G. LOVE AND SPECIAL SAUCE
WORLD MUSIC THEATRE, JULY 16
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While riffs and bass lines from old Parliament-Funkadelic records were once the staple of hip-hop sampling, the frantic search now for that “rare groove” has resulted in increasingly diverse and creative borrowings. DJ Muggs of Cypress Hill and House of Pain pillages hard 60s R & B and blues–the heart of Cypress Hill’s “How I Could Just Kill a Man” is bluesman Lowell Fulson’s classic “Tramp”–and innumerable combos groove on everything from late-50s jazz (Digable Planets’ bop appropriations) to 70s soul jazz (just about everyone else). White boys do it too: the Beastie Boys, this year’s Lollapalooza darlings, and G. Love and Special Sauce, a new three-man outfit from Boston, are to varying degrees influenced by hip hop, incorporating it into their even broader, more idiosyncratic musical universes.
The Beastie Boys have been making a lucrative career out of such seemingly haphazard genre splicing for years. After their bratty multiplatinum debut, they got musically weirder and threatened to become irrelevant. But 1992’s breakthrough album Check Your Head split the trio’s shaky hip-hop pedigree wide open: it employed live instruments, a blatant hard-core burst, loads of Meters-like slumming, and uncut 70s-style funk. Their recent Ill Communication adds even more esoteric sounds–chanting monks on “Bodhisattva Vow”–but that album doesn’t really do much more than use Check Your Head as a template, attempting to re-create its success. Continuing to mock their white-skinned hip-hop illegitimacy–“Get It Together” features the line “I’ve got a Grandma Hazel and a Grandma Tilly”–the Beasties ignore musical boundaries, loading their recordings with a dense pastiche of unexpected samples.
