Genre
The side where the record is the instrument: samples, breaks, turntables. Less about the charts, more about music built out of other people's music.
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Selection Hip hop
Turntablism
Ten records
Ten American records from 1995 to 2000, grouped by the label that issued them. Read from the catalogue numbers they give away what the sleeves don't: several of them aren't albums at all, and four of the ten we can't find on Spotify.
Song Hip hop
Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth
Mecca and the Soul Brother
The 1992 track everyone knows as hip hop's elegy comes from a 1967 saxophone record picked up on spec in a Village shop by another producer, who had already used that loop on a remix released earlier. How it changed hands, and who it was written for.
Artist pick Hip hop
Madlib
Shades of Blue
In 2003 Blue Note sent him the original tapes and let him get on with it. He did not only choose the tunes: he chose the takes, and the minutes where the studio is just people talking. Four records he pulled out of that archive, and what he heard in them.
Monograph Hip hop
545
EPILOGUE
Four turntables shut in a room, five days, five songs. That is the deal the group is named after. Across five albums it never came out at five, and in July 2026 the run closed.
Our hip hop starts from a technical move: take four bars off somebody else's record and make them last as long as you need. Two trades come out of that, hunting the records and playing them, and neither one resembles writing a song.
What interests us is where the move turned into composition. Records made of nothing but samples, the turntable used as an instrument rather than as a contest weapon, the small labels that put them out. It is the part of the genre that shares more with electronic music than with radio.