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The haunting echoes of r&b and garage ephemera are hallmarks of Burial’s music. Myriad, minute vocal snippets, tossed-off castaways in a sea of murky radio remembrances, reanimated as deeply expressive fragments, pitched around, recontextualized rhythmically and harmonically and vibewise. This is a poignant poetics, sometimes jaw-droppingly so, as the producer projects an alarmingly “human” voice despite denaturing the originals so audibly. (Reminding me of my reactions to Mouse on Mars’ excursions in synth-bent emoting<\/a>, evoking an obviously artificial but affective fragility — but that’s the topic for another post perhaps.) <\/p>\n Prolly the best example in Burial’s oeuvre is “Archangel<\/a>” which, as noted here<\/a>, sources its suggestive vox from a couple amazingly fleeting moments (ad libs even!) in a semi-successful<\/a> but forgotten r&b jawn<\/a>. <\/p>\n Beyond Burial’s own distinctive remixing of the recent past, the approach has become more broadly adopted across contemporary electronic\/sample-based production, especially by dubstep producers wielding similarly semi-obscure (and sometimes truly obscure) reggae samples. Burial falls into this camp too, with recent dancehall recordings — like their r&b and garage counterparts — serving as suggestive sonic signposts of post-millennial\/colonial London. <\/p>\n As \/Rupture noted<\/a> via this insightful bit of sample spotting @ the lockitdown blog<\/a>, Burial sampled Sizzla’s “Just One of Those Days<\/a>” (aka, “Dry Cry”), his BIG CHUNE from 2003, for 2006’s “Broken Home<\/a>.” <\/p>\n Living in Kingston in 2003 I bore repeated witness to the power of Sizzla’s massive one-drop revival album, Da Real Ting<\/em><\/a>, so Burial’s allusion jumped out at me way back when his first album<\/a> dropped. One of the things I found so striking and beguiling about Burial’s use of a phrase from “Just One of Those Days” was the way he displaced its original emphases by shifting its place in the meter by but an eighth-note. <\/p>\n So, while the original sounds like <\/p>\n whose FAULT no ONE but mySELF\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n in the Burial track, it goes<\/p>\n WHOSE fault NO one BUT myself\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This may seem like a subtle distinction, but that’s what makes it great. Indeed, that’s what makes it better, to my ears, than a rather similar attempt at transformation: e.g., what strike me as the baldly (and badly) manipulative efforts of Zomby for “The Lie<\/a>,” which takes the following Sizzla lyric<\/a> —<\/p>\n I was born in a system that doesn’t give a fuck about you nor me, nor the life of our kids\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n and turns it into<\/p>\n I was born in a system that doesn’t give a fuck about you nor me, nor the lie\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n WHICH. MAKES. NO. SENSE. & totally undermines Sizzla’s critique. <\/p>\n Is this supposed to be a sly and suggestive gesture? If so, it comes up woefully short. I think it rubs me the wrong way, interestingly, a lot more than than, say, Kanye West’s equally brazen use of Chaka Khan’s “Through the Fire<\/a>” to propel “Through the Wire<\/a>” (which I find funny and surprisingly compelling) — and I think this difference emerges largely for ideological reasons, which are inextricable from aesthetics (or, in other words, my idiosyncratically but also historically \/ culturally \/ socially \/ politically situated reception of the poetics at work in these tracks), despite that some may want to make room for “strictly” musical considerations in these rarefied conversations.<\/p>\n