If you’ve ever bought a DJ Kicks album by any of the famous spinsters out there, you’ve certainly noticed that the original music samples that inspires their tracks is entirely another animal. Here’s a case in point. It turns out the heavy-breathing, hard-beating Massive Attack has sampled a ton of little known sexy funk classics. No shit. So you have to think to yourself, “Massive Attack are huge funk fans?!” Well, at least one of them is…
Some of their samples come from tracks that we can all recognize (“Never Can Say Goodbye” by James Brown, “I’m Glad You’re Mine” by Al Green) while others are totally off-the-wall numbers that only a true RnB/funk aficionado could possibly bring to mind when throwing together a beat (“It’s Time For Love” by Pieces Of A Dream, Mambo by Wally Badarou).
This is the true talent of modern music makers: you have to cull for the real hooks. Taking only the best known hits of yesteryear is a copout. How weak is building immediate popularity out of a single sample on an otherwise mediocre product? (Hear that, Vanilla Ice!)
Taken out of its context, which this compilation does without much coercion, the tracks on Protected: Massive Samples don’t draw many obvious or immediate references to the MA songs sampled from it. Nonetheless, this is a remarkable assembly of little-known one-off wonders that never made Kasey Kasem’s list, and something perfect for background entertainment while you do homework, laundry, or in my case, flip burgers for a yard full of drunken douche bags.
Thanks to Massive Attack for inadvertently taking painstaking years to make a mix-tape that—if you’d made it yourself—would impress the hell out of your friend at the record shop and probably get you hella laid if you gave it to a little hottie with a nice bottle of wine.
