The stab is Dave Tompkins' conceptual invention. He's the US scribe who talks like a twenty-clawed crab walks. Tompkins is almost impossible to understand unless you've shared the same breakfast cereal, swapped hubcaps with him, seen the Reds crush the Bronx Deltas together, beaten him at craps in the park, met his mum, traded Miami Bass 12"s and daytime soap plots. He apes hip-hop's game of popcult simile. It's easy to think he's missing the point; for me it's the SOUND of rapping which makes it soar; the cadence not the content. It's a shame because with his stuff on "the stab" he isolates one of THEE most pungent sonic cliches. There is a piece in the totally classic "Tuba Frenzy" zine (the one with the Richard McGuire cover) in which he goes into it in depth. Er, I guess I got about a third of what he was on about...
DJ Premier would be one of Tompkin's "stab" idols. The way Premier wields those hard-edged concussive riffs on All City's "The Actual" and let's the space between do the work, mmm, that's stabbing. Also the "torque", feedback sounding like a playstation trial-bike, which spills off the stabs of Miami Bass, is key to his stab pantheon. Dennis Coffey's "Scorpio", and it's quavering trebly squall is classed as one of the original stab tracks, and epitomises the snug fit of the very America-centric "Story of the Stab."
The real playground of the stab is Rave. Beltram's "Mentasm" features the stab-de-stabs. In Rave one is confronted by about a billion post-mentasm stab tracks worth mentioning. Interesting here is 4Hero's "Mr.Kirk's Nightmare". I reckon Dego and Mark Mac heard the Mentasm stab through Dennis Coffey's "Scorpio". Looking at Ardkore within the context of Soul and Funk is rarely considered worthwhile, but in this instance it's illuminating. "Scorpio" was hardly a transgressive flavour for SUAD, Danny Breaks and all the other "fast hip-hop" crew. It was famously one of Afrika Bambaata's "slay 'em" tunes, well and truly factored into hip-hop by Queen Latifah and De La Soul's "Mama gave birth to the Soul Children" It's easy to see how it's dissonant stabs could be aligned to Rave. Coffey's riffs were galvanised by Rock. However 4Hero were as much into the minor key riffing of Bob James' "Nautilus" or Roy Ayers' "We live in Brooklyn baby", with their coffee-coloured ambient stabs and Jazz-Funk tuning. That's what they heard in the (Black Sabbath influenced) minor key Mentasm riff. History bears this out. People were generally baffled (and the critics disgusted) by Rave music dovetailing into Jazz-Funk-lite, all that music which followed Good Looking records and EZ Rollers "Rolled into One". We shouldn't have been so surprised, this was what the stab meant to many of the raving crew, minor-key Jazz Funk riffs. Clearly born out by 4Hero's recent trajectory too.
It's been weird hearing this new Beyonce "Crazy" track. For a while it seemed like Timbaland's stabs on Ginuwine's "What's so different", Missy's 3rd LP, and that whole gamut of BBoy's on ecstacy that Reynolds was chronicling a few years back (Jay Z's "Snoopy Track", Memphis Bleek's "Is that your chick", Ludacris's "What's your Fantasy", and Ja Rule's "6ft Underground) were a stateside rebirthing of the ecstacy mentasm stab, the connection underlined by it's synth-etic implementation. It'd be quite easy to get all Jungian and Chomskyian about the primal nature of this stab riff. Weird hearing "Crazy" because that rushy riffy stabby chorus seems like equal parts "Scorpio" and WRK's "Corker" with shades of the maximalism of Sonz of Da Loop Da Loop Era's "Far Out". Bled into the red deliberately, what's on the face of it a scratchy superfly horns/guitar blow-out smudges and blurs in the white heat of feedback. Mmm, thats stabby!
Posted by Woebot at July 11, 2003 10:55 PM