In order to shop at the Park Slope Food Coop, you have to do a monthly work shift. I do two a month, one for me and one for my wife, who is much too busy earning most of our money to do her own shifts. I work early mornings on the Receiving squad. As produce gets unloaded from trucks outside, we break down the pallets, bring everything into the basement, and organize it into the various walk-in coolers. One of the Receiving coordinators plays music from a mammoth Spotify playlist called Sea of Liquid Love, over 1,900 tracks spanning hip-hop, electronic dance music, reggae and other groove-oriented styles from around the world. During my last shift, “Can I Kick It?” came up in the rotation, and in spite of the fact that we were schlepping boxes of vegetables around before dawn, everybody lit up. Why is that track so great? How did these guys, all of whom were younger than twenty years old, record such an all-time banger?
Before I try to answer the bigger questions, let’s take a look at the samples in the order of their appearance in the track.
The song begins with an iconic bassline sampled from “Walk on the Wild Side” by Lou Reed (1972). I heard this song surprisingly often on classic rock radio growing up. David Bowie and Mick Ronson co-produced it. Tribe’s label didn’t clear the sample. Rather than suing them, Lou Reed agreed to let Tribe use the sample in exchange for… uh… all of the publishing royalties. That seems excessive.
The bassline is really two basslines sliding in opposite directions. Contrary motion is a common contrapuntal device, but it’s usually discrete pitches, not slides. Bassist Herbie Flowers played the slide from C down to F and back on an upright bass. Then he overdubbed the slide from E to A and down from C back to E on electric bass. Here’s how he came up with the idea.
If you are a bass player, you should know that it’s possible to play both parts at the same time by tapping.
Anyway, the slide guitar and percussive clink are from “Sunshower” by the eclectic disco/jazz group Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band (1976).
I wonder whether they only wanted the guitar slide and caught that little percussion sound on the end unintentionally, or if the percussion was always supposed to be there? I heard the clink as a flaw for a long time, but now I’m starting to think that if it wasn’t there, the track would be too smooth and would lose its edge.
The drums and organ are from Dr. Lonnie Smith‘s recording of “Spinning Wheel” by Blood, Sweat and Tears (1970). It’s a pretty chaotic performance, but Joe Dukes‘ drumming holds it together.
In Q-Tip’s verse, on the line, “a life filled with fun that’s what I love”, the word “fun” with the horn blast is from the aptly-titled “Fun” by Sly & The Family Stone (1968).
Finally, if you get the album version of the song from iTunes, it starts with a lead-in that is really the end of “Bonita Applebum.” The groove underneath the guys talking is sampled from an extremely weird song, “Jagger The Dagger” by Eugene McDaniels (1971).
In this interview with Mix Magazine, Tribe’s engineer Bob Power talks through the tedious and labor-intensive process of putting the track together. The standard narrative on sampling is that it’s a lazy way to avoid playing your own instruments. Today, maybe that’s true! But in 1989, sampling was a major technical challenge. The devices they were using couldn’t sample anything more than a second and a half long. Bob Power talks about having to spread drum parts across multiple samples and then meticulously aligning them using SMPTE timecode.
I made a mix of all the songs mentioned in this post, enjoy.
I made this for a couple of different reasons. First of all, four and a half minutes is not nearly long enough for the magnificent groove that “Can I Kick It?” creates, I need at least ten. Second, I want to hear past the boundaries of those samples, to know where they come from. Every time I hear “Walk on the Wild Side”, I’m disappointed when the Dr Lonnie Smith beat doesn’t kick in. Thanks to the magic of Ableton Live, I can make all those things happen without too much difficulty.
By the way, the music video of “Can I Kick It?” uses a different mix of the song with different samples. The Extended Boilerhouse Mix has a great Prokofiev sample. The Von Trapp mix brings in Julie Andrews. These are all fun, but none of them hit me as hard as the album version. Why is it such a timeless banger? Tip and Phife are great emcees, their lyrics are clever, their voice qualities are distinctive and charismatic and musical. But for me, the main thing is the track, the contrast between the oceanic serenity of the bassline, the gigantic beat, and the chaos of the organ sample and Ali Shaheed Muhammad’s scratching. It’s so much greater than the sum of its parts. Lou Reed should have thanked Tribe for giving his bassline its true home.