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Haitian Fight Song has possibilities...
But looping bits and pieces of jazz tunes (as with all other kinds of tunes) has been done almost to death—Guru was doing it back in the day with the Jazzmatazz project; and does anybody remember Us3? They were on Blue Note, as I recall—in any event, they were the first hip-hop outfit to be given full access to Blue Note's back catalogue: they had a huge hit with a tune sampling Herbie Hancock's "Cantaloupe Island."
But this is different: ragtime isn't loose or vampy—it's rigorously structured and thoroughly composed music, and this remix plays off that. It's the same kind of exercise as the famous Strokes/Christina Aguilera "collaboration": instead of taking just the vampy bits of a record and extending them, you're lifting an entire structure more-or-less wholesale, and imposing another structure on top. The fascination comes in how the two structures interlock and recontextualize one another—and in the best cases, the beauty is in how inevitable they sound.
The Eminem/piano rag thing is so exciting because both the underlying structure and the overstructure are so intricate, and the mesh results in such propulsive cross-rhythms.
And I think it makes a sly comment about race, too, by placing Eminem's voice in the context of another great and uniquely American artform, as exemplified by an African-American composer. |
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I had to wait 24 hours to get my account working...