Jonah Bromwich sees the shadows of tomorrow.
If I had to pick an artist that I thought people might be listening to fifty years from now, I’d give serious consideration to Madlib. For one thing, there’s the prolificacy—when you put out thirteen albums in a single year, you’re significantly multiplying the chances that someone is going to stumble upon you one day. And the archaeology-like pleasure of picking out those samples is only going to increase with age. The reclusive producer’s been dissolving genres and transcending ethnocentric American music for over a decade now, and I hope that the good people of the future have the good sense to see how dude prefigured and encapsulates the expert collagism that is the hallmark of the most talented artists working today.
It’s not often that we at Passion let so much as a thirty second snippet from the producer squeak past, and the album teaser “The Mad March” certainly merits your attention (as well as the attention of you future people, ironically surfing old music blogs on your google contacts.) If this is Madlib’s version of bowing to the dance craze, I’m all for it. The single is resolutely analogue and body-moving, with well-placed horns and a sly, shuffling beat. It’s a quintessentially Madlibian stew of samples, these ones sourced from the same vintage Zambian rock that he delved into on Beat Konducta in Africa. The single’s meant to preview an upcoming Bay Area show at which Madlib will be giving out a limited edition EP. For those of us who can’t make it out west, that EP serves as a preview for Madlib’s upcoming album Rock Conducta.
Madlib is an obsessive’s obsessive, and though his release schedule has tailed off of late, it’s almost more fun for fans to have him spontaneously drop a track like this. It makes for a more enticing trail of bread crumbs to follow to the source of more music. I can only assume that fifty years from now, people will still be enjoying the wealth of ubiquity, obscurity and good ass music that the producer provides for us right now.
