What happens when the House of Hits puts a hit on you, musically speaking?
Soul II Soul owned dance floors and radio airwaves all over the world in 1989, when the one-two punch of ‘Keep On Movin’ and ‘Back To Life’ took the hip-hop DJ’s blend tape style to the mainstream. This was the breakthrough that DJ Hot Day, Kid Capri, Grandmaster Vic and Ron G had prepped us for – smooth R&B vocals over proper rap drums.
Teddy Riley’s New Jack Swing sound had already been circulating for a couple of years at this point, but that was very much a different beast – a faster, twitchy groove designed for the polkadot shirt and Gumby haircut dance floor set. Soul II Soul’s Jazzie B and Nellie Hooper nailed it when they delivered a gentler, head-nodding tempo that worked just as well in the car as it did on the floor.
This was still the Wild West in terms of what you could sample, and it wasn’t long before rap fans noticed that the addictive groove of both songs had a familiar ring to it – the beat sounded exactly like Biz Markie’s hilarious ‘Pickin Boogers’!
Marley Marl explained his take on this to Havelock Nelson for the October 1991 issue of The Source magazine:
‘When I first heard “Keep On Movin’” I bugged out. I was like, “Oh shit…right off my jam.” You know it was dirty as hell and I knew nobody knew about this Larry Graham shit. He just have to had lifted it off the dub version of “Pickin’ Boogers”. That flipped me out, but it just let you know that was another innovation I came up with that was good. It’s not the Soul II Soul sound, it’s the project sound of Marley Marl.’
That being said, Larry Graham break is a stretch, since the album that hosted ‘The Jam’ (Graham Central Station’s Ain’t No ‘Bout-A-Doubt It) had a UK pressing so the ‘rare groove’ heads over there would have been up on it.
But sonically? If we compare the sound of the original drum loop, taken from Larry Graham’s ‘The Jam’ at the 5:08 mark, to Marley’s version for the ‘Pickin’ Boogers’ dub, his version has a very different feel due to the way it’s been compressed, EQ’ed and given that Queensbridge coat of grime to it.
Marley detailed his set-up during this early Cold Chillin’ records period to Amir Said for The BeatTips Manual, which explains why songs such as ‘Eric B. Is President’ and ‘Pickin’ Boogers’ have such a distinctive sound:
‘I had a Roland TR-808 that was triggering off of three separate samplers…I couldn’t afford no Emulator, so I bought the cheap little samplers, the one-shot bullshit. I had a Korg SDD-2000. It had a sampler and a digital delay. I had three of those.’
Jazzie B already had form here, having previously used another Marley Marl dub (‘Make The Music With Your Mouth, Biz’) as the basis for the ‘London Beats, Volume 1’ bootleg his crew released in 1987. As he told Jeff ‘Chairman’ Mao in 2010:
‘We made our own mixtapes, and this is an example of what we used to do. This is what ended up being called rare groove, we didn’t pay any royalties, nothing. We did it with three turntables, and if anyone remembers the Bozak Mixer, that was my pride and joy, it cost us a lot of money. Someone nicked it as well…We called this “London Beats” ‘cause it was all the songs that were big on our club scene in the early ’80s.’
To add another wrinkle to this torrid tale, EPMD went and did the exact same thing in reverse for their track ‘So Wat Cha Sayin’ at exactly the same time! Erick Sermon explained the circumstances around this to Daniel Isenberg aka Stan Ipcus back in 2012:
‘I happened to be going on tour, and we were overseas in London. The DJ plays this beat, and it’s “Fairplay” by Soul II Soul. And I’m like, “What the fuck is that?!” And he gives me the dubplate. I still got it, it’s warped now. When we get home, and we’re going in the studio, I had the dubplate. And that was it, with ‘One Nation Under A Groove.’
I heard Clark Kent find those drums later on in life, and I was like, “Yo, how did you find those?” He knew it was ‘Fairplay’ for some reason, because people were searching for that, because it was “Impeach The President” just beefed up. Clark Kent knew. He played it on the radio one time. I couldn’t believe he found it. But it was years later that he found it, not immediately.
Jazzie was a dope producer for Soul II Soul. He was hard. But he had no idea we used that record. They would’ve been came and got us. But he had to know, because it came out that year, and I took it. He might’ve just not been focused on that type of stuff. Because it was a dub version on the B-side of their record.’
By some strange cosmic coincidence, DJ Pete Rock then played this very same EPMD single right before he starts cutting-up doubles of Soul II Soul’s ‘Back To Life’ for almost ten minutes on an 1989 episode of WBLS’ In Control radio show, hosted by none other than…Marley Marl.
As you might recall, ‘Back To Life’ was an accapella track on the first Soul II Soul album, Club Classic Vol. One, but after the single mix (which apparently used the drums from ‘The Jam’ this time combined with some Dennis Coffey percussion instead of Marley’s version) became a hit the original version was swapped out on later US pressings, since a huge number of punters had bought the album and returned it because it wasn’t the mix they knew and loved.
By the time 1990 rolls around, Marley Marl gets some payback and grabs a snippet of the Caron Wheeler vocal (from the album version without any backing track) for the Intelligent Hoodlum (aka Tragedy) single, ‘Back To Reality’, complete with Nellie Hooper style piano keys!
Just to add some more sugar to this already undrinkable Kool-Aid, A&M Records then enlisted C.J. Macintosh for the ‘U.K. Remix’, and he went and looped the start of ‘Keep On Movin’ – complete with a snippet of Caron’s ‘Keep’ vocal clipped in. What the actual [Aaron] Fuchs is going on here?! Did Marley make an expensive truck call to London and demand that C.J. added the Soul II Soul record as part of a double-decker trolling of Jazzie and Nellie? I’m surprised that he didn’t ask the pressing plant to carve ‘I Dare U 2 Sue Me!’ on the run-out groove at this point.
But, as Blastmasta KRS-One was so inclined to declare when on stage, ‘We’re not done…we’re not done.’ The final chapter of this bizarre saga saw Caron Wheeler (the vocalist for the aforementioned Soul II Soul singles) record a single with the late, great Biz Markie in 1999, over a backdrop of Rocky horns, courtesy of Saleem Remi and pals. Did Biz ask her what was up with her boy Jazzie B pinching his ‘Pickin’ Boogers’ drums a decade earlier while they were sharing tea and crumpets at Power Play? Maybe Caron gifted him the mythical, one-of-a-kind Bob James ‘Mardi Gras without the bells’ CTI 12” he used to troll everyone about as compensation? You’ve got to respect the man, he played that bit to the end like a true comic-book villain.