It Took Seconds

Six minutes: So as I understand it what happened was this - there were certain rules of structure associated with songwriting and composition and those played a big part in determining how long a thing was. And then James Brown came along and basically unhooked length from this framework by saying, “OK, let’s build a track around groove rather than around structure”, and the groove could extend from a few seconds to as long as the players could physically sustain it. And this is one of the things hip-hop is built around. So when you’re listening to much early hip-hop what you’re listening to is scale-free music - individual moments in the track don’t necessarily progress from or relate to others, there’s not necessarily a starting point or at any rate the starting point feels arbitrary.

By ‘85 and tracks like the Boogie Boys’ “A Fly Girl” we’ve come out of hip-hop’s super-long-song period - which won’t fit into the structure of this blog, of course - but some of that scale-free feeling sustains. How long does “A Fly Girl” need to be? How many rhymes have we got? I like the pedantic breakdown of what makes or doesn’t make a girl fly enough - fluorescent socks a dealbreaker? Standards are high! But mostly I enjoy this for the rock-hard beat with its occasional keyboard drop-ins and the background sound of a knife sharpener.