And it was music that was very much about the respective scene. That means, from people who, if they wanted to hear some type of record, they had to go and make it. House music and hip-hop music both came from the ghetto. I think they’re part of the reason why you had to start clearing samples, because they were generating so much money off other people’s voices that the people who owned it were like, “Wait a minute, we’re supposed to get money from this.” Todd was sampling things and speeding them up on house records before you had to clear samples. This is gonna sound weird, but I actually give most of the credit to house producers like my man Todd Terry. The record’s too slow, OK, speed it up! RZA just did it in a way that no one had ever heard it before, and he did it amazingly. But to me, this is just a matter of hip-hop musicians making what they have to make out of necessity. Don’t get me wrong, RZA is a huge inspiration. You know what, everyone thinks of this as more of a lineage than most of us do. We simply attacked it a little different. The way me, Kanye and Just chopped it, it was more: We’ll get seven pieces of a record, put it back together, add a breakdown part and make the sample do the hook. Whether it was a two-bar or a four-bar loop, he might add some drums and a bassline and that’s it. RZA’s style was closer to a sped-up loop. RZA started it in like 1996, he was ahead of his time. Through their own words, we trace back the origins of the sound to Wu-Tang and house music, discuss the role of the MPC and the heydays of Roc-A-Fella and Dipset, as well as the impact the genre had on trap and dance music. But for this primer to the genre, we asked three of the production style’s most influential architects – Ayatollah, Rsonist of the Heatmakerz and Just Blaze – as well as Diplomats superfan, chef and author Eddie Huang, to reflect on how chipmunk soul changed the use of the voice as an instrument. There are countless producers who contributed to the legacy of chipmunk soul – Alchemist, Swizz Beats, Evidence, 9th Wonder and AraabMuzik, to name only a few. This intricate back and forth could inform the song conceptually – take Jay Z’s “ Song Cry” – or as a foundational call-and-response between the beat and the MC. As different as these tracks might be, one thing they all had in common was the interplay between the reassembled voices of the original samples and the raps on top. During those years, producers Just Blaze, the Heatmakerz and a young Kanye West created high-energy beats that served as the perfect backdrop for both larger-than-life braggadocio and rap sentimentalism.ĭespite having the genre in the title, the chipmunk soul aesthetic swiftly branched out from exclusively sampling soul records to reggae (“Dipset Anthem,” “Shottaz”), radio rock staples (Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” Starship’s “We Built This City”) and Middle Eastern records, which became a short-lived trend in its own right. The name mostly gets used in reference to the Diplomats and Roc-A-Fella era in the first half of the ’00s. Questlove allegedly coined the term, but it was arguably used more frequently outside the US than in the States.
The “chipmunk soul” style was enormously popular in the early to mid-2000s. Sonically, there was a direct connection between backpack and TriBeCa: high-pitched, cartoonish soul samples. While semi-independent operations like Rawkus, Def Jux and Fondle ’Em ran the underground, the charts were dominated by icy hardcore raps from the Ruff Ryders camp and Roc-A-Fella’s slick street soul. Bad Boy’s shiny suit empire started to fade, and New York rap diversified into multiple directions.
At the turn of the century, East Coast hip-hop was fun writ large.