Always preferred Good Life but I can see why that's probably wrong
there was preoccupation with precision in 80’s drumming (of course coming out of drum machines and sequencers and all that). it’s really coming across in the drums on this. Camp flared nostrils. alan rickman in die hard. Annie lenox’s hair and outfit in ‘sweet dreams’. Those claps in ‘money that’s what I want’. Precise drumming as some strange proxy form of opulence. A very 80’s sense of “drive”. Determination.
Reminds me of this:
the drums are like an overexcited basset hound running through loads of mud and fucking loving it. It’s dumb bubblegum pink, oversized tongue flailing through the air, big floppy ears. Covered in rain and mud and living life to its idiotic fullest
that chromatic thing in the chords is all witchy. Walking into a tent and a gypsy woman with big jangle bracelets and earrings is awaiting you in the austere, mystifying glow of a crystal ball.
Proper hardcore synth stabs in this one. Something an mc would say something great over; “get wild!” and then you’d proceed to get wild.
I agree it's human scaled music. It's not bombastic. It's very often lonely, alienated, sad. There's a romanticism to the Detroit stuff, a melancholy. Very much city music. Late night music.
Makes me wonder about romanticism and 90s rap - the sampling of jazz, harking back to another era, even when rapping about the cold realities of street life. Something wistful and belated about it. Swept away by synths later. Something otherworldly in that sample heavy new York rap, whether it's spooky or yearning or nostalgic.