The Light in the Attic reissue of Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson has garnered some heady praise, including a 10.0 and Best New (Old?) Music status from Pitchfork.

I don’t claim to be at all familiar with Gainsbourg’s work, but when I listened to the album, the opening bass line to the first song, En Melody, was instantly recognizable: The Beatnuts, the criminally overlooked New York-based trio (now duo), sampled it on Superbad, which appears on their 1994 full-length debut Street Level.

The Beatnuts push the tempo on the sample, turning the provocative mood of the original into the perfect low-end foundation for one of the best tracks on Street Level (and possibly The Beatnuts’ catalog).

• Serge Gainsbourg | Melody
• The Beatnuts | Superbad

My pals Jay (aka DJ Funkfinger) and Celine (Queen Celine) are putting on the first of what I hope to be many successful soul nights at Chez Nous in Phoenix. As you can tell by the blinking gif there, the night is called Filet of Soul.

Jay has kindly asked me to contribute some tunes – 45 minutes’ worth – and my wife (bless her) won’t let me get out of this. Eeek! As I’m not a DJ nor do I pretend to be, I’m a little nervous about showing how I can’t mix or match beats. To think, I usually mock those kinds of DJs!

Ah well. If anything, I’m going in there with a theme: I’m going to play soul songs that have been sampled by recognizable hip-hop songs. Maybe not all that original, but it’s what I know.

So who out there has some suggestions for me? I’ve got a pretty decent list compiled so far. I’ll be using Jay’s Serato set-up – what? I never ripped on DJs who mix only mp3s … honest – though I wish I could do it on all 45s.

No matter. Here’s one of the tracks I’ll be playing.

Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm | Getting Nasty

As sampled on:

Jurassic 5 | Concrete Schoolyard

Sole Sides points us in the direction of this gem — a mix of songs sampled by DJ Shadow as used for his own music.

This is another great example of how Shadow has inspired musicians and crate-diggers alike. Check out a previous post on the Shadow Sessions, a live band that performs Endtroducing.

From what I can gather, the guy who put this together, Fraykerbreaks, has been hunting/collecting Shadow’s sample sources for years.

Translated from the site: “Fraykerbreak, in his second collaboration with nachopancho brings us a set full of original samples from the magnificent DJ Shadow.”

• Fraykerbreaks | The DJ Shadow break set

Tracklist at nachopancho.net.

I’ve been enthralled by the recent writing on the revival of the Incredible Bongo Band’s 1972 LP, Bongo Rock, which contains the cover track Apache, a heavily sampled song in hip-hop for its wicked bongo/percussion breakbeat.

The New York Times wrote a piece about the album, which is being properly reissued after decades of bootlegging. Soul Sides followed with a little more detail about Apache. (An aside: If you’re not reading Soul Sides, you’re really missing out.) As a fan of hip-hop, I’d probably heard Apache copped thousands of times with no idea about the rich, and somewhat sordid, history of the song.

The short version is that the legendary Kool Herc got his hands on a copy of Bongo Rock, which was all but forgotten, and introduced it to his weekly DJ night in New York. Extra copies of the same record “allowed him [Herc] to extend percussion-driven sections of songs indefinitely through hand manipulation of the turntables, creating hypnotic percussive loops” (Times story). That gave rise to the use of the breakbeat, an especially vital part of a track for the B-boys and B-girls (or breakdancers).

Another post by Soul Sides from last year gives you mp3s of the various versions of Apache and just a few of the hip-hop songs (The Roots’ Thought @ Work, Nas’ Made You Look) that sampled it. DJ Z-Trip blended the break in Apache with Madonna’s Like a Prayer on the never-cleared but popular Uneasy Listening Vol. I with DJ P. The-breaks.com gives a list of songs that use the sample, though I’m guessing it’s only partial.

Needless to say, I defer to Soul Sides, the New York Times article and music writer Michaelangelo Matos for historical context of Apache. It’s quite an amazing piece of hip-hop history. (Meanwhile, the reissue of Bongo Rock is available at eMusic, which includes the 7-plus-minute Grandmaster Flash remix.)

I’ll add to Oliver’s extensive post of mp3s with L.L. Cool J’s You Can’t Dance. From Matos: “I believe the first major rapper to utilize “Apache” is—and I’m happy to be proven wrong about this—L.L. Cool J, with “You Can’t Dance” from his 1985 debut, Radio.”

Listen for the bongo break right at the chorus after L.L. spits, “You can’t dance.” On the raw and beat-heavy Radio, it seems like a natural spot for Apache’s introduction to the sampling world.

L.L. Cool J | You Can’t Dance

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IN A BIZARRE COINCIDENCE, I swung by Z-Trip’s Web site. He’s made Uneasy Listening available for download in four parts on a new downloads page. I strongly suggest you grab that; it was a mash-up before the term was ever popular.The album never got a proper release, likely because attempting to clear the hundreds of songs used would be a lawyer’s nightmare. I believe about 1,000 copies were pressed; I’ve seen numbered vinyl at Amoeba.(If you’re looking for the use of Apache/Like a Prayer, it comes early in the mix.)