#esg #samples
Back around Dilla Day, I took a look at one of the most famous sirens in hip-hop and dance music — the wooooop that kicked off Mantronix’s 1988 sample-collage classic “King Of The Beats” and became Dilla’s signature drop during the last few years of his life.
And while it’s a funny sort of example of how you don’t even need to use a melody or a break to create an instantly recognizable touchstone of a sample, there’s an even more unlikely, instantly recognizable sound in the same vein. It’s one that hip-hop and a host of other genres made into an enduring moment of recurrent and exciting noise even though it was bizarre and borderline abrasive: that unearthly, oscillating, torn-aluminum creak that signals the titular extraterrestrial touchdown in ESG’s instrumental “UFO.”
It might not be a huge mystery just how ESG made it into so many crates — they were from the South Bronx, peaked right when the early Roxy-fueled hip-hop/punk crossover of Downtown NYC was at its height, and were thoroughly danceable in pretty much any mode. (Exhibit A: Larry Levan/Frankie Knuckles/Haçienda heavy rotation jam “Moody.”) But why this piece of their music seems a little harder to grasp at first. Maybe we can figure it out from here.
The Original: ESG, “UFO” (from ESG EP, 99 Records, 1981)
