Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Janelle Monae samples the Jackson 5 on new song

Janelle Monae is just one of several artists contributing tracks to Baz Luhrmann's Netflix series The Get Down, which looks at the rise of hip-hop in inner city New York four decades ago (others on the soundtrack include Nas, Miguel and Michael Kiwanuka).

Her effort is a riff on the Jackson 5's epic 8-minute funk jam Hum Along and Dance, which is also featured in the show. She explained more to Beats 1:

"I don’t really do a lot of sampling, but they had the rights to the Jackson 5's Hum Along and Dance, so this was a sample I worked with Jeff Bhasker [Uptown Funk, All of the Lights, Run This Town]. Once we got in the studio together, we just picked parts that we loved and that’s how we made the music.

"So it was inspired by the Jackson 5, and I just basically put Janelle Monae on it, but I wanted to keep the essence of Jackson 5. Michael is one of my heroes. As I was recording this song, I was envisioning a world where color [she means "colour"] was not the root of... the center [she means "centre"] of attention. It wasn't about black and white, green and yellow, but we were all on the dance floor together living and breathing as one."

You can hear an excerpt of the song, as well as a pretty tedious interview, below.

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