Hey I'm Mike Shinoda. I'm at Amoeba Records and this is What's in My Bag.
The first thing in here was one of my favorite albums of all time.
'Fear of a Black Planet,' which, I don't know if you can see the cool re-release.
The very first time I listened to it, I got it because
I'd seen '911 is a Joke' on Yo! MTV Raps.
But when I listened to the album, I kept coming back to 'Burn Hollywood Burn'
because it featured Chuck alongside Ice Cube and Big Daddy Kane.
Which is like such a weird combination in a sense, but it was really good.
It's probably one of the most influential albums ever for me, personally
which is weird, because I don't do what they do.
But they were so much more aggressive and thoughtful
and it was like such a well-rounded experience between
Chuck's hardcore delivery and Flav's joking around and then Bomb Squad production.
Just such a perfect record to me.
The next thing I found was this Bjork record, 'Post.'
I think it was probably the most artistic album I had ever heard up until that point.
Like somebody who just was approaching an album more like a gallery artist than a singer.
And to me that was... I was in art school, or getting ready to go to art school at the time
and it just broadened my horizons, y'know, in the sense of what you can do
in the midst of something that is more about commerce
you can inject quite a bit of art into it and still retain your integrity
and still make an album that people want to listen to.
This Pharcyde 'Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde' record was my favorite, favorite album
when it came out, for probably a whole year. I listened to it non-stop.
They were L.A. artists. They just had such unique deliveries and the beats were so incredible.
They were only together for a short time. They recorded one other album that people really heard
and then kind of fell off the face of the planet and broke up.
So it was almost like magic that this one album was able to happen, and it was so, so good.
To me, it kind of embodied graffiti culture at the time.
It's there, like you can kind of see it and whatever
but we were all wearing like massive pants and double, triple XL shirts
and like tagging on stuff and drawing those exaggerated graffiti-style characters and listening to Pharcyde.
For me and my friends, this was like the biggest record.
So excited to find this Aphex Twin 'Richard D. James Album.'
You can hear the influence of his stuff, maybe not just this album but his stuff in general
on a lot of our early material, when we were doing all the stuttering stuff.
Even if you listen to 'In The End,' there's like little bits of stuttering that's a digital manipulation to the vocals.
And you hear it now. It's still being done. You still hear Nicki Minaj doing it.
And it really all came from Aphex Twin. He would make an electronic track
and on its own it might not be the most interesting or exciting thing
but then he just ran it through a blender of digital chopping
and he just turned it into something completely different in the computer.
And he was using the computer as an instrument, in a way that I had never heard.
Y'know, chopping things up into like 1/64 slices
and then rearranging them and effecting them and I don't even know...
To this day, I've tried to figure out some of the things that he's done and I can't recreate them.
Refused. I don't think there would be a Linkin Park without Refused.
The sound of the guitars and the drums, like the live band sound of this album
was one of the things that, when we were recording and when we were mixing
I remembered A/B-ing 'Hybrid Theory' to this album
and being like, it needs to have as much energy as this album does.
Yeah, this is a really, really special record.
One thing that I was super excited to find, and it's not just one record, it's a whole bunch of records.
But when we were getting started as a band
our DJ Joe and I used to go down to Melrose
and find all these independent records that were made by DJs.
Usually here and New York, but sometimes other places. Bay Area, Chicago...
DJ Rectangle, DJ Swamp, Q-Bert... And I found a bunch of them downstairs.
The DJ Rectangle ones were cool to me because they had break beats and stabby scratches.
They just have a stab and then there'd be space and another stab and a space.
And that's what you'd use as like a battle DJ, what Joe used to do.
You'd use those and you'd fast forward to the next one and scratch that one
then fast forward to the next one and scratch that one.
DJs were getting really creative with it, to the extent that, on this DJ Swamp record
this one, what he did was he took all of these loops
and, y'know, the needle will go around the record one time
and over the course of the vinyl, they go closer and closer to the middle.
The little groove that the needle is sitting in is going like this.
Well they made this record without the grooves going towards the center.
They did one groove that goes around like this, and they set the BPM of the breakbeat
to fit one cycle, was the loop.
So it's called 'Never Ending Breakbeats' because you'd set the needle on it
and it would just ride a groove in a circle forever.
And then you'd go to the next one and it would just ride in a circle forever.
It's like a very, almost like scientific way to do it.
It was almost inconsequential what the beats were
it was just incredible that somebody had thought of that and done it.
And DJ Swamp was the guy.
But what's interesting to me is that a sound on vinyl
especially if you start to pitch it, it changes the sound so much
in a way that you don't get if it's in the computer,
and you don't get if you're using Serato with a digital file.
It's been pressed on to vinyl and then once you manipulate that, you get a whole new sound.
And y'know, my early demos and stuff like that whether it was my rap stuff or the stuff for Linkin Park
that was a lot of what I used to do.
Was that cool?
Yeah it was great. Thank you so much.
We really appreciate you talking with us today.
Yeah, this was super fun.