When you think of someone with ADHD, who comes to mind, is it a woman in her ...
Just this constant feeling is being too much, you know, too kinetic, too loud, all of the two, anything.
And just really feeling like people got some kind of social rulebook that I never got.
The changing face of ADHD, that's this week unexplained to me. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Nate, yeah. Nate, what are you playing? Oh, you know, uh, Caravan, Duke Gellington, one, T-Zell.
Did you study Duke for your, uh, PhD? Oh, yeah. Why do you ask, uh, well, because we're, we're tracking, uh, Charlie, great to see you. Hi. Hey.
Ah, podcast time.
Welcome to Switch on Pop.
I'm musicologist Nate Sloan, and I'm songwriter Charlie Harding.
“You wanted to know why I'm jamming out to Caravan, Charlie?”
Yeah. It's because I can't get the song out of my head after hearing it sampled on one of the most exciting hip hop releases in recent memory, ASAP Rocky. His album don't be dumb, bringing Duke Ellington and Thelonius Monk back into the popular music landscape.
I'm so excited to talk about this record Charlie.
We got into it a little bit in an episode a few weeks ago.
We talked about Rob and then we did some quick hits, and I played for you, uh, one of the singles from ASAP's new album don't be dumb, called punk Rocky. I like that track. It's kind of like if like the 60s wrecking crew were playing on a tame and polished song. It's both throwback and very contemporary.
“And I feel like it's a bit of a distraction, perhaps?”
Yeah, I feel like the record is a lot more diverse, darker, uh, some really heavy hip hop beats. It's not just this ASAP punk rock thing. There is so much to uncover here. Maybe one of the most creative hip hop releases that we've seen in some time. And at a moment when hip hop's chart dominance has been waning.
I feel like we have to pay attention when artists try something new and daring and still find a healthy bit of commercial success doing it. Okay. So what does this have to do with you, Kellington? Before we get to Duke and punk, we need to set the stage for some of the diverse sounds
that you will encounter over the course of this record Charles. Don't be dumb, opens with a sort of message saying, I'm back. I haven't released a new album in almost a decade, but fear not loyal fans. I am here and my attitude is in tact. This is order of protection.
Cool synthesizers, a little bit of a rainfall effect. Wow, I do a way to start an album when you have been heard from in some time. When you might be known better as Rihanna's romantic partner and father of her children
“then top MC in the game, you have to make a statement.”
It opens up no beat, just that simple synthesizer, heavy beat drop and then a lot of really dexterous sort of rhythmic modulation, jumping between triplet feel, quarter note feel. It's really good, auto tune on the vocals, but not so much that it really transforms that you can still hear his voice. And he's not holding back on this album, later we get a track that is clearly a dis-against
the rapper Drake stole your flow. I don't know if that's original anymore, but these beats are dark and pretty heavy. It's not the uplifting music that I need on this freezing February morning, but I like
What it's doing.
Well it's 86 in Bommie here in Los Angeles, Charles, but I appreciate the darkness nonetheless.
I also appreciate the fascinating cast of characters that Asap Rocky has assembled over the course of this album, talk about dark soundscapes, this track features a songwriter who is none other than Danny Elfman of the Nightmare before Christmas, and many other haunting refrain, but Tim Burton also has his fingerprints on this release, designing the cover and creating videos promoting the album, director of Nightmare before Christmas,
Claude Brader, Danny Elfman, if you moved through this record, we encountered some other fun surprising guests, Thundercat shows up on the track Playa, it's Thundercat really is a surprising guest anymore, I feel like they're amazing everywhere, but I'm happy to hear it. I was surprised, but your point is fair, Charles.
So, you can always tell if it's Thundercat by a couple of key characteristics, tell me
more. The main one is that he plays a sixth string bass that just goes from the lowest range to the highest range, and he often uses this tone that you call it envelope filter, it's kind of like a wall wall, except for the wall wall, which you can move with your foot, the envelope filter makes a wall sound right when you hit a bass string, like every
“single time, jerry Garcia uses an envelope filter a lot, and I think probably where”
he's pulling it from, we'd be like Booty Collins, like very prominent, fucking delic,
kind of sound, and then the other thing, if Thundercat's on a track, he's going to sing in that beautiful full set out. It's that combination. I don't think if it were heard it quite in that with those heavy 808s, they're balancing out the low end, his envelope filter bass doesn't have all that big sub, so the hardening
808 compliments him very nicely. An example of these sounds you're describing could be found on a Thundercat track, like them changes, which is him after you playing two parts, you get the low end, the big wall wall wall, and that's him playing the higher register of the bass double tracking on top of himself, like showing that the bass is everything, you don't need a guitar, could
“hear those envelope effects one more time, Charlie?”
They are creating the feeling of a vocal like quality to a non vocal instrument. These signature Thundercat tones give us yet another palette over the course of this album. Keep going, let's listen to STFU, which delivers quasi-industrial vibes. The sort of break beat, element, the bit crushing, it feels like I'm playing an old race car video game, super high anxiety, appropriate for a song whose central message is to shut
the F out, heard air force, parentheses, black, Demarco, has one of the more head spinning beat switchups I've heard in recent years. So if the last song was like the Nintendo 8-bit crushed sounds, we're now moving to like Sega Genesis FM synthesized sounds, a little bit more high-fi, but also throw back. I don't know, I'm just hearing a lot of video game reference in these songs.
“I think there is a lot of video game reference, also moving so drastically from one sound”
to another feels like something that might happen in a video game, as you like go from one level to another perhaps. There are more surprises in store, the title track, don't be dumb, samples, indie, darling,
Claros, song, sinking, I've to see this guy cry when you're ready for it.
And when we get to the last track of Don't Be Dumb, appropriately titled the end, we are
“met with a beloved icon of the folk rock scene, Jessica Pratt singing this haunting”
refrain accompanied only by the acoustic guitar. This is as chaotic as our modern moment, I mean we have the punk alt rock thing, we've got super hard hitting beats, we have thundergap, funkiness, video game music, Clareo is better on pop and now like alt folk, what on earth is happening and yet we still haven't even gotten to the jazz.
Yes, also I need to mention that in addition to Jessica Pratt, will I am of the Black
I piece, it's also featured on that final track, and don't trip, keep calm carry on even
“know the wicker ones, but the bomb now heard a stick of kids want to burn the sun now got sick”
pigs in the ghetto fuckingest and dystopian. This is it's it's it's it's a endlessly entertaining poporee, obliobase, if you will, of our modern musical soundtrack, but yeah, there's one thing conspicuously absent from my rundown of don't be dumb and it's what you walked in on me playing at the beginning of our recording session today.
Help Marison.
There's one track we haven't discussed yet and it is my favorite and in many ways the most
interesting to be on the album, it's called robbery and it features Dochi and now it's time to talk about Duke Alan Tin, the lonius, funk and Caravan because what do we hear when I press play on robbery? Wow there's been a lot of sampling of jazz throughout the history of hip hop going back to the earliest days through the 80s, 90s, 2000s, it is a constant in many ways and yet I'm
hard pressed to think of many other examples where hip hop artists take a jazz sample and use it so thoroughly and explore it in so many ways and draw so much of their own approach on the track from the sample. This is true not only of ASAP but also of his featured artist Dochi. They're not just rhyming over these tracks, they're like inhabiting characters in
the way they're putting themselves in the world of the 1950s smoky jazz club and their residents, their cadence, their tone is all inspired by that, their rhythm is inspired by that. This is a really unique and really exciting track to me. Listen I like what they're doing here, I want to get into the details.
I feel like we should mention their problem is plenty of precursors, one of which through the Fundercut connection to Kendrick Lamar, we could listen to the track for free and
“I think we get the same kind of like Swan Piano Smokey Jazz vibe.”
But obviously different in so many ways, not as sample, much bigger band but it also has that male and female collaboration going on, so it feels like it's maybe an extension of that world. Also totally different styles of jazz. Kendrick's for free is definitely an antecedent here.
I think it opened the gates for a lot more hip hop artists to collaborate with jazz musicians. In this case, we're hearing the work of the composer, saxophonist, Terrace Martin. But yeah, as you said, this is a little different because it's an active collaboration
Between Kendrick and a contemporary jazz artist.
Yeah, though we have this woman narrator at the top cursing out Kendrick, I think that's
“a little different than the relationship between Dochi and Asap on the track robbery.”
Yeah, most significantly to me is the way that Asap is taking this sample and doing something new at it. That's what stands out to me. But yeah, no, for free is definitely like in the shadows of this song. Let's go a little deeper into that sample.
It is from a 1955 recording by Thelonius Monk called Thelonius Monk plays Duke Alanton. Great groove. Thelonius Monk, man, it's everything you want to be in a musician. You can hear a few notes of someone playing a song, which isn't even their own composition and you know exactly who it is.
The jagged piano, little dissonant intervals constantly playing with time, so Monk. I could see why Monk would be appealing for hip-hop artists to sample. For the reasons you just said the same way that Monk can play a note and you're like, "Oh, I know exactly who that is."
“You know, I think a lot of MCs would like to think they can say one word and people would”
recognize them. There's something very individualistic and often a kind of classic about Thelonius Monk. He's covering a song by Duke Alanton and the Puerto Rican Trombonist Juan Tiesel, Caravan,
that was first recorded by the Alanton Orchestra back in 1936.
What makes the song stand out within the Jazz Cannon is the scale or mode that it's using. We're in the key of C, for a drink. Exactly. We start on the route note.
Instead of what you would expect, maybe, which is to move up a whole step at the beginning, sound like this. We have a half-step motion, which gives us this characteristic sound, often associated with Middle Eastern music, and Eastern European as well. Eastern European as well, and certainly the title they gave the song Caravan, maybe like
conjures up these exoticized images of like foreign lands and alternate forms of transportation. I feel like the Trombon evoke a snake trombory kind of vibe, it's a very sneaky line. It's really smooth and slithery. It is. And even though it was kind of unusual within like a 1930s Jazz context, it would go on
to become one of the most popular Jazz songs ever. And beyond, I mean, by some metrics, this is one of the most covered songs of all time. According to the website, who sampled?
It's like a top five covered song, according to the website, second half songs.
It's top 30. However, we measure it, it's like this is one of the most popular songs ever, something about this melody, this kind of mysterious mood that is established with the fridgy and scale really caught on with people. Yeah, I mean, when I played very poorly in a high school jazz band, Caravan was one of
the first probably like seven or eight tracks that we learned. It is part of the canon. And Elington himself would return to the song over and over again, including in one famous recording he made much later in 1962 with the drummer Max Roach and the bassist Charles Mingus on an album called Money Jungle.
Wow, that is some powerful piano.
I want to say this again. I don't think hearing this sample in itself is that radical.
“I think it's what Ace App and Dochi do with it that makes this track kind of unique.”
Even on previous albums, Ace App Rocky has certainly sampled other jazz artists. His track LSD, for instance, uses a drum sample from the alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson.
Here's Lou Donaldson's "Otabilly Joe.
And here's that same groove appearing in LSD.
And if we look to other hip hop artists, we can actually find other examples where people sample Thelonius Monk and Dook Elington. The Wu Tang Clan actually sampled another track off the same Thelonius Monk record called Phelonius Monk plays Duke Ellington, this is Monk's version of Ellington's song "Black and Tan" fantasy.
And here's Wu Tang Clan's "Shame on an N-word from Enter the Wu Tang" through six chambers. Another Wu Tang member goes face-killa, sampled Duke Ellington's recording my little
“brown book, this is a really remarkable sampled I think.”
That was Malcolm by Ghost Face Killa, and we can point to so many more examples. But I think what most of them would have in common is that they take a little snippet of a jazz recording and they loop it over and over again. We're talking a measure, two measures, maybe even half a measure. That's not the case with robbery.
One of the moments that really arrested me when I listened to this track for the first
time was hearing ASAP and Dochi sampled the bridge of Caravan. Okay, well, it makes sense because Dochi is presenting a really different kind of romantic emotional appeal, and so they need something contrasting. What's contrasting to the ASAP, the B-section? We start the song in this like straight, eighth, almost latin groove.
“But then when we get to the bridge, we're swinging, and we're in a major key.”
It's very different. It's like we're jazzing it up all the sudden, and then we get back to that frigion groove.
But I would never expect a hip-hop artist to actually sample that jazz section, then it's hard
to do that. It's hard to do that successfully to wrap over a swing triplet groove like that. Dochi makes it look pretty effortless, but don't be fooled y'all. It's a challenging thing to do. Yeah, I feel like they really earn it as well because both of their vocal deliveries sort
of fit the styling of each section, the opening caravan, main melody, it feels like smoke ear lounge vibe, and you have a sort of like spoken word lounge vocalist with ASAP Rocky. And then when we go to the more jazzy swing part, it feels like you've got like a swing vocalist of the swing era singing over the track, but brassier won't be.
“It's a kaleidoscopic effect, but what does it all add up to?”
I have one more meta analysis of this song, Charlie, that reveals all after short break.
Everyone knows our politics are divided, there's left versus right, and divid...
on age, gender, or race, but maybe our biggest divide in our politics isn't about identity
at all.
“It's insideers versus outsiders, at least that's what Congressman Rokana would say.”
The real issue is two tiers of justice in America, the real issue is people look power and wealth using it to be above the law, and escape even investigation or prosecution. And it's only gotten more noticeable in recent months, as issues like the Epstein files and artificial intelligence have seemed to pit the elites against everybody else. California Congressman Rokana takes on the Epstein class.
Today explain in your feed every weekday, and now one Saturdays too. There's one part of robbery I haven't played for you yet, Charlie, let's listen to it now. They just held up the whole jazz club. I know, it's like a scene straight out of a 1930s gangster movie. That's fun, they bust in with their Tommy guns, and they hold the place up.
Now it's a fun scene than the kind of way you would find a skit or an interlude and plenty of hip-hop albums, but I feel like there might be something even deeper here, what's that? What kind of robbery are we actually referring to? Oh, it's a stick up, but wasn't there a great famous couple from the gangster era that went around and robbed everybody?
“I believe you're referring to Bonnie and Clyde.”
Yeah, it's kind of a Bonnie and Clyde thing. I think this goes even deeper. Don't you say as you ain't invent this, so please don't approach. Watch my black ass in the Swade seat. We take it up space.
White folks don't phase me. I feel like the robbery here might refer to the theft of black music by white artists throughout the course of jazz, right? 1917.
The first group to record a jazz record is the All-White ensemble, the original Dixie-Land
Jazz Band. 1935, Benny Goodman becomes the, quote unquote, King of Swing, the most successful band
“leader of the era using compositions written for him by black band leaders like Fletcher”
Henderson and Count Basie. Zoom ahead to the 1950s. Max Roach, the drummer we heard earlier, complains about "I'm resurrecting the careers of all of these white composers like George Gershwin, but all the royalties from my music is going back to them."
It's part of the reason that the bebop movement starts away to reclaim the music that was seen as being profited off by white musicians, and this cycle continues over and over again, the white appropriation and profiting from black musical creation. Is that the robbery that's taking place here? I like your analysis.
I feel like if you go any further, don't you and Ace up Rockier are going to make a response podcast. It's going to trounce our podcast. I mean, I would love to hear it. Yeah, I would do.
Caravan itself is kind of an interesting choice in this respect. Yeah. For one thing, there's another songwriter credit on Caravan, Irving Mills, who was Duke Elington's manager, a white guy who put his name on a lot of Duke Elington's compositions to get a little bit of that royalty money, even when he didn't technically have any contributions.
He wrote some lyrics for Caravan, so maybe he did have some write, but the instrumental version? I don't know. And then Duke Elington himself was notorious for stealing his bandmates' compositions and making them his own.
Yeah. So the theft goes both ways. It's like, it's all a robbery, maybe, is the idea here. Someone's just sticking up each other, Jackie and their style, but the proof is in the
pudding, ultimately, right?
It's not what you take, but what you do with it, and what are Asap Rockier and Dochi doing here? They're creating something entirely new, you know, bow your head and kiss the ring.
That's what he says on this track, something new out of a melody appropriated...
Middle East, and Eastern Europe of a song that might have borrowed from other creators
in a band that may have been speculating at this point, written by somebody who borrowed things from people on their band without properly crediting, it's all, what a stir.
“Zoom it out, and that becomes maybe a theme for this album, you know?”
Charlie, finish this quote for me, "Great artists don't borrow, they say may I please have permission to license your work?" No, they steal. They steal, and maybe this track is like a mantra, you know, Asap Rockie is going to steal, and I say that in a sort of friendly benevolent way, he's going to jack everyone's style
on this album. Thundercat, Clareau, Jessica Pratt, Will I Am, Danny Elfman, everybody's coming into this project, right?
That's the mantra here, steal everything.
This is a stick up, this is a robbery, I'm taking all your sounds, I'm taking all your flows, and I'm putting it in here to create something wholly original and new. I think if this album is indicative of possible directions for the genre of hip hop to head, like this is exactly the playbook that other artists should be following. Well, one way to think about hip hop is that it is an archive of all of American music because
of its innovation and sampling, hip hop really expands the idea that when you're making music, you are in conversation with this much larger archive, this web of all of these interrelations. They're much more clear in hip hop, whether it's through a sample, a lyrical interpolation, a borrowing of flow, a lot of what the genre does is it allows people to mistake a claim
in a larger body of work, and so when we're listening to Asap Rockie, we're hearing all the genres of American music, at least many of them, if not all. Maybe that's even the way that hip hop regains its like commercial and foothold is embracing its role as the archivist of popular music. Maybe that's Asap Rockie's new alter ego, you know, he calls himself Flaka, maybe you
could be the archivist. I think that's a pretty, I like that. A pretty sick MC name personally, but yeah, I totally agree, more Duke, more monk, more
“jazz and your interests, speak easy, more stick ups, that's what I want to hear from”
the world of hip hop. When you were playing some of the later examples, it's really heavy piano, it may me realize that fridgy and movement, it's something that we've heard before, for all Williams, like to use it all the time, just want to be Grammy for his achievements, but particularly, I think about Nelly and it's getting hot in here.
So if you're not a jazz head, I'm just saying I feel like there's a ways of stepping backwards through the archive of hip hop and popular music to eventually arrive back at Duke Elington. There is a pathway in Nelly and Feral, might be our bridge.
You can never go wrong with fridgy and minor second troughs.
Always feels good. Switched on pop is produced by Rianna Cruz, edited by Mrs. Soap, engineer by Brandon McFarlane, illustrations by Iris Scott Leave, our theme music is by Zack Tenerio, Josie Adams,
“Archiris, remember the voxmedia podcast network, remember a vulture, which part of New”
York Magazine, you can subscribe to my bag at comm slash pod. Find us on social media @switchampop, tell us what are your favorite jazz samples in hip hop, what are the the monk and Duke tracks we missed, what artists do you want to see sampled in the future that have been? Yeah, and we'll be chatting about it on sub-stack.
And if you go to our website, switchdampop.com, you'll find a caravan of goods. I see what you did. You've got a book, like the one over Nate's shoulder, if you're watching this on video right now, which you can do on YouTube. We have merch, which I am usually wearing, but today I am not.
Oh, what is that? Oh, Nate is holding up a lovely little switchdampop sticker. I don't think we have that on the website yet, but we do have mugs, shirts, all kinds of lovely apparel, hats of all kind, including really nice new pink beanie that I'm very excited about.
It's true. It is very cold out right now, if you're not in Los Angeles. And what else are we doing? We're going back again on Tuesday, and until then, thanks for listening.
