I never used to be into hip-hop music.
Growing up in the 80s and 90s in a WASP-y part of Canada, when I started listening to music it began with modern rock. When gangsta rap arrived...
I didn't get it.
The lyrics were specific and the delivery precise, and the cultural part (hip hop) was impossible to relate to—the biggest struggle in my life was homework, a paper route and being a teenager.
I was too young to smoke weed, never had any interaction with police and grew up in a stable household with three generations of family. Nor did I understand the violence they were rapping about, or the guns, or why so many women were bitches.
Maybe it wasn't the ladies, fellas?
It wasn't until stumbling upon Beastie Boys, Rage Against the Machine and Raggadeath—bands that were fusing rock and rap—that I found a reference point for the rest of hip hop music. Despite this, outside the above bands, there wasn't a whole lot of emotional resonance with the music; when I would listen it was cerebral and fuelled by curiosity.
The shift happened when I started going to the bar. Exposure to rap playing at deafening volumes, free from commercial breaks or the menace of haters, strung together by competent DJs formed the emotional connection I was missing, with the rich sampling in G-Funk in particular satisfying a need for melody in what I listened to.
The waning days of G-Funk were the early days of P2P file sharing on the old Internet, when most users seemed to want to go out of their way to be helpful. It was easy to find people who had spent the previous five years listening to almost nothing but hip hop music, and if you told them the sort of thing you were into they'd share suggestions and the actual files for you to listen to almost instantly.
This was a game-changer. Prior, music on demand only happened when you owned the CD.
This is where playlists started for me.
Lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling or driving somewhere were good times for focused listening of an album, but when I was gaming, which made up at a minimum 50% of the time I was listening to music, I wanted individual tracks of a very specific type—no quiet or low energy intros or outros; no skits or other audio filler. No hidden tracks. I wanted to focus on the game and not have to tinker with the music, so I prepared playlists.
The G-Funk Sampler no.1 (and the rest of the playlists around here) share the above themes, but with a focus on the sub-genre and some spillover into adjacent styles.
Made for jiujitsu.