Midnight Marauders, Gloria

Midnight Marauders is such a great album. It's a classic for reason. I honestly don't think it can be overstated how good this is. A Tribe Called Quest beautifully blends hip-hop, rap, and jazz in such an intuitive way. It feels good to listen to it.

Just listening to this, I was thinking about how many samples from classic soul and jazz artists like James Brown and Roy Ayers were used in Midnight Marauders. And really, when you think about the history of hip-hop, the artists typically paid tribute to jazz and soul artists by sampling them in their work. That's a key component of hip-hop.

When ATCQ made this album, digital synthesizers and samplers were available. But the history of sampling is much earlier than that. One of the major pioneers was DJ Kool Herc, a Jamaican immigrant raised on dancehall music who helped pioneer hip-hop in New York in the '70s by using two turntables to isolate and extend drum breaks from funk and R&B records and to rap over them. This breakbeat style became the backbone of early hip-hop music. That DIY ethic of sampling vinyl records is really cool and innovative.

I think that, for so many of us, the idea of being able to find what we want online fairly easily ruins the magic of finding something in a record store—maybe finding something that you are looking for, or maybe finding something that you didn't know you needed by randomly choosing it and taking it to a listening station. There is absolutely a magic to that. I was in Chicago last weekend and spent a good chunk of my time in record shops there. I would just take a pile of things I didn't know to a listening station and seeing what I could find. For the most part, I could get those same albums online, but it's different finding them this way.

It's also different listening to them on vinyl, knowing that every time you play a record, it's a little bit altered. Vinyl is a purely physical medium, and every time that you drop the needle and that hard plastic stylus drags through the softer grooves of the record, it changes them a little bit, it degrades them a little bit. Records change with time; it's normal. They can even sound different from a little bit of dust in the grooves, or with temperature shifts, or with how fresh or worn down your stylus is. But that's cool. There is a little bit of magic in the analogue.

I think that magic exists with digital sampling too. Just the idea that something older, like all the '70s artist ATCQ sampled, can be transformed into something new is really cool. Maybe there is a keyboard line or a forgotten drum break just waiting for new life in some dusty record crate? This album feels alive and fresh even after 30 plus years, because it is a little bit alive, most music is. Every listen leaves its mark on you the same way a stylus leaves its mark on the grooves pressed into a record.