I fell down a WhoSampled rabbit hole and landed on “You Are What I’m All About” by The New Birth, produced by the great Harvey Fuqua. The album cover might suggest some kind of goth techno, but the actual music is gospel-inflected R&B.
This track has been sampled many times, mostly the clave part from the beginning. For me, though, the real magic comes when the vocals enter at 0:22. Then it suddenly becomes the most outrageous groove you’ve ever heard.
Let’s have a look!
(Noteflight has no clave sound, that’s why the part is playing back on a cowbell.)
The “yeah yeah yeah” in the fourth bar of the pattern feels like it should hit on the downbeat, right? But no, it’s on the “and” of one. My ear reorients so that the “yeah yeah yeah” feels like it’s on strong beats, and then the next measure feels like it comes in too early. That is wildly destabilizing. You’d expect that when drummer Robin Russell comes in, he would settle into some simple backbeat pattern that would tie it all together. Instead, he either accents unexpected beats with empty space between them, or plays crazy fills. It should be annoying, but it works! (Thank you to commenter Jet Jaguar for identifying Russell for me.)
The harmony is simpler than the rhythm, but still satisfying. It’s almost all plain vanilla E-flat major scale except for G7, the V7 chord of C minor, the relative minor key. The riff begins with a walk up the E-flat major harmonized scale: Eb, Fm, Eb/G, Ab, Bb, Cm. Then insert the B natural from G7 as a chromatic passing tone between B-flat and C, and you’ve got it. The riff ends with a really nice variant on the V-I cadence, Ab/Bb resolving to Eb. You could think of Ab/Bb as a voicing of Bb9sus4, but I hear it as a literal combination of the Ab and Bb chords, a way to have both the subdominant and the dominant play at the same time. This kind of mostly diatonic harmony arranged in rhythmically complex ways with hip chord voicings is an essential gospel formula, and it always sounds great.
I tried this groove under the acapella to David Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream” and it sounds pretty awesome!
David Bowie wrote some of his best songs over funk and soul grooves, so this didn’t require a huge leap of imagination on my part. Still, it’s always exciting to hear something familiar in a new context.
By the way, The New Birth was a whole vibe onstage.
Yo, ever heard Always Be My Baby by Mariah Carey? She must have lifted the **** out of this.
It looks like this may have been the drummer – someone actually mentions him in the comments on the video. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Russell
Insane opening groove indeed!
Thank you!
The New Birth was one of my favorite groups of the 1970s. I remember my mother playing their cover of the Bobby Womack song, and their cover of Skylark’s “Wildflower.” This is a great analysis of one of their great hits.