#songbender part 46 – Roni Size – Strictly Social
Top of the eeevnin to you all ladies and gentle as hell men. This time we’re going back to when drum&bass actually meant something with drum and bass in it, and all the rest were just the bells and whistles.
So if someone is as old as i am, definitely remembers Roni, and we have already featured another song in my list. And there is really only one thing i want to talk about right here and right now, and that is that:
after all these years, when I get back to these old ones, it’s really amazing (to me at least) how similarly i think about crafting songs that i make. It seems that these things were such an inspiration for me back in the day that i simply can not imagine doing it any other way.
Like, just check when he brings in that little breakbeat on top of the actual rhythm. I mean, this is my shit, yo. I do this all the time. And i learned it from these guys. And i believe that this is how it SHOULD be done. Don’t ask me why. I can’t tell you and i don’t care.
But maybe this is also the reason why i’m so skeptical towards today’s music – it just seems so empty to me. With all this 16th notes on the hihat, and desperately trying to find a “new” sound – well my friend, you won’t find any. Everything has been done before you. And it’s just the question of talent whether you are able to find a combination that suits the song(!!!!!) or not.
mostly not, these days.
so this is a primitive song, if you think about it. nothing really happens in it, nothing is really surprising. but back in 2000 we were not really after that shit, you know? this was actually new, and something else, compared to the pop crap and the techno and the 4/4 and the whatever was going on at the time.
this may have very well been created in a tracker (like fasttracker2 that we used) as really there are no effects, right? there’s no cutoff filter, no phaser, nothing INTERESTING that recent stuff is so much after.
but still, it’s an iconic song in my eyes, as it just throws samples on top of each other, but doesn’t overthink it, and just lets the rhythm and the bass (oh wow what genre is this again?) do the work.
This is from the Planet V compilation from 2000, which was somehow a bullseye in terms of collecting all the absolutely kickass songs of the time. And it’s not just my opinion – most of the time when there’s a compilation, there’s like 2-3 songs on it that are worth their while – well this one, it’s a bullseye all the way.
And still, while this is not the best song in the world, AGAIN, right? who cares. It’s a great one in my eyes. And hopefully you can find the things i mentioned in it as well, and maybe at least it got you following the rhythm, which is quite ok for a 24 year old song.
thanks for checking, and see you next time!