Admitting to sampling Ultimate Breaks and Beats is one of the last remaining sacred cows of rap music. Ghostwriters and beat-jacking entire songs all seems to be fine and dandy these days, but the pride of claiming that you personally found every drum sound, horn stab and loop in the dollar bin of a ‘Mom & Pop’ thrift store/op shop is something that a very rare few are willing to admit to. When I asked UBB co-creator Breakbeat Lou about this, he revealed how Mantronik put together his classic ‘King of the Beats’ record:
Breakbeat Lou: What we tried to put out was something that was rarely available or people didn’t really know the name of it, even though we heard it many times in the parks and in the jams. In the later volumes, we were trying to push the envelope in the sense to do your homework the same way we used to do our homework. We tried to give you the tools to let you know there’s more you can search for than just what’s here. You can do your homework and go to a store and find out what else can be on Stax records, what else can be on People records. We were the instruments for keeping hip-hop ‘hip-hop,’ and we were the college for diggers. The digging craze started with us. Mantronik would want to get a test-pressing as soon as we got them. He would say, ‘Whatever you want, I’ll give you for the test pressing.’
John Leland and Steven Stein also caught sight of Kurtis in action, circa 1988:
Back at the Music Factory, Mantronik, the musical half of Mantronix, eyes the painting of a shattered skull on the cover of volume 12 of the Ultimate Breaks and Beats. He flips the jacket, new since his last visit, to look at the track listings. “What!?” Then, “Oh shit.” Then he realizes that the “Johnny the Fox” title he sees isn’t the Tricky Tee record he produced, but the Thin Lizzy original from which they took the title and beat. On a pillar opposite the Ultimate Breaks and Beats is a column of albums in green or black jackets that bear the legend, SUPER DISCO BRAKE’S. Mantronik sneers, “Those pressings suck.”
STANLEY PLATZER: Well, the Salt-n-Pepa girls were in, and then they went into the studio, they bought every one. Volume one to I think 12, at the time, and then they made the LP, they had them all on there. Jam-Master Jay bought four each, about three weeks ago.
K-Prince: I heard people were trying to get the test presses before the actual volumes came out, because they would be the first to sample the white label a few months before the actual pressings came out. My friend Willie Dynamite used to work at Downstairs Records. Ced-Gee, Marley Marl would come into the shop, asking if they had gotten the test pressings for the next volume.
DJ Eclipse: Me and my man The Mighty Maestro met Kool Moe Dee backstage at a concert. We started asking him about breakbeats because at this point we only knew the breaks by sound, not name. He told us a couple that he knew, but said we should ask his DJ, Easy Lee. After the show was over Lee pulled out an Ultimate Breaks and Beats LP and told me that was where everyone was getting them from. I wrote down the contact information off of the record. The next day I ordered doubles of all the volumes that were available at that time. Interestingly enough, we had first stepped to Eric B & Rakim with the same question at the same show and they both acted like dicks.
Amusingly, David Toop cites Eric B’s ‘disgust’ with DJ’s using breakbeat albums in his 1984 book, Rap Attack:
I asked the late Paul Nice about this as well:
Did you notice that a lot of hip-hop records would sample the new volumes as they came out?
Definitely, especially towards the later volumes. I called them ‘foundation’ records – they really were the foundation for golden era hip-hop. I think Diamond D said, ‘Lazy producers? Sometimes you would hear three or four songs off the same volume.’ Some of the more refined tastemakers like Diamond D – those guys who would shine a little bit later and were a little bit more innovative with their production techniques – would try not to sample from there. At some point it was obvious that those were the go-to records.
It’s interesting that there’s almost nobody who’s willing to admit that they sampled off of them.
You never know. There was that Dismasters song called ‘Keisha’ which was off the ‘Keep Your Distance’, the Babe Ruth [song]. I think Salt ‘N Pepa used a different part of that same record. When that came out I was like, ‘Oh wow!’ In hindsight – and maybe this is just me being cynical – but maybe Hurby The Luvbug got it right from the Volumes, the Ultimate Breaks and Beats albums, and Chuck Chillout or one of these guys from Bronxwood Productions or whoever was behind the Dismasters actually had the original record. I don’t know, it’s a mystery.
In terms of any artists actually admitting they dipped their creative wick into the UBB inkwell…this is as rare as ‘Take Me To The Mardi Gras’ without the bells. I spent some time trawling through my rap books, magazines and even the internetS (RIP Dallas Penn!) and all I was able to find were three examples of anyone actually admitting they took a funky break (from UBB) and they looped it.
EXHIBIT A:
Sweeny Kovar was able to wring a confession out of Peanut Butter Wolf (who I once saw cosplaying a Guy Richie character when he performed in Melbourne, in what was either a really dedicated piece of performance art or his misguided belief that British geezers get more dolly birds than Yankees on these shores) for this UBB feature for Passion of the Weiss in 2014:
PB Wolf: San Francisco was an hour drive for me and it was before I had a car so I’d have to find a friend or relative to take me up there to get them and I’d be bummed when they were sold out. San Jose was a difficult place to find the original breaks and those compilations would teach me all about hip hop more than anything. I remember driving down to LA maybe once a year or so and finding more volumes of the records and buying whatever I could afford. I’d use all of [the] volumes. A lot of the songs I was making with Charizma in the early 90’s were using things from them, but even the stuff I was doing in the late 80’s before I met Charizma was too. A song we did called “Ice Cream Truck” comes to mind as using a few different songs from UBB.
EXHIBIT B:
Brian Coleman detailed the recording of the first Jungle Brothers album in his 2005 book, Rakim Told Me:
EXHIBIT C:
More Brian Coleman action, this time discussing the creation of Strictly Business with EPMD in Check The Technique:
Elsewhere, Dee Barnes can be seen enthusiastically pulling two volumes of UBB from Ice Cube and Sir Jinx’s crates on this episode of Pump It Up from 1989.
Years later, the guy who attacked Dee Barnes for daring to show a cheeky Ice Cube diss on her show was caught out bullshitting in a music magazine. In the debut edition of Scratch in 2004, Dre explained that he stays away from sampling these days, right next to a photo of his studio displaying two copies of the Dusty Fingers compilations leaning against the wall. I guess he was just looking for stuff to ‘replay’, huh?
HipHopDX followed-up on this in 2010 when Chris Thomas interviewed Danny Dan The Beatman:
DX: Did you ever think of reaching out to a Kanye West or a DJ Premier to collaborate with? You’ve got the records to do it.
Dusty Fingers: The only one I want to reach out to, who is one of my favorite producers of all time is Dr. Dre.
DX: So when you first heard “Guilty Conscience,” which was lifted off of Volume 3, how did you feel?
Dusty Fingers: I loved it. It was a perfect marriage—the sounds that he used with the records that I put out. It was dope. I can’t say no more. It was crazy. He kinda reached out to me [in a photo shoot of his studio in the now-defunct Scratch Magazine] when he had one of my Dusty Fingers in the background. I thought that was cool of him to do that because he ain’t have to do that. I want to thank him for that because that was bigging my shit up. Even though it has a west coast feel, he’s always been authentic to his genre. When he replays all his stuff, it’s just a beautiful composition of what he really wants done. And all his shit is dope. He’s the only guy who does get my respect that plays keyboards because he’s going after that certain sound of what he really was intending: that Funk sound, that eerie sound and it complements the sample. And then when he plays the sample over, it sounds so much like the original record. It’s dope. I just hope to hear more stuff from him in the future. If I could link up with him it would be nice. I got shit for days that I could give him ideas with. I could really work as a team with him. We could make a lot of dope records.
Writer’s Note: Inquiries were made to each of the artists mentioned in this piece to refute the claim of sampling straight off a Dusty Fingers comp. There were no responses as of this writing. Every Dusty Fingers Volume mentioned herein was released before the actual artists’ sampling from them.
Not sure if Danny ever heard from Dre directly, but if this pic from the Chronic 2001 is to be believed, Andre has so many records stashed he’s happy to just walk all over those shits!
Perhaps it’s time to announce an amnesty so that all of these 80’s guys and gals can finally take unload their guilty conscience *cough* and admit that they chopped up ‘Impeach The President’ or looped ‘Think’ from their copy of Ultimate Breaks and Beats. It’s OK, rap fans will not think any less of you – most of us were just happy to escape the wasteland of drum machine and beatbox records that had taken over in the mid-eighties!
Just wanted to add that the intro to the Village Voice article is peak KRS-One:
The funny shit is in the mid ‘90’s, when cats were acting like they were too good to fuck with the UBB joints, Pete Rock and especially Preemo went back to them joints and made classics (ie. Pete and Preemo’s Impeach The President flips on INI’s Fakin’ Jax and Biggie’s Unbelievable , respectively…)
@oskamadiaon: There was a rumour that half of the drums on the first Jeru album were UBB drums that Premier chopped-up again. Maybe he lost a bet?
turns out that dre sold off that record collection a few years later: https://www.complex.com/music/a/backwoodsaltar/dr-dre-regrets-selling-his-massive-vinyl-collection-im
@hotbox: He had a bar in his record warehouse?! My respect for Andre Young has increased by 15%.
Man, this article made me go listen to ‘Stunts, Blunts, and Hip Hop’; “He doesn’t use breakbeats”.
The Dallas news was tough to take when I read it from his Wife. R.I.P to a great.
From memory there is an UBB volume pictured on the back of The Main Ingredient too.
@Sandro: Nice one, never noticed that until now.
So all of my Hip Hop heroes didn’t dig for breaks? I knew at some point I was hearing the same beats with (sometimes) different samples over them, but learning that they were just snatching their beats from someone else’s finished compilations is disappointing. These guys weren’t putting work in like that, they just went to the same place to sample the same records. I guess sampling a drum loop from Splice isn’t much different if you think about it in terms of the work they’re doing. SMH
The other issue is UBB and compilations are almost always needle drops, so producers are betting that the compiler had good gain staging/preamps, mixing console, bounced it to high resolution tape correctly, etc. Adding in another opportunity for quality to degrade before it even hits the sampler to get chopped up and worked on. As drums are the foundation of hip hop tracks, this can be a risky gamble.
Kinda reminds me when The Mighty V.I.C. told a story recently on how Dre bought a ton of his records back in the early 00’s too
Just a point of conversation, how do we know that any time a song from UBB was sampled that it was from UBB itself? The producer can actually own an original themselves. I know many people draw the line at after the first time a sample it used, it is done. But for those that use, re-use, repurpose the same same samples, are they not able to use a copy of a record they already own because it was on the UBB series? All of the songs on the UBB are not exclusively rare songs that no one would ever have owned or found on their own, though I know some of them are, in fact, pretty rare.