
The Micro-Chop Daily X #8
A Micro-Chop playlist featuring 10 hand-picked instrumentals — every single day for an entire year.
A nother day, another 10-beat instrumental playlist in the books. This daily playlist project and the subsequent writing it requires is giving me a needed dose of calm in my life.
My bank account is in dire straits, writing for other websites keeps drying up, and it seems like the prospects of living a financially stable life as a modern writer are grim.
But I don’t know what else to do, so I just keep plugging away one day at a time — hoping that people will start to care a little bit more if I tell enough engaging stories.
On this playlist, I’ve included a couple of all-time favorites from my distant past. I can’t remember the first time I heard Ayatollah’s instrumental for Cash Brown’s “Last Man Standing”, but I think it was in a commercial for ESPN’s show “The Life” in 2000. I immediately embarked on a mission to find out the name of the song — it was much harder to do such things in those days. Once I tracked it down, I downloaded a shitty quality MP3 on my friend’s computer and burned it to CD. Then I ordered doubles of the 12" vinyl from The Turntable Lab.
18 years later it’s still one of my favorite instrumentals. Although you probably recognize the beat as Style P and Pharoahe Monch’s better-known single “The Life”, I’ve always been partial to the original Cash Brown version. As great as Ayatollah’s re-flip was on “The Life”, nothing could replace the magic of “Last Man Standing” for me.
I also have a special connection to Foreign Exchange’s “Raw Life” that started over fourteen years ago. Phonte and Nicolay dropped their collaborative debut Connected in the summer of 2004 before my junior year of college and the album stayed in constant rotation for the next several years. In addition to my other favorites “Nic’s Groove”, “All That You Are”, and “Happiness”, “Raw Life” was one of my go-to songs. When I was studying abroad during the second half of my junior year, I would listen to “Raw Life” on repeat during my 30-minute walk to work, dissecting Nicolay’s production and Phonte’s impeccable verses.
Then I got to see Little Brother and Foreign Exchange perform live at London’s Jazz Cafe, which remains one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. While I was there by myself I got to meet Guardian writer and Phiona Okumu, who also happens to work for Apple Music/iTunes as a music editor and in label/artist relations. Phiona and her friends were some of the nicest people I met during my four months in London and the really helped set the tone for my entire stay there. I still have vivid memories from that show and the way the artists and crowd fed off of each other. It was magic.
Maybe I can’t make you experience the same emotions I feel when I listen to “Last Man Standing” or “Raw Life”, but I hope by my experiences with these songs make you take the time to really listen to them and the eight other instrumentals included above.
The eighth playlist in the Micro-Chop Daily X series features the following artists, with each name hyperlinked to bring you directly to their Bandcamp, SoundCloud, or website: OBUXUM, ProducerTrentTaylor, Dutchy, Seneca B, Audio Samuri, Juicy The Emissary, Ayatollah, Raggedy Jeans, Nick Wiz, The Foreign Exchange.
Be on the lookout for The Micro-Chop Daily X #9 dropping tomorrow.
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