Sunday Music: Millie Jackson Moments

It came up in the Nardwuar interview with The Alchemist - how he’d used the same 1976 Millie Jackson record to drive songs by Mobb Deep, and Dilated Peoples.

It’s important to say, my flashback here is to listening to a lot of all three of them in the late-90s and early-2000s. My entire awareness of The Alchemist’s work was in slowly piecing together how he did both underground and more mainstream work. I was genuinely fascinated by how he seemed accepted on both sides of the divide.

That was a big deal in that era. It’s still a big deal today, to me, at least. Largely because I wanted to figure out the same thing for myself, in whatever way I could, and not exclusively with music.

How could you be self-sustainingly viable, but also still respected for your artform?

It’s kind of a north star for my whole life, really. And, even though back then I was in my early college years when this started to really make sense to me, there weren’t a ton of examples of adults who were doing it. You either sold out or you stayed underground and the people who chose to stay underground always seemed to be struggling with viability.

Despite all those questions, The Alchemist was one I latched onto. All the beats, ever since, both in life and musically I mean here, I don’t even know if that pun was intended or unintended, showed him navigating it. Because I could find him in the liner notes of a big record that kids at parties might be playing, and a relatively unknown record that I was mail ordering and obsessing over like some kind of secret treasure.

I have gone down a bunch of rabbit holes in the past regarding samples he’s used, but I hadn’t really cross referenced them against each other like this. Of course, Nardwuar has. This is why I love his interviews, right? I want somebody who can pull out a childhood reference or some piece of obscurity, even if he himself doesn’t totally understand it’s context, but the research process makes you respect his respect for everybody he interviews. Damnit, that’s inspiring too. But that’s a whole other post.

Nardwuar brought up the Millie Jackson record in the interview, how Al used it for both artists, and even if his memory seemed a little hazy on it (we are talking about work he did 30 years ago, let’s be fair), but it sent me digging for the original Millie Jackson record.

Free and In Love is a pretty serious record. It doesn’t have a Wikipedia page of its own, which, feels odd since the two chronologically neighboring records do, but it’s out there and easy enough to find. Still, if it’s source material today still isn’t worth of a wiki deep dive, imagine the crate digging reality of what this record represented in the mid-90s.

This is the stuff great crate diggers are made of. Even the internet hasn’t fully caught up to mid-90s Al. And one thing you can hear almost straight away when you play any of the songs is that Al definitely lifted drums from these records.

One iconic part of the Mobb Deep sound is the drums. The snare with crazy long decay in particular is a personal favorite. It’s the sound of something clicking or pinging or tapping in a concrete and steel stairwell, somewhere near you, but you can’t tell if it’s next to you or far away, and that makes it a little bit haunting and a whole lot intimidating if you know you’re out of your element and firmly in somebody else’s.

Millie’s got that snare in spades. She’s got some other more ethereal sounds in the arrangements too, and just like The Alchemist loves movie sound effects and generic scene background vibe-music, you can see the what and why he’s hunting on this record straight away.

Even when he actually uses her voice, which he did for Dilated People’s, you get a slightly more pitch shifted and intense “you’ve done nothing” that - it totally fits the underground against the world energy Dilated was so great at.

Dilated didn’t get the Mobb Deep snare. Mobb Deep didn’t get the Dilated vocal sample. Alchemist was painting different pictures with the same source ink and brush. It’s a really cool think to unpack.

The Alchemist still bridges a divide we rarely see creators bridge. I’m still looking up to him in that way. Finding out details about how he was working when I was discovering him makes me happy. Not just because I get a little nostalgic when I hear these songs, but because it serves as a reminder of how much you can do with so little, if you’re just willing to dig in and get creative.

Here’s Millie Jackson’s “I’m In Love Again,” followed by Mobb Deep’s “Drop a Gem on ’Em,” and Dilated People’s “The Platform.” Never would have guessed they were all related like this. Thanks Nardwuar.