a, I guess, 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 Deep. This is, you know, Bad Boy Records. This is Wu-Tang. You know, 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 you get a different sound out of De La Soul 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 Diggable Planet. You slicker this year. My little app, A-Train, got the thick in my head. And what, 16 joints later still lounge. Fresh from Flatbush in my baggy bag. Like everybody's drop. And these second albums that a lot of people are falling off. Some of my favorite artists are falling off. Oh, that second Diggable. Oh, you cannot beat that. I love it. That's my favorite. And I loved it at the time. But let me tell you. But it didn't go off as hard. That's another second album. It didn't do as well. Where I feel like they knew where they were going, but like the audience for a lot of us were not quite there yet. Yeah, Blow Out Combs. Blow Out Combs is so perfect. That's a perfect record. A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing was huge in 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 its, 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 can 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 1994, 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 hip hop. People saw like how Ray and the rest of them were living. And I think that that probably did influence what was happening to what it felt like. And it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like a lot of people are like, you know, we're going to do this. We're going to do this. 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 to 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 were experiencing internal conflict. The far side was Imani, Booty Brown and Slim Kit Trey and sort of Fat Lip joined on. By the time they go in to record Lab Cab in California, by all accounts, J. 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 albums. So we're going to get into all that. I guess that's what I'm saying. It's going to be a very fun, bizarre ride to Lab Cab in California. Lab Cab in 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 Kit Trey, Imani and Booty Brown. And they were basically dancers in the Los Angeles scene. They met at an underground club and they started dancing together. They'd actually served a very brief stint. I didn't know this. They served as a. Some of the Fly Boys on Later Era and Living Color. Who knew that? That's kind of nuts. Right. 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. They were part of the Fly Girls. But being mentored. 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 meet Fat Lip and he's there in Argyle sweater, Argyle socks. 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 Kid 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 two things went well together. 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 an unsung hero of this episode, one of a couple, and his name is Reggie Andrews. Reggie Andrews. Gotta talk about Reggie Andrews. Take a bow, sir. The high school music teacher at Locke High School. That's the one. Here in LA. That's right. Alan Leroy Locke High School here in the LA USD. It should be said that there's, if you want a deep dive into this gentleman, KCRW has a great podcast called Lost Notes with our good friend, friend of the pod, Novena Carmel. Check that one out. But also a fun fact about Reggie Andrews, he produced 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. Tommasi Washington. Some members of Earth, Wind & Fire, apparently. Terrence 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. SCU. Got some seed money from A&M Records. To basically set up a studio for developing artists in South LA. 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 Ride 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 MPC-60. And not unimportantly, this is actually an underrated thing. We've talked about it on some other episodes, but not just the MPC, but Reggie Andrews. Reggie Andrews' 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, which is sort of like having a mountain of 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, Ya 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 Soul, House of Pain. Paul Stewart basically takes them on as a manager. They meet Mike Ross at Delicious Vinyl. Yep. And they sign 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. It's an unsung. Like, in the early 90s, we have, like, we have Giles Peterson, and we have Talkin' Loud, and we have this, like, acid jazz movement, which I was super into, and Mo Wax, 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. 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 rappers. Uh-huh. Brand New Heavies, and the main source. Yeah. Guru. Strings for all my siblings, just follow what everyone sings. I mean, it works, I'd say. But they were great. No, they were great songs. It was a great record. And how crazy is it, in this pre-Roots era. Yeah, right. That there's a live hip-hop band, it was like a weird thing. That there was a live band playing. Playing with hip-hop artists. It was so innovative. That 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. Yeah. 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 Soul Flower's on there. Oh, what the heck? Niggas just wanna 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 thwacked. And by the way, that album was put out. Put out by Delicious Vinyl. The far side's debut album, Bizarre Ride 2, dot, dot, dot, the far side, it was just so groundbreaking in terms of establishing an alternative hip-hop scene for the West Coast. I mean, like, after this, like, there were all kinds of artists who were clearly influenced by the far side. 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 Just Say? I mean, it sounds like the far side, right? Yeah, 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, gotta cop for it. You have to buy the entire thing. Yeah, you gotta buy that thing. Yeah, sometimes there are singles, not always. The far side teamed up with J. Swift to produce this album, and I just think that Bizarre Ride 2, 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, just, it sounds so good. I think it is significant that this record is a singular vision 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 is J. Swift, who is the singular producer from beginning to end of that record. Bizarre Ride has the jazz-influenced sampling of the East Coast Native Tongues crew. I'm talking about a tribe called Quest, De La Soul, but it also has something that's distinctly Californian about their sound. You know, listen, this album was not a smash, which is 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. We didn't know how to track how much albums were selling back then. It's so discouraging when I hear kids now talk about, like, yo, J. Cole, his opening week numbers are crazy. Like, all of our kids talk. Talk about 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? Do you enjoy the music? Right, right. That used to be the rubric, and that's not the rubric anymore. And so I was a little bit, you know, shocked to find out Bizarre Ride 2, 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? 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. It has a 90s. Interestingly for me, maybe 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? Is that why I think. It's literally Summer in the City. I did know that, but the title has influenced my experience of the song. That's what it sounds like. episode we've done since quincy passed 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 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 uh get into the mix whenever we have a fun deep dive on all that brazilian stuff but i want to say one other thing about jay swift before moving on which is that uh because we're going to give a lot of love to another producer who goes by jay uh 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 uh can stomach some very uh let's just say politically incorrect humor because the humor on bizarre right too is would not fly by today's standards but if you go back and listen to that album i i just i gotta ask that you think man just one kid because he really was still a kid at the time produced this entire record uh here's a little snippet snippet from for better or for worse do you take rye melinda to be your lonely wedding 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 Rhymelinda? That's great. I love that one. It has such a great bounce to it. We come to Lab Cab in California. I could spend a whole day talking about Bizarre Rite 2, but we come to Lab Cab in California, their second album. Like I said, so many artists are struggling with that second album, that sophomore slump that we hear so much about. And look, the Farsight knows that there are going to be big expectations on this second album. 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 Bizarre Rite 2. 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 Jay 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 want the best. They want the best in the biz. Yeah. And in their minds, that's Q-Tip from Cribe Called Quest. Yes, 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, Amp Fiddler, you know, great Detroit musician, you know, touring guy. Great guy with George Clinton and the P-Funk. He comes across this kid in Detroit out of Conant Gardens who is amazing. Like, he's 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 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 Q-Tip and Alisha H. Muhammad's sound changes around this time, I think, because J.D. comes into the mix. 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. 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, musicologically 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 Frank and Dank and the people who've known him for an extremely long time. It occurs to me, and this will connect to the. 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 Dilla yet. Oh, anytime we say Dilla in this episode, let's be clear. We are talking about J.D., James DeWitt Yancey. Yes. But in this moment, he's still J.D. He's J.D. And that factors into this story, because going back to the far side, asking Q-Tip to help and him saying, no, I'm sorry, I don't have time, but I like this guy, J.D. 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 far side, he's probably joking when he said this, but he's like, wait a second, Q-Tip's real name is Jonathan Davis, or was it? That's his birth name. J.D. Wait a second. Is this Q-Tip with like a fake alter ego being J.D.? So, I think he was probably joking, but there was some question as to whether it was. By the way, they ultimately formed the UMA. Yeah. The production squad, the UMA. And at that point, it's really opaque, because you don't know. Who does what? Did Q-Tip mainly produce this one? Did J.D.? Like, who actually was the producer? Was Ali Shaheed Muhammad? Like, you don't actually know who produced this one. Well, and the Charnas book I mentioned, Dilla Time, goes into a deep dive into that, and how that starts to become something that Dilla's not crazy about. Yeah, exactly. Because he doesn't have his name on the record. That he's not getting the credit he deserves. This is a great time to dive into J.D. We could easily spend a few episodes diving into Dilla's career. The man was prolific. But for the sake of time, let's talk about J. Dilla, a.k.a. James DeWitt Yancey, born and raised in Detroit. He was born and raised in Detroit, in the relatively middle-class neighborhood of Conant 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 the most, though, with the drums. And we like that, because we're both drummers. Dilla started to get into production as well. And at the end of 1988, he formed Slum Village with his high school friends, Ba Tin and T3. Great band. Do you think we should listen to some Slum Village? Oh, absolutely. 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 sang, Claire. He does that a lot. And he does that a lot. He changed the lyrics, right. The sound of the sample, like it. 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 Dilla song. Yeah. He's got a sample where the lady is singing in Portuguese. Right. 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. Yeah. Which is a sample. Which is, of course, a sample of That's Tau Atei featuring Bebel Gilberto. And the name of the song is Tecnova, as in Bossa Nova. So we're already into the Brazilian stuff. And obviously, you wouldn't even have Bossa Nova if you didn't have Gilberto. And by the way, if you didn't have Gilberto, you wouldn't even have Bossa Nova. If you haven't already, go back and check out our D-Light episode. We talked 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, Jay Dilla, flew from Detroit. He played some more tracks to the band when he was in LA. They liked the. They liked the Brazilian one and started writing to it. And this is his first trip to LA, by the way. And he doesn't have his famous MPC yet, his MPC 3000 that's in the Smithsonian. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he has a friend's borrowed SP-1200, the sampler we've talked about on some other episodes. Very famously, part of the French Touch. All the French Touch Daft Punk guys used it. So the Farside is holed up at a place called Sound Castle 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 add. One thing I want to actually say about Lab Cabin California as an album is that I feel like, much like Blowout Comb, I don't know that the hip-hop community loved it as much then 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 Dilla. Other songs produced by the band members themselves. There's a song on there by Slim Kip Trey 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, Dilla did six tracks on this record. He did Drop, right? He also did Bullshit. And these were actually the first JD tracks. Remember, he's not Dilla yet. These were the first JD tracks to 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. 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 Dilla 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. We're off to 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 it, Don's on me. They still split it four ways. When they got to the Booty Brown song, they all still got 12.5%. They all still 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 duns cats, dun dun cat, and then there's duns 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 DAW, 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 hi-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 hi-hat that's straight. There might be a snare 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, yeah. Quantizing is when you have the grid of like literally the math 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 sixties and the seventies, it's not always good because there's a live drummer. There's human beings that were not playing. Exactly. Like he's going with the feel. He may not be a perfect robotic machine. And I, and I, 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 going to 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. You know, it's 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, like, and I'm going to play it for you in the mix. And this will all make sense actually perfectly in this song. Cause 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. Cause that perfectly explains what I'm saying. So here is the high hat. And as you'll hear, they're straight. There's 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 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 cause it's inconsistent. Yeah. It's 20 bars. You can hear the inconsistency. It's a 20 bar loop, which I wouldn't even call a 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, but I'm going to give it a try. I'm going to play a little bit of 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 notes in the high hat. And then he just programmed the kick and snare. Cause when I tried to do it to get the high hat perfect and the kick imperfect and the snare is so is hard. I couldn't do it, but I'm not Dilla. So you're not, I'm not him. I'm not that guy, but it here's me trying to do that. So I'm trying to be perfect with my high hats and then I'll do wait, wait, wait, you're fired. I'm fired. Go back to working with the wascals. Look, it's hard, but he's extremely skilled. He might have done it. He might have done it all at once. Or he might have programmed the high hat and then gone back to just do the kicks. When I saw a jazzy Jeff doing this, he was able to do both at the same time, by the way, when, when you see quest, I'll do this at a different guy at a drum kit. Yeah. You know, I, 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. Then 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. Yeah. Because it's mostly not quantized. It's mostly played by hand, but he also uses 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 eighties versus the nineties also. Cause like, if you look at old Michael Jackson videos, Michael in the, uh, hyperactive coked out fifties, he's always a little 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 background dancers. And I feel like it speaks to the nineties 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 nineties and late nineties about landing just behind the beat. So it's like the opposite of the eighties. It's like, nah, man, I ain't doing that. Yeah. Yeah. I'll come along for this ride, but I gotta be dragged. I'm the snare. Yeah. But I'm the, 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, it's not a common 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 3000, 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 he, from the same time, he's been doing it for a long time. He's been running from the success of this far side 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 3000, 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 Dilla is, is that type of beat programming where he's making these micro decisions 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 direct, directly on the grid too. Like sometimes he would make that choice. So that, that comes after this song though. He doesn't have that device yet. So he's doing this, he is programming it, that 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 for whatever reason, they're like, no, let's make it more normal. I mean, Dilla hasn't happened yet. This is his first, 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 ahead behind kick drums. And they want it to just be normal for lack of a better word, I suppose. So when they come back from lunch, Trey's like, why'd 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 fisticuffs that ensue. And Trey does win the fight. I don't know if they won because there was mediation going on fat lip i think listens to the show so fat lip if you chime in and let us know did you win the fight we'd love to know uh 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 uh 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 how much uh dilla 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 things 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 you maybe do something that other people wouldn't do that wasn't by the book literally all right pm fiddler he just recently passed and again this being one of the first released tracks by that the world had ever heard by then jd later dilla he he doesn't have the device that would get him the ability to chop and rearrange samples which we we know him for later on in his career but one of the core things he's inspired by apparently and i heard this in on an interview that that dan charnas who wrote that book did with rick rubin on on broken record he says that he was inspired by a saple singer's song called piece of the action and when 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 the sydney poitier 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 piece of the action by mavis staples i hear it right yeah it's a little ahead 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 right it doesn't happen so much nowadays i just i just saw um an outcast video from like 2002 when um andre and big boy are performing uh the whole world in the whole world and it's all white people like to a disturbing 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 and three no i mean like it makes no sense but here's why i bring it up okay it's because when i was um i was playing this week some dilla songs for my uh kids because you know they 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 hand claps 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 dilla 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 interesting is because and i can't describe it maybe you can but like even there it sounds like three claps oh okay it's called a flam yeah like a drummer will do that too where they have their two like 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 it's not like a hard 80s like clap it's it's like a 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 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 they can be stereo even yeah and it makes them like just bigger and more human how would you clap would you clap like with your hands well you need more though first i think it's a well let's try we got two people so one of us claps like that one no it's just a little bit timing wise okay one two three we're both trying to be late i'll be early okay one two three four one two three four one two three four one two three we got it we got it yo yeah get us in the studio now son listen the importance of dilla's sound and the the i'm trying to think of a better word than wonkiness or drunkenness but the time is multiple in fact the term he used for it apparently jd himself called it simple complex that's how he described his own beats was there's 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 uh you have to remember this is 1994 this is q-tip has heard this demo and he's telling everyone within earshot this is the future of of beat making and he's he's bringing it to the far side there's a story that questlove tells about how the roots were opening for far side in north carolina and uh 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 here's the kick drum on the song 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 he 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 you know the d'angelo 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 19 i went looking for this song and i 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 quick everybody knows everyone knows it's a little bit insulting well known it's a little insulting to some of our core listeners but you just heard a cabasa and a cuica that sound so also importantly we have this sample from 1984's rockbox by run dmc so just that little snippet of run which sounds like this in the mix run run run and then he added some scratches which add to that texture so it's like this and when you add the cabasa run those are live those are live scratches right they sound like live scratches but they're not scratches to me and i imagine we were we were speculating that dilla probably did yeah i would imagine live from the front 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 i could just listen to that all day it's so good and i feel like you know uh real dilla fans know that like he's actually a big fan of like this sound like this bossa no va sound years later he releases a song called rico suave bossa nova uh where he just goes full on into the sound of bossa nova and here's a little bit of that that's uh rico suave bossa nova off of his album welcome to which is of course an interpolation of this song so the album by the absurdly named milton banana and his milton banana trio that song is uh 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 saudade vem correndo and it's by stan getz 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 so 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 the person who's credited in the credits their name is not on the record it's not in their voice is not in the sample they're not the element that was actually saying 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 percent and the guitar player that you're hearing doesn't get anything yeah they were married so i wonder if as some part of their like just financial arrangement they're like look we share the published album and they don't get anything and they don't get anything they don't get anything and they don't get anything and they don't get anything 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 crazy that that far side song gives 25 to this state to the estate of this woman who has nothing to do with what we heard what's crazy is this reminds me of the naz sting conversation we had a couple episodes you know back where the part that he sampled in the message is not the part uh sting contributed to the shape of my heart right yet sting is the one who got the public exactly and sing actually gets 10 of the publishing on this song on everything on everything 10 of everything yeah sing gets 10 of everything included he's the 110th percent 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 peeks his head over the wall like by the way did you hear that are you listening i'm here but 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 short and it never happens again yes i think listen i i feel very strongly about this as you can tell from daft punk to dj premiere my favorite producers are often those people who will take the tiniest liver of something and build it out into this big beautiful world of music when it's when it's over that quick and you're just like man they knew there was something special in that tiny two seconds of of music that build out an entire song right so there's no right or wrong way to be like a sample finder to be a digger but so often what one does as 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 break beat 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 great way to get through it and it's just a great way to get through it and it's a great way to get through it and it's a great way to get through it and it's a great way to get through it and it's a great way to get through it and it's a great way to get through it and it's a great way to get through it and it's a great way to get through it and it's a great way to get through it and it's a great way to get through it and it's a great way to get through it and it's a great way to get through it and what a deep digger of records a great 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 that's unusual you do it for a living and that is more than i've done i will say as a what 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 like that 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 perfect four bar loop that begins that song so there's no right way no there's no right way there are different ways but i i do have a special love for people like there 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 it's kind of incredible i always think that that's like an extra layer but and you're right to point out that for 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 the image of all uh sample that uh p rock sample for whose world is this like that sample is is a tight it's like a raft in the middle of the pacific ocean like how did he find that two seconds it 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 bass content is boosted a little bit but it's literally just the sample with that bass line emphasized uh and so and the high part when they're twice but he's eq'd them it's the same sample twice with two different filters that's super cool two different eq he's got them on the gangster setting as we call it on this that's right all the way up all the way 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 shitty headphones are always like the mids are in your face yeah and the bass can't be found and the it's 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 bossa nova the movie black orpheus plays a big role in american jazz and and what was seen as cool in the american like hip you know black hip community um black orpheus for those who don't know is a retelling of the orpheus legend uh during carnival in rio and it's a beautiful movie uh i believe that it won best foreign film the year it came out uh and it has this amazing samba jazz song and it's a really good song and it's a really good song and it's a 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 louise bonfa who we've talked a lot about whose song morning of the carnival uh 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 the carnival than there were africans taken to the carnival than there were africans taken to brazil uh than there were to north america but it was like 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 boston and jazz and these desperate sounds from diet 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 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 the very contemporary yeah the very contemporary hip-hop sounds that were coming on the mid-90s and look just a very simple song and it's a very simple song and it's a very simple song and it's 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 rio or between the sambistas um 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 bossa nova is essentially a slowed down version of the samba now the samba starts life in the in the national music of brazil yeah 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 bossa nova which literally means new trend or new wave in portuguese is is kind of a transformation by slowing it down by kind of actually importantly adding some european elements of harmony and melody like that's that is also a big difference the chord changes in this song are pretty unusual they're not something you would have heard in a samba for example and one last thing that i think is really important is that it's not just about the rhythm 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 getz like charlie bird like quincy jones like quincy jones like dave brubeck who 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 like 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 um and it's not it's not an accident that soul bossa nova 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 brubeck puts out a record called bossa nova usa in the liner notes he says quote we had long waited for bossa nova 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 unusual we were talking about swing before there's no swing in bossa nova it's actually if you listen back to these early jazz records ostensibly jazz records what you're hearing is a like a clave da da da da da but you're not hearing a da da da anymore this is a pretty straight rhythm propel fitness water with gatorade electrolytes zero sugar and vitamins propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self what propels you propel with gatorade electrolytes it wouldn't be rap without vocals it wouldn't be vocals without fat lip slim kid trey where do you want to start i want to start with fat lip you know he's the first person to come on the track and uh this track very obviously called running because it's about i love the far side they're so funny it's a it's a song about fighting but it's also a song about not fighting yeah it's about avoiding fighting right so you know can we hear a little bit of fat lip on verse one for no reason at all i can't record niggas rolling seas in my face down the hall of kicking it in the back of the school eating chicken at three wondering why is everybody always picking on me i mean first off i like that you can hear like he's he's syncopated it like he's not landing every line no he's got some swing in there too absolutely he's coming in i like the fact that you feel like you can like hear like his his speedy delivery a little bit i 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 always picking on me exactly charlie brown which is from the coasters he's gonna get gone just you wait and see why is everybody always a lot of a lot of people don't realize that i i grew up thinking that song was about the cartoon character that 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 uh why is everybody picking on me is something that you could easily see charlie brown saying so here's 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 man you hear um yeah and every rapper's got their own style and some definitely have a more staccato thing like this like buster rimes 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 put the count on seven chicken shits don't get to heaven till they face these fears and these fears you know like i i'm even thinking about the part you know as a victim i invented low key till the key hold itself got lower than me as a victim i invented low key to the key hold itself got lower than me so i stood up and let my free form form free said i'm gonna get something before they knock it not me i also think it's interesting where he chose to double up on his voice like just sort of like put a an asterisk or an exclamation mark emphasis line and then emphasis on the line so like give it up to slim kid trey like even the songs he produced he's one of my favorite songs in the group's canon he's just clearly a a genius musical is it okay that my favorite voice though is imani let's hear about it and money with the high voice let's go 1995 and now that i'm older stress weighs on my shoulders heaviest boldest but i told y'all until the day that i die i still will be a soldier you know the thing about imani which is amazing to me is that he obviously he's he's he's the one with the high voice he's the one with the high voice he's the one with the low voice he's the one with the high voice he's the one with the high voice i always thought that he was sort of doing the far side's version of chuck d you know what i mean like it's a little bit more like a a demonstrative even though he's singing the preacher kind of like yeah it's a little bit more up there which is ironic because now that i think about it the one time they directly referenced chuck d in their music is actually on the song called officer off of bizarre right too and it's actually fat lip who does the chuck d impression but yeah money's great i mean like all these guys were great oh by the way i think i think booty brown is on the song i think he is uh he's in the chorus yeah well why don't we hear that chorus can't keep running away can't keep running away hey a little bit of a harmony there yeah i love that me 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 dilla puts together this beat he's got the hi-hat the kick the snare but he's also got that run dmc sample in it right so what they get 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 in the chorus or if it's in the chorus or if it's in the chorus but he's using this loop of a song which is called sodas vem correndo which means sodas which is very loosely translated it's a complicated portuguese concept of sort of nostalgic sadness and longing but it means that word sodas 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 if the farsight had the idea for a song about running first or did he come to them in the chorus or did he come to them in the chorus or did he come to them in the chorus Also this one, which is one of my favorites, this is Thelonious. - 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 unpredictable, shall we say. - He'll continue to work with everybody from Busta Rhymes to Janet Jackson to D'Angelo, 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, 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 in 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 the song "Lightworks" without thinking about like, "Thank you, Dylan. Thank you for providing my life with these beats that just absolutely just cut to the core of who I am as a person." ♪ The name of the game is Lightworks ♪ And before we move on, I also want to say that this episode has been, it's been a lot about Dylan, 'cause on this show we talk about songwriters, we talk about producers, that's just what we do. But we have these amazing lyricists also at the heart of this story, the Far Side. And though 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" is not there, "Slim Kid Trey" is not there. - Right, right, it's technically the Far Side, but in name only. - Listen, to this day, I think you can go see them. You're always gonna see "Slim Kid Trey," "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, 'cause we're big fans. - So 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, so to speak. - And it's still okay. - And it was all okay, because the Far Side 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 Far Side, I got a letter from the DMV the other day. I opened it and read it, and said they were suckers. You know, they were talking about the very mundane-- - 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, Luxury, it's time for one more song. This is the segment where we share a deep cut or a hidden gem with you, the One Song Nation, and with each other. Okay, you go first. - Well, as we discussed earlier, bossa nova never died, and nor should it have. We still love it. There are some recent bossa nova songs, and one of my favorite bossa nova songs of the modern era is by Luve, and it's called "Falling Behind" from 2022. ♪ Moved out to a new city ♪ ♪ June is dawning down on me ♪ ♪ And all that I can find ♪ - I mean, it's baked into that. That's 1962 in music. 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 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 gonna do something quite similar. Keeping with the Dilla of it 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 is already a little bit older, by the time it came out, but it 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." ♪ Big Booty Express ♪ - Sounds like a kielbasa, or just a shaker. ♪ Big Booty Express ♪ - I mean, that song is epic and long, and we can only play a snippet of it, obviously, but he's, you know, with the word "express" in the title-- - It's very Kraftwerk-y. - It's very Kraftwerk-y. - It's Bossa Nova. - 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." - Yeah. - Detroit techno is something that we came up with. - Which has something of a Kraftwerk legacy and Bossa Nova. 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 @dialo and on TikTok @dialo. - And you can find me on Instagram @luxury, L-U-X-X-U-R-Y, and on TikTok @luxuryXX. - 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. - There is so much NFL on ESPN right now. Monday Night Football, plus pregame and postgame. NFL Live, NFL Primetime. Everything you need to stay on top of every game, every week. - Unbelievable. - And now, NFL Network is on the ESPN. 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