The Waxonia Desk on Neo-Soul
Five records from the two years around Voodoo, when a group of musicians in one New York studio argued a genre into existence — plus the sampled bar that the drumming on all of them is answering.
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D'Angelo / Untitled (How Does It Feel)
The band play so far behind the beat that it feels like a dare. Most of that feel is four people refusing to hurry each other rather than anything that was ever written down.
Slum Village / Guess Who
Dilla's drums audibly and deliberately out of time: the single most imitated piece of programming of the last thirty years, released before anyone had a name for what it was doing.
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Lauryn Hill / Ex-Factor
Made just outside the collective and unmistakably of the same moment. The competition between these records is audible on all of them, and it made every one of them better.
James Brown / Funky Drummer
The bar underneath everything above it. A generation of drummers learned Clyde Stubblefield from a sampler rather than from the record, and played him differently as a result.