Undies’ pants beats? – I just realised why we don’t use the word “undie” for our hip hop over here. So I’m an idiot.
Josh doesn’t understand why people go on about undie beats being boring or just plain bad. With Mos Def I suppose you’re quite lucky. Probably the Roots too; I don’t know their work too well. The problem isn’t from the drum samples being obvious or the loops being common (I personally can find that a problem at times, which Tom doesn’t agree with, but that’s a different story) but with the arrangements being unimaginitive. The problem that annoys me the most is that it seems that all too often an undie producer just takes a bar of an old funk track and loops it for 4 minutes. No variation, no nothing. That doesn’t mean to say that repetitive can’t be good, but it often helps. A good Dre production, for example, will almost always have plenty going on which isn’t immediately the focal point but makes all the difference to the listener.
It’s hard to think of examples off the top of my head but for the bad side of things look at some of the older Rawkus stuff; some of those beats are so repetitive that I’ve fallen asleep listening to Shabaam Saadiq. It’s just a shame because the rappers can be so good and get let down.