Oblique Saturdays

A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion. 

Last week's card said 'Disconnect from desire'.

Disconnection from desire came via Gala, The Beastie Boys and Scritti Politti. From the Bagging Area readership pool, Ernie was in first with Alessandro Moreschi, L. Braynstemmmmm suggested Kraftwerk's Computer Love, Rol offered Claudie Frish- Mentrop and Expendables' Man With No Desire and Jase gave us Sinead and I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got. Chris also offered Sinead's second album and suggested the Apple Brightness Mix of I Am Stretched On Your Grave which has a sample of How Soon Is Now buried within it.  

This week's card said this- Breathe more deeply.

Good advice. Useful for dealing with stress, increasing mood and focus. 

In the studio breathing more deeply could be interpreted as an instruction to let the music breathe, to slow it down, leave more space between the notes, focus on what you're not playing as much as what you are. It makes me think of Basic Channel, the Berlin techno duo who made dub- techno so minimal, so stripped down that it almost became something not music- just pure sound, a breathing exercise. 

This one is fifteen minutes long and from 1994. The dull thud of a muffled kick drum, a ball of barely there static, a repeating synth sound. Inhale exhale.  

Quadrant Dub I

I also thought of this from Deanne Day, a mid- 90s pseudonym used by Andrew Weatherall and David Harrow on three 12" singles. D and A. Andrew had dropped out of view a little post- Sabres, a choice to shun from the bright lights and the greasy pole. Blood Sugar was a deep house/ dub techno night he put on and Deanne Day fits in very well with that sound- kick drum, hiss of hi hat, lots of space, that vocal sample, 'I can hardly breathe', and a bassline to groove to. Another nearly fifteen minute long track.

Hardly Breathe

Inhale exhale. Calm in repetition. 

Later on the vocal becomes, 'When you stand there/ When you stand naked/ Looking at you'. Less calming perhaps. 

The synths swirl, the drums drop out, the bass bumps away, the snare rattles. A few minutes later (and nothing happens in a rush in Hardly Breathe, everything plays out for bars, unfolds in its own time) a long two note chord moves in. 

Andrew had a thing when making records around this time, as Deanne Day or Blood Sugar. There could only be four elements going on at once. If you wanted to add a new sound, you had to remove one. It kept it minimal and focused. Restrictions as a creative tool- which sounds like an Oblique Strategy. 

Feel free to make your own Breathe more deeply responses into the comments box. 

Forty Minutes Of That Drum Break

Back in December I posted I'm Not The Man I Used To Be by Fine Young Cannibals and then more recently Madonna's Justify My Love, both songs driven by a very famous drum break- the Funky Drummer, a drum solo played by the legendary Clyde Stubblefield on James Brown's 1970 single Funky Drummer (actually from the B-side Funky Drummer Part 2). Digging into My Bloody Valentine's back catalogue over the last two weeks brought me back to a B-side from 1988 titled Instrumental No. 2, the flipside to a 7" single given away free with the first 5000 copies of Isn't Anything. 

My Bloody Valentine and Madonna (with co- writers Lenny Kravitz and Ingrid Chavez) both built their songs around a short interlude track by Public Enemy from 1988's It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back. PE's Hank Shocklee denies that the drum break on Security Of The First World is a sample from Funky Drummer but both My Bloody Valentine and Madonna sampled Public Enemy- Kravitz denied it saying it was a drum break that was 'just lying around the studio'. Kevin Shields was getting into acid house in 1988 as well as developing MBV's guitar noise and there's a good argument that Instrumental No. 2 is the first indie- dance track, ahead of The Soup Dragons, ahead of The Stone Roses and ahead of Primal Scream. Admittedly Happy Mondays might want a word.

Anyway, the whats and wheres and who's firsts aren't what I'm here for today. I started piecing these tracks together and thought I'd try to get them and a handful of others to work together in a mix. Forty minutes seemed enough- there are literally thousands of songs that have sampled the Funky Drummer and hundreds of hip hop records including Boogie Down Productions,  LL Cool J, Eric B and Rakim, Run DMC, Beastie Boys and NWA. In fact I might come back and do a hip hop Funky Drummer Sunday mix. But in the meantime, this one is those records above and a couple of others. 

For a while Shadrach by The Beastie Boys were in the mix but it's a different drum break, more likely from Hot & Nasty by Black Oak Arkansas and I dropped Fool's Gold in too but it's not the same break either- it's a funky drummer but not the Funky Drummer. DNA and Suzanne Vega did make the cut but I don't think it's actually the Funky Drummer, it's more likely sampled from Soul II Soul, but it felt like it fitted. 

It's probably worth remembering that Clyde Stubblefield, the man whose drumming is the Funky Drummer, got nothing more than the session fee as the drummer in James Brown's band. 

Forty Minutes Of The Funky Drummer

• Public Enemy: Security Of The First World
• My Bloody Valentine: Instrumental No. 2
• Madonna: Justify My Love
• Sinead O'Connor: I'm Stretched On Your Grave
• Fine Young Cannibals: I'm Not The Man I Used To Be
• DNA and Suzanne Vega: Tom's Diner (DNA Remix)
• Radio Slave: Amnesia (Instrumental)
• James Brown: Funky Drummer (Album Version)

Security Of The First World is from side two of It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back, the greatest hip hop album ever made, Chuck D, Flavor Flav and The Bomb Squad writing the book on how to splice noise, funk and rap, politics, race and music. Security Of The First World is a one minute twenty loop, the Funky Drummer, a pulverising bassline and some bleeps, that changed music. 

Kevin Shields sampled Public Enemy for Instrumental No. 2. The pitch drops a little and it sounds scratchier- maybe they sampled it from vinyl. Over the top Kevin plays ghostly guitar chords and layers of wordless vocals to create something that would inform later MBV tracks- Soon is surely born here. 

Madonna's Justify My Love was a 1990 single, banned by MTV due to the S&M, voyeurism and bisexuality on display in the video. I wrote about it earlier this month here. Madonna and Lenny Kravitz wrote and recorded it in a day according to Lenny, very quick and in his words 'authentic'.

Also from 1990 is Sinead O'Connor's I Am Stretched On Your Grave. Sinead was a huge Public Enemy fan. The lyrics are from a 17th century poem, Taim Sinte Ar Do Thuama, translated into English by Irish poet Frank O'Connor and set to music in 1979 by Irish artist Philip King. Sinead's vocal is stunning, alone over Clyde's drumming. Some bass bubbles in, there are some drum crashes and at the end there's a dramatic fiddle part by Waterboy Steve Wickham. 

In 1989 Fine Young Cannibals released I'm Not The Man I Used To Be as a single (the fourth from their album The Raw And The Cooked). They sped the Funky Drummer up and there's some house music in the chords and production. A song that bears repeat plays. Roland Gift was a star who reused to play the game. 

DNA sampled Suzanne Vega's a capella version of Tom's Diner (from here 1987 album Solitude Standing though it dates from earlier, it's on a 1984 Fast Folk Music Magazine album). DNA played it over the drum break from a Soul II Soul record. DNA pressed it up and released it without permission and it took off. Suzanne's label A&M decided to release it officially rather than sue (Suzanne liked the version) and it became a massive hit. It's not the Funky Drummer but it felt like it fitted with Sinead and Madonna and the whole 1990 drum break sampling vibe. 

Just to show that you can't keep a good drum break down, Amnesia is from 2023, a track by Berlin DJ and producer Radio Slave and a tribute to the Ibiza club Amnesia and partying under the stars in the mid- to- late 80s, something Radio Slave admits is a romanticised notion. 

I was in two minds about including the source material. Funky Drummer was released as a single by James Brown in 1970, split over both sides of the 7" with Part 2 being the source of the drum break. This is a nine minute studio version, released on a 1986 album In the Jungle Groove- surely the source for many of the hundreds of artists who followed Public Enemy's lead after 1988 who sampled it.