Apr 4, 2019
The Album: James Brown: In the
Jungle Groove (1986)
This is the first of what will eventually be four episodes,
released quarterly, that focus on the art of sampling. As Morgan
explains in this episode, sampling isn't simply a key aesthetic
within pop music styles, especially hip-hop, it's also an important
way through which the past becomes present, allowing us to
rediscover artists of yore. No artist in the 1980s benefitted more
from this than James Brown.
By the end of the decade, Brown's long funk discography had
seemingly been mined thousands of ways over but if you had to trace
things back to a ground zero, you'd find In the Jungle
Groove, the 1986 compilation from Polydor that practically
felt designed for sampling, especially by highlighting some of
Brown's fiercest and funkiest tracks, complete with new edits and
remixes, none more far-reaching than "Funky Drummer," a former
45-only jam that the comp not only released in its full form but
also took Clyde Stubblefield's iconic breakbeat and looped it into
its own standalone track.
For our inaugural Art of Sampling episode, we revisit In
the Jungle Groove and talk about both our favorite songs
off the comp as well as our favorite uses of those various tracks.
Listen to how we give it up and turn it loose.
More on In the Jungle Groove
Show Tracklisting (all songs from In the Jungle Groove unless indicated otherwise):
Here is the Spotify playlist of as many songs as we can find on there.
If you're not already subscribed to Heat Rocks in Apple
Podcasts, do
it here!