Heavy Rotation Part I

So this will usually happen on a Sunday night, but my mate Bunners knocked me out with a fat bowl last night, so it's happening today.
This weekly (hopefully) post will be to highlight whatever track has been heavy in the rotation of songs i've been listening too. It won't necesssarily be a track released the previous week; in fact knowing the state of hip hop at the moment it probably won't be from the previous week unless it's a good week for Hip Hop.
It'll just be a track that is good enough to get me to stop listening to Get This for a while, could be from years ago, could be something crazy, could be a rarity.
Or it could be none of these things.

So, part I.

Promoe - Headache
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Promoe (Mårten Edh) is a Swedish rapper, and a founding member of Swedish hip hop group the Looptroop. This track has been getting the first play of the morning for quite some time now, and will continue to do so.
Taken from White Man's Burden, it's been a while since i've heard a track that uses interplay between the rapper and the sample so well. Headache uses a decent selection of samples from Julie Driscoll's A Word About Colour, taking the chorus as it's own (as do so many tracks these days), but unlike most chipmunk soul beats released these days, the original inspiration for the beat is brought in throughout the verses themselves, in a variety of different ways.
As highlighted below, the Julie Driscoll track individual lines of A Word about Colour are sometimes brought in to link one bar to the next. Sample is in parentheses:
"My semen's sedated from stress and toxic waste,
my whole being's mutated;(my soul)
don't even mention my soul,
it's been gone for so long...."
A clever and mellifluous way to link the original feel of the sampled piece into the new track, and it is put to better use a little further on when samples are used to rhyme 2 lines, and close out the verse:
"Stumblin around in a state of mass (confusion),
and i see no solution, (confusion)
but to turn up the music to soothe this (pain that i'm feeling).

This continues throughout the track to great effect, increasing the effect of both the beat itself and the potent lyrics. And the lyrics are potent enough without needing to be propped by the beat. Again, keeping with the theme of the original sample, the track is heavily politically motivated, although the lyrics lean more towards highlighting the feelings of inadequacy and helplessness that accompany people who feel left out of the political system about the issues For example,
"We spiral downwards,
inbreeding a bunch of spineless cowards
livin' in an illusion we define as ours.
Nationalism's that kind of prison
we assign all power,
desperately clinging on to it until the final hour..."
As Rex Hunt might say, this is dizzy stuff folks.
Ghostface raps over "Superman Lover", and uses the concept to structure the feeling of his rhyme, but doesn't really play with the original song during his verse at all, and most MC's rhyming over a track with a sample based chorus will use the first line of the chorus to dismount from the verse e.g. Lil' Wayne's "Best Thing Yet":
"And that's because I know the sun will raise again,
And when it do, Im'a praise the Man.
They say "You crazy Wayne!" but I just bake a man,
And thats Ms. Baker saying that i'm the...(Best Thing Yet)"
Nice, but not nearly as impressive as appropriating a whole track into your lyrics.


Well, that's it. Enjoy the track, and as an added bonus, here's the original inspiration for you to compare the two.
Julie Driscoll - A Word About Colour
Now, i'm going to drink Vodka and Cranberry and watch The Wire until I crash out.
Peace,
~Broke