Chipmunk Soul

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Chipmunk Soul is a production style of hip-hop music , which during the early 2000s was very successful commercially and the East Coast -Rap impressed this time.

Instead of the instrumental samples customary for hip-hop , the Chipmunk uses soul vocals samples , which are often taken from well-known soul pieces and then pitched and looped . The name Chipmunk goes back to David Seville , who used the technique of pitched voices very successfully in the late 1950s for the cartoon series Alvin and the Chipmunks . Subsequently, the Roots -producer? Uestlove the term Chipmunk Soul coined for this new form of hip-hop producing.

Vocal samples were used in hip-hop production as early as the 1990s, prominently, for example, with the Wu-Tang clan mastermind RZA ; The basic idea of ​​Chipmunk Soul to play vocals samples faster (and thus also higher) did not arise until the beginning of the 2000s with the new generation of New York producers around Just Blaze , Kanye West and Heatmakerz .

One of the first commercially successful chipmunk soul productions was the Just Blaze-produced single Oh Boy by Harlem rapper Cam'ron in 2002 . Oh Boy was characterized by the congenial interaction of the production and the raps and soon became a hip-hop classic. Subsequently, Cam'ron and his crew The Diplomats ensured a further popularization of the production style on various mix tapes and the style-defining album Diplomatic Immunity (2003), which contains various productions by Just Blaze and the Heatmakerz. Another milestone is the Kanye West album The College Dropout from 2004.

literature

  • In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era by Richard Iton, Oxford University Press US, 2008, ISBN 0195178467