Coolie J Is Back II (February, 1987)

At the end of 1986, my production partner Charlie (DJ KooKoo) got a new toy - a Yamaha VSS-100 sampling keyboard. At first we did what everybody does when they first get a sampler; we spent days saying funny things into the built-in mic and playing our voices sped-up and slowed-down on the keyboard. But then I noticed that the keyboard had an audio-in, meaning we could feed a break in off a record and sample and loop it, just like we’d heard on records such as “It’s My Beat” by Sweet Tee and “Ego Trippin’” by Ultramagnetic MCs. Charlie had picked up two of the first Ultimate Breaks & Beats compilations at Downstairs Records while on Christmas vacation in New York City, and going through those we were starting to get an idea of how the backbones of some of our favorite hip-hop songs were built, on scratches and samples of “Funky President” or “Kool Is Back”. And now with the sampler, we could join the fray. We were still a few months away from getting our first 4-track recorder, so the sampler was utilized as part of our process of “layers”; recording a pass of turnables / keyboards / drum machine through a mixer onto a cassette, then playing that cassette from a different boombox back through the mixer onto another cassette, while adding more overdubs; full takes, no cut-ins. The sound quality would degrade with every generation, but at least the scratching remained in stereo, something we were never able to do in all our 4-track years to come. These "layers" were our cheap dirty version of multi-tracking, and we’d gotten pretty good at it throughout 1986, with many of our scratch/keyboard instrumentals becoming popular on Lecco’s Lemma, the premier local rap show run by legendary DJ Magnus Johnstone. One of the definitive aspects of the 8-bit sampler is that it distorted the sound of whatever break or beat we fed into it, making it tinny and raspy. We compensated for this by adjusting the equalizer on the mixer to get the bass booming again. The first breakbeat I looped was "Impeach The President" for a song with Funky J called "Turntable Terrorizer" ( https://soundcloud.com/user-55254727/turntable-terrorizer-by-funky-j-the-diamond-2 ). The next beat I looped was Dexter Wansel's "Theme From The Planets", and again I adjusted the beat through the mixer while adding some reverb and echo from Charlie's guitar pedals. Charlie recorded a couple layers of scratching, and our friend Jerry (Coolie J) recorded a couple of verses. We'd met him while he was with the Def MCs (a precursor to the Top Choice Clique) and had recorded a few songs in 1986 over drum machines and keyboards, but the sampler opened up a whole new world. We went down to Lecco's Lemma (now at Boston College) and played the song at the end of January, 1987. Fans really responded to the looped drumbeat, which as it turns out was one of the first times anyone had ever heard it looped. This is January 1987, so it would be a few months before Eric B. & Rakim's "Paid In Full" would kick down doors with its opening track "I Ain't No Joke", built atop the Wansel beat. I'm not saying I was "first" or anything - others had scratched bits of that song, and Eric B. & Rakim were certainly already well into production on their album by then. But yeah, for what it's worth, our song was one of the first places anyone heard that beat with rapping over it. It's not a better/worse thing, it's just chronology. Note: this is our second version of the song, re-recorded in better quality from scratch. The original version is here: https://soundcloud.com/type4/coolie-j-is-back-january-31