Mainstream hip hop took a sharp turn in the early 1990s.
At the start of the decade, many of the biggest hits were goofy party rap; The Humpty Dance, Ice Ice Baby, U Can’t Touch This. Later in the decade, goofy was replaced by gritty. By 1995, artists like Nas, 2Pac, and Biggie were putting out music that topped the charts while feeling completely different from the hits of just a few years earlier.
Part of it was the subject matter, which was often more political and more violent than what had come before. But a big part of it was the samples that producers and DJs were using to underscore their MCs’ lyrics.
I remember listening to Cypress Hill’s Black Sunday for the first time and being taken aback by how different it was from the shiny, highly produced sound I was used to hearing from mainstream hip hop. Cypress Hill’s music (and their album art) wasn’t shiny at all. It was dusty. Dark. Even spooky.
OMA is a four-piece band out of the UK, and they specialize in playing live instrumental versions of precisely this era of hip hop. Their versions of Nas’ “NY State of Mind” or 2Pac’s “The World Is Yours” are just hype enough and just eerie enough to be a good addition to a Halloween party playlist.
But the one that gets stuck in my head the most is their rendition of Wu-Tang’s “C.R.E.A.M.”
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The main sample from Wu-Tang’s classic is the opening two bars of “As Long As I’ve Got You” by The Charmels. It’s a typical late-60s soul love song, replete with cheesy lines like, “If happiness was water, I’d never run dry.” It’s not a great song, but the first two bars, with the haunting, fluttering piano line and spooky vibe, are perfect sample fodder.
The Charmels song never comes back to those first two bars; the rest of the song is in a totally different key, and that piano line never repeats. It’s like the Charmels put those two bars in specifically for Wu-Tang’s benefit.
2. OMA reproduces the instrumental quite faithfully, but listen closely and you can hear the bassist making his part just a bit funkier with little fills here and there.
3. The tremolo guitar, with its big reverb, is the spatial opposite of the tight, no-reverb drums.
Recommended listening activity:
Decorating for a Halloween party.