A few months go I had mentioned the shift from sample based producers who actually were interested in finding chunks of quality music to the indiscriminate micro-digging chop masters of today who will flip Firestone Christmas records without shame. Listening to this FSD compiled My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy sample set, it’s reassuring to see that Kanye is still firmly in the quality category, even if he is often only grasping at very small fragments. (ROFL at paying whatever it cost him to grab just four words from Crimson, he probably just wanted to inflate those budget numbers.) As disparate as these sources are there seems to be something of a unifying feel here, or at least an overriding qualitative consistency. A mixture of crate staple breaks like “Think,” “Soul Makossa” and Cold Grits (maybe this is what he meant by boom bap? though that sort of thing has always been in Ye’s toolshed) and varying degrees of noodly prog-ish stuff from different moments in time. It’s easy to picture Manfred Mann, Bon Iver, Aphex Twin and even Smokey Robinson as all existing in the same sphere even though they definitely do not.

The other day on Twitter Kanye called Jake Paine’s HHDX review of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Family “tasteful” and I joked that “tasteful” is probably the highest compliment in Kanye’s head. So yeah, his sample choices on this record are definitely tasteful. (Apart from that horrible “Afromerica” shit…)

One clarification though: I don’t think “Runaway” actually uses the body of Pete & CL’s “The Basement,” only the short interlude that opens the track, which doesn’t actually appear on the version in this zip file.

11:27 pm  •  17 November 2010  •  20 notes