Playlist Of The Day 8/22/2015: The UBB Playlist

Ultimate Breaks & Beats – So this is how it all ends up. One big, orgiastic release of 24 songs that were featured on the Ultimate Breaks & Beats series. There's one from each volume in the series, except one for which there weren't any tracks available on Spotify. It's a little weird, since there's probably at least four or five available Spotify tracks that sampled the songs that aren't on Spotify. That's the nature of the past. It just vanishes, leaving tiny little vestiges everywhere. It causes selective memories. It engages our psyches in dismal masquerades. It comes in as a siren and leaves like an echo. By the way, I have no idea what I'm saying right now. I'm typing this all without actually looking at the screen. Come to think of it that's how I get 90% of my work done. Including at work. Work-work.

If you've not yet read the Cuepoint oral history about UBB, please do so, it's a fun read. It contains these quotes which feel like good notes to end on.

TR Love: There’s different people that jumped on the bandwagon after the fact. You’ve gotta remember the originator — the originator is Lenny. Ultimate Breaks & Beats served the masses, from there spawned other entities, other eggs, other offshoots of everybody else doing their own versions with their own volumes of drum breaks. Anybody can capitalize, if it’s done correctly. But if you just throw ‘em together it’s not gonna work, because it doesn’t have the same quality.

Paul Nice: The golden era of hip-hop wouldn’t be what it was if it wasn’t for that series. If that series wasn’t available, recorded rap might have died. It might have had a much shorter history.