Not all messages are displayed:
show all messages (125 of them)
five years pass...
i also love deep cuts, but most of ya’ll probably figured that out by now.
what is it about that moody track in the middle of side two with the almost painfully resonating chorus, or that fierce rocker that had the unfortunate task of being placed after the hit single in the album’s sequence? are those songs not to be taken as seriously as the more promoted ones? even with some of them smashing fucking everything? oh, and that b-side remix that only ever appeared on that one import 12” single? that shit is essential, dude.
why am i drawn to these songs? these wonderful, sometimes ramshackle, sometimes ebullient, sometimes beautifully understated songs. like a lot of questions in my life, i can’t answer that. all i can do is explain where my concept of “the deep cut” comes from.
and unfortunately, like with a lot of things that shaped the way i think about music, my concept of “the deep cut” comes the source magazine. i probably haven’t read it in over 20 years and not regularly since the 90s. but wow, for a few years there, they had a complete hold on me in terms of taste and what i needed to check out. besides the reviews, my favorite part of every issue was a single page with lots going on: there was of course “rhyme of the month” (which then became “hiphop quotable”) in a column running down the side of the page, the ever-beloved unsigned hype feature at the top, and at the bottom in a highlighted box, the treasure trove of selected deep cuts from current favorites, labeled simply “FAT TAPE.”
(reminder that i am a person living with dissociative identity disorder and as soon as i finished typing that sentence, my inner dialogue immediately erupted in a cheerful resounding hurrah of, “OH FUCK YEAH——FAT TAPE!!!”)
fat tape was so reliable that they kept the name “FAT TAPE” even when nobody bought tapes anymore. fat tape was so reliable that they often put songs in there that would later end up as singles. fat tape was so reliable that they would put songs in there and then absolutely trash the album in the reviews section of the same issue (while also talking up that same song in said review lol). fat tape was so reliable that i began to be able to gauge what page of each issue it was on with one riffle. fat tape was so reliable that i started buying wackass down south bounce shit because they started having their songs show up in fat tape. and fat tape was right — god fucking dammit this shit is dope as fuck.
during my time reading the magazine, i’d say probably 80% of the songs that showed up in fat tape ever got issued on a single of some sort (but oftentimes, they did highlight what would become the second or third single or at least a b-side). a lot of them became very well-known album cut (and, back then mixtape) favorites. sometimes they got really obscure, too. i remember there was a group that got featured in the “alternatives” section (where they would briefly review other hiphop-adjacent genres, mostly r+b) and somehow they had a song end up in fat tape (the group name is lost to time, but i do remember going into my local wherehouse record store and trying to special order it to no avail).
so i guess that’s where i got it from? i was trying to stick out as a dj in the years to come and i became so obsessed with seeing people respond to awesome jams they didn’t know at all by people they knew really well. the hunt was on. should i play “ms. fat booty” or “know that”? or should i say fuck it, fuck the vinyl purists, i’m just gonna play the unreleased jam i downloaded from the internet and recorded to minidisc?
(and then i started to get into rare grooves and beat making —— don’t think i need to explain that one of the main ideas of that scene is kind of the glorification of the deep cut)
it got to a point where i just stopped playing well-known songs some nights. i wanted to bring that fat tape calibre curation to people in real time. of course i went too deep and i got lost. i didn’t dislike singles or more popular songs, i just wanted to hear something different. years later, i find myself less concerned with singles than ever (but i still really love them sometimes, slowdive’s “kisses” is a yearlong favorite by now). i still have that fat tape kind of mentality in my head though, maybe stronger than ever. these days, labels can put out whatever pre-release “singles” they want but the streaming numbers tell the full story. when the last carla morrisson album came out, “diamantes” was just an album cut. i called it a fucking jam immediately. it was in her top ten most played on spotify for a long time after the album came out. even now with the new mariah the scientist album, i was all about “from a woman” on first listen and that’s the one track from the album that’s consistently trending in her top five.
i don’t wanna say i’m some sort of all-knowing music shot-caller, but i can’t even begin to formulate what a life without a constant search of deep cuts would have been like. it’s too much fun not to dig. but what am i looking for? i guess to answer that would be to kind of answer the question “what is a deep cut?”
and i’m looking for a song that contains a definitive characteristic —maybe even a few of them— for that artist. like something that you can only get from them or the people they’re working with. to me, the most definitive deep cut of alltime is “push.” it’s a song that hardly ever got played even when it was new. i wasn’t there to hear the album when it was contemporary, but by the time i got to it, that was my favorite song on the album right away. it’s everything i love about the cure. it went on all cure mixtapes and compilations of feel good jams and is still a reliable companion for long car rides and big sunsets. and it wasn’t just me that knew the song was awesome: it had such a cult following, they started to play it live again in the 2010s and it’s a common setlist staple by now. f`kn rad.
anyway, i don’t have any really new insights here. it’s been a fun journey through music, as cockeyed and askew a path as i’ve carved out for myself. like i say, can’t imagine any other route. i guess i’ll leave with one last thought: i love deep cuts, but i really love when the album takes its title from the deep cut. ooohhh that gives me chills.
― "another slice of death, please." (Austin), Saturday, 11 November 2023 21:26 (five months ago) link