My name's Adrian Younge
I've always loved music
I look at myself as like a hip hop producer
that went back to the late 60's, early 70's
to make modern music
I don't use any digital equipment
New music to me are old records I've never heard before
Sonically, black music is in a bad condition
As far as urban radio, it's terrible
If you have a number one record
you could be top of the charts for like, 100 weeks!
It doesn't mean you sold a record
If you look at the track record and watch the movie
you know how different artist's careers are going to end
It's not going to be any future in it
Who in this time period right now
are they going to make a movie about in 50 years?
Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Sam Cook
This generation, I don't know
Now R&B, love rap
I always think emcees have just a certain [esthese]
that they have to put out there
And it was all [inaudible] "thousand ki--"
how you going to not do that?
Right
You cannot sing with the banjos
I don't care if you're like the hardest rapper in the world
You lose an ounce
"Never too much, never too much, never too much"
that's just our people, that's what we do
You can have the musical language and not have the people
who's able to catch up the sonics
To me, his music sounds like it's a sample
And it's not
His main choice of instrument is the bass
There are very few musicians that takes the bass position
that's able to really inspire, influence and grow music genres
You gotta go back to Mingus
Adrian writes the music first
then he connects that drum and bass together
He's onto something
People refer to what I do as nostalgic
We're not using pluggins
We're not using a synthesizer that's emulating a guitar sound
We're using real instruments
When people hear that sound
it triggers something in their heart and in their mind
Black culture has just been running itself to the ground
And it's synonymous with the popularization of rap music
I'm a hip hop dude till the day I die
I feel like in a lot of modern music, there's a sameness
Somebody writes a song, somebody makes a beat on a laptop
The end product is a thin-sounding emulation
of what music should be
versus a golden era of hip hop
They're still using tape
They're still using microphones
Emcees are not rapping 30 times to make one tape
They're owning human error, the nucleus of great art
And real music has that
When you think about the sonics of music
sound travels at 1,120 feet per second
The many frequencies, whether, you know,
the higher hertz or the lower hertz
Now we catch all spectrums, you know
Talk about, how many notes are there in music?
And I told him, "there's only seven notes"
And he corrected me and said, "no, there's 12 notes"
But then [inaudible] only five notes
everything else is a division of
But the seven, it's similar to that God quality
The blue scale is a five note scale
A five in mathematics is power
and that's true, friend
We constantly create that
Rock and roll is a byproduct of blues
Hip hop, byproduct of blues
Popular music, itself
If you take that back to the Asian scale
it's still a five tone scale
And Asia has picked up their ideas
from their integration with Africans
So to define it, it's undefinable
One, two
I'm a collector of sound, meaning
I'm like a chameleon
I pass by something, I got it
In my neighborhood where I grew up
there was always a house playing some music in the background
I can remember fights in the streets
with a husband and a wife fighting in the middle of the street
and I would hear, "I never knew love before"
So every time I hear that song, I see that fight
If there was ever a disaster in America, the music would change
When I was walking in New York
I watched the first plane go into the building
Are you serious?
Promise to God
And then I watched both the buildings come down
Three months later, got back, I told the bus driver
"drive past Sunset"
Nobody
Turn on the radio, they were playing Bob Marley songs
like, "One love, let's get together"
They couldn't play any of the songs on their playlist
They were comfortable
Kendrick Lamar, when I first heard his music
was kinda talking in a different way about his life
The truth always resonates
I'm stuck in a certain world that I don't want to get out of
Some people are like, "Premier's stuff always has the same
even his hi-hat's the same"
But the people that say that could never do what I do
Next journey there'll be no hi-hat
Now tell me who has the highest sound now
People have said that, oh I use the same hi-hat
OK
But is it funky, though? How does it feel?
I'm more of a feel-guy
If it feels good, let it rock
In '96, I was recording on an eight track, Tascam Portastudio
My parents bought me a Fostex digital hard drive recorder
and I was super excited I'm gonna get a digital recording
I don't have to buy cassette tapes or anything
and it's just digital
It's great, it's clean. Digital was clean
That's what everybody was telling me
Started recording and I thought something was wrong
because of the way it sounded
My drums weren't hitting, everything sounded thin
and I literally thought I was doing something wrong
I said, oh my God
there's a difference between tape and digital recording
Took that machine back, got my eight track
and started living this arguably archaic life
of having everything authentic
Never accepting anything less
When I first heard this, though, I was like
man, how did they get this to sound like this?
This is incredible
It's the right kind of dirt
that matches with the way I like to sing
One of the major things I always wind up doing in the studio
is trying to dirty up the mikes
because of the digital age
My last album
we were in the studio for days trying to find the sounds
When I first [resigned], we still had two-inch analog
It all changed in like one year, we had to shift to Pro Tools
and that's the way the engineers worked from then out
It's just too clean
It's just missing that hiss
Like, how do we find the hiss?
We would just turn the fans on
just trying to recreate the random white noise
that analog tools have
That was one of the things that caught me
when I listened to the track
I decided that I wanted to go out to L.A.
just to start thinking about new music
and Adrian said, "you should come past my studio"
It knocked me out!
Because everything was analog and the dirt was just
He had a mike there, I'm telling you
I felt like, man, my voice sounds like
we didn't have to think about finding the sound
because it was just there
So we can just create
Next thing I know, I guess we're doing an album
Ten songs!
In four days?
That's unheard of
When I would go to my little studio to make a song, I would say
I want to make a beat that sounds like some dark [inaudible] shit
I need to find a sample with some organs and strings or something
So I'll go through a hell of records
looking for like an organ-type thing
or a string-type thing
Until I found something, what could I do to manipulate this
to give me a certain dark sound
Now, I walk into this room with a great sample in my head
and I record it how I want it to sound
So when I say everything is vinyl-based
it's what would I have heard on this record
that I'm playing in my imagination
A rare record from Hungary in 1971 that's like this band
that wanted to be The Beetles but weren't as good
Their recording was all fucked up
but that recording is what we think is super dope
that a hip hop dude would want to hear now flipped
with chords opened up for a bridge in the chorus
You see what I'm saying?
So I play guitar as if I'm one of these Hungarian dudes
that listens to American music all day
and I'm trying to be like them
you know what I'm saying?
I play drums like Idris Muhammad, but I'm never as good
because there's no cafes for me to play drums in
I play in my room all the time
I use those perspectives
I collect sounds, visuals
It allows me to put myself in a certain space
and make music based on what I'm feeling sonically
Not that I want to copy it; I want to feel like that
I'm never going to sound like the Spanish totally
I'm never going to be Stevie Wonder
I'm never going to be Donny Hathaway
I can put myself in a certain space
and make music based on what I'm feeling
but I can sit in a room and dream something up
That's what I mean, a 'collector of sound'
That's the artist side of me
That's the thing that people laugh about
they're like "fuck that artist shit, gonna make some dough"
And for me, I'm gonna do both
I've always said I was blessed and lucky
because I was only making records for myself
I was just fortunate that people liked the records
The Mighty Clouds of Joy, the Gospel Keynotes
Mainly Southern groups
Mahalia Jackson and James Cleveland and early Jackson Five
The Temptations, Smokey Robinson, The First Family of Soul
Grabbing 45's off the back of cereal boxes
All of that energy of a neighborhood talent show
See a little sign on a post, "$500 Win This Contest"
Run down the street, put a band together, you know
And all these people that were really good and better than me
So anything that I did, I had to figure it out
I had to like it a whole lot. And that's how I am now
If you grew up listening to David Ruffin
you wanna make people love you for a long time
That's my thing
You want people to take your music, make it not be about you
I'm from the planet of The Parliament
George Clinton and James Brown
and old Cameo records
Fatback Band, anything from The Parliament
to Bootsy to Funkadelic
I'm from that same planet
and a lot of people can't really go there
I was like, wait a minute, you know, ever since James Brown
no matter what the time signature is, I always start it on the one
The whole spiritual aspect of the music has kind of
taken a shift
I think where
most of our background and general charge would be
from going to church and singing on a choir
that whole experience is not the same
More and more, people didn't grow up in church
They didn't start singing in church
Their journey to this music is different
It used to be in the school systems
It's not that same narrative
Where you would get a certain spiritual thing
from maybe a god or love
that whole thing is replaced with a different god, which is money
A lot of the songs, the main drive behind it is revenue
But that's the whole concept of where blacks are right now
That's because we have a lot more opportunities
than we did in the past
So instead of having that lane to collect revenue
we have a lot more time to be retrospective
and inward thinking about dreaming
So the yearning was deep
or something else, you know
But that narrative has changed, so now we want to play catch up
We want to generate status and generate a different position of power
That's the mind state; that's the new god
That's the new yearning
The thing that would have made you complete
making an artist piece and loving it
now, the new gratification
the new thing, is to have money
You know, maybe after everyone gets that
they'll go back to the blues
But right now, it's like "Fuck that!
You gonna want me cause I got this shit!
You can't resist soul shit I got!"
You know what I'm saying?
G
You know what I mean?
Simple mathematics is A, B, C, D, E, F, G
and G is for what?
God
Gladys Knight and the people that wrote her music
they said start everything with G and you won't go wrong
But then you've got somebody like Stevie Wonder
and he seemed to stay in the B flat scale
Right, right
So when we're starting at A minor
Now at A, you know in mathematics they say A is for [a law]
We start a little bit below that
because we give respect to the maker
So we do A minor
But that scale, which is a relative to C
that scale is a powerful scale
We write in that scale a lot
I've been examined by a music doctor
and he says when I talk, my tone is A minor
And that's why I'm so attracted to that
You know what I mean?
I think us as black people are attracted to it, as well
It's something that's secondary but necessary
441 kilohertz, which is the sample rate of most A's
it's 44.1
That's A!
That's A
We're 440
That's what we'll probably stay at
That's A minor
People will say, you know, I hear your music and it sounds old,
but it sounds new at the same time
Why is that?
The reason why is because I'm making music for tomorrow
I'm trying to create timeless music