Amazed that that Brooklyn Express tune only has one like, it's the best tune in this thread.
37. Coldcut - Beats & Pieces
This is acting as a kind of stand-in. On one level, it's literally the sound of the last 30 years of music being cut up and remodelled, on the other it's a British answer version to Lesson 3 (see upthread - I find it frankly insane that there's only 3 years between the two, seems wrong somehow), and a precursor to all the insane creativity you'd get in British dance music over the next 15 years. On a final more personal level, it's a stand-in for their show, which I loved precisely because it was so eclectic - it'd be Sheila E to 808 State and back again on any given afternoon - this seems to capture the spirit of hip hop to me (flashback to reading in Rap Attack about Bam cutting up Kraftwerk & Malcolm X speeches at Bronx house parties). I've always loved this ability to cut and mix, to place one thing alongside the other, in a way that empowers both. Perhaps it's some kind of psychoanalytic dramitisation of my own mixed background.