Sebutone Def
Let's get granular
The story of the Sebutones song “Sebutone Def” starts with a side mission. In 1994, I made a trip to NYC. One day while I was there, I went into the Fat Beats shop at the old original location on E. 9th Street. DJ Eclipse was working that day. I remember that when I walked in, no one else was in the shop. Eclipse was at the turntables doing cuts over an instrumental and it was funky. After looking around for a bit, I told him I was looking for a copy of Critical Beatdown by Ultramagnetic. I had a bunch of the early 12”s but only had the album on cassette and was looking to fix that. Depending on the day, Critical Beatdown is (and since it came out in ’88, has been) my #1 or #2 all-time favorite hip hop album.
Eclipse told me that they didn’t have any copies BUT he had just heard that the guys at Funk-O-Mart in Philly had just scored a whole box of them. He gave me the number for the shop and told me to ask for a specific guy (I forget the name now). So I called the shop and got the guy on the phone. He confirmed that they had recently found a box of Critical Beatdowns but said they only had a few left and that those last few copies weren’t for sale. So he offered me a deal - a trade. He said that if I could find him a copy of a record he was looking for, he’d give me a sealed CB. The offer seemed completely reasonable at the time but viewed through the lens of today’s record game, it seems utterly outlandish. The record he wanted was an Afro-Cuban jazz album called Afro Temple by Sabu Martinez. Depending on condition, that record sells for anywhere between $400 and $800 today. OG copies of Critical Beatdown go for $50, tops.
I told the guy I’d take a look for him and would call him back if I had any luck. Now here’s the truly bonkers part of the story, given how rare the Sabu Martinez record is: I found a copy a week or two later! But I didn’t make the call to my guy at Funk-O-Mart because I found a copy of Critical Beatdown too. What a week that was!
It quickly became apparent why this guy in Philly was fiending for the Afro Temple record. Holy shit. That record is bananas. The main attraction is a song called “My Christina”, which begins with an ungodly drum break - one of the all-time heaviest, if you ask me. And those are the drums I sampled for “Sebutone Def”.
“Sebutone Def” was the first song Sixtoo and I recorded together as the Sebutones. Rob (Sixtoo) lived a few blocks away from me in those days, so we hung out all the time. When we first decided to form a group, we had a few long discussions in which we devised a philosophy and a set of guiding principles. There was a very specific esthetic we were going for. We wanted to make songs that were slower in tempo compared to the norm. And ‘menacing’ was the word to describe the vibe we were after.
The beat for “Sebutone Def” didn’t start with the drum break. It was the bass. I wish so bad I could remember where that bass comes from but I can’t. I pray that I never sold whatever record I sampled and that it’s still in my collection somewhere. One day - maybe this winter - I’ll go through every jazz record in my collection and scan for bass solos. As I recall, I was playing whatever record that was one day and randomly hit the record button on the SP-1200 during a particularly chaotic section of the mystery solo. Normally, a loop jumps out at me and I grab it. But not in this case. I just wanted the chaos and hoped to wrestle it into a loop. Once I had a clean loop started, there wasn’t a discernible rhythm to it and that was fine because I didn’t necessarily want there to be one. But when I added the Sabu drums - holy snappin’ arseholes, as my uncle Wayne would say. Somehow the drums married themselves to the bass in way that made it make some sort of terrible sense. I knew right away I had a banger on my hands. After that, I added a horn sample. Once again, I can’t remember where it comes from. I just liked that it had a sort of wounded animal energy to it. And that’s it! Very simple, really. But those three elements that work very well together, I think.
Now, as for the lyrics… You’d have to ask Sixtoo for insights into his verse. Here’s what I can tell you about mine:
I remember there being a bit of struggle to write the first line because I had trouble working out a flow for such a slow beat (83 bpm - I had never rapped over a beat this slow). But once that first line was down, I was rolling. The rhymes hit in odd places in the first few lines but I liked that. It’s sort of a nod to Kool Keith.
“We got egos!” is a reference to “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force, of course. I had become a member of the Universal Zulu Nation a few years before and wanted to offer a salute.
Where Rob says “what does it all mean?”, I wanted that to be a sample but I couldn’t find the sample I was looking for at the time. I know now that it comes from a radio broadcast from 1945 - the mayor of New York reading comics for kids. The sample was used in a bunch of hip hop classics by Double D & Steinski, Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince, 3rd Bass and Cypress Hill, to name a few.
“First we’ll take Manhattan and then we’ll take Berlin.” Looking back, it’s pretty weird that I made a Leonard Cohen reference. When I made this song, I wasn’t the Leonard Cohen fan I’d later become. When I lived in Montreal, I always went to this particular breakfast spot because I heard he liked it and went there sometimes. I finally did see him there one day after going for months. I was too scared to say anything to him. And years after that, I played a Leonard Cohen tribute show in Austin and met a bunch of the people from his band (but not him). I saw him play at the Beacon in New York in 2009. I had two tickets. I offered the second one to Robert Christgau, who had been a friend for several years at that point. Bob and I had a great time. Our minds were blown. That was one of the best show I’ve ever seen.
“Most contemporary hip hop types are like a stone's throw from being wack but not the Sebutones though…” Word got back to me that Peanut Butter Wolf and some of the guys in his camp thought this was a dis aimed at the Stones Throw label. That stressed me out because it was not my intent at all and in fact, I was a big fan of what Stones Throw was doing. I dreamt of being ON that label! I was just using the expression. Maybe I should have considered the potential for the line to be misconstrued.
“… all I see is MCs concerned with foreign policy…” I wish I could remember exactly what was on my mind here. I think I was sensing that hip hop was approaching a point of no return. This was the mid-90s and although we were entering a heyday for indie hip hop, it was also the beginning times of hip hop going mainstream and I didn’t like it. I could feel the music I fell in love with in the 80s dying.
“You can’t beat the beats, you can’t cut the cuts…” The chorus is pretty hokey but I wanted to emphasize the idea that with both Sixtoo and I, you were dealing with ‘masters’ of all the elements of hip hop. And sometimes, keeping it simple is the best way to get a point across, I suppose.
Hey, look - lately, I’ve been asking myself if I should keep these posts going. When I started in the spring, people seemed pretty keen and things ramped up fast. In the last while, things seem to have cooled a bit. Granted, all I have to go on is ‘likes’. I guess that’s the economy we’re living in. But I don’t want to waste anyone’s time. I don’t want this to feel like spam. So for as lame as it is to ask, ‘like’ this post if you want me to do more. If I see that a decent percentage of y’all are into it, I’m more than happy to keep going. Otherwise, I’m thinking I’ll disappear again for a while and focus on my drum breaks project and maybe another album. If that’s the case, maybe set up a notification for these posts if that’s possible and I’ll check back in down the road when/if I have any significant news and/or a new album. And check in on Bandcamp once in a while. I could slap some shit up there at any time.
