There’s been a cluster of celebrity deaths in the last week or so; Ozzy Osbourne, Hulk Hogan and Donald Trump’s political career (who said Jeffrey Epstein was all bad?). The death of Daniel Dumile, aka MF Doom, a few years ago, went largely unnoticed outside the heads, and is one, along with Ozzy, that deserved to be lamented (even the dwarves mourn Ozzy, what a character he was). I mention this because lately I’ve been on an MF Doom binge, and it occurred to me that while Dumile was a lyrical shaman, the beats to go with his rhymes also deserve more love than they tend to get. This is where Special Herbs Volumes 0-9 comes in.

It begs the question as to why sampling a song and refashioning it well is a vastly underrated skill. As a genre, hip-hop instrumentals (even J Dilla’s, or say those on De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising) are largely perceived as an afterthought. It’s somewhat logical that they’re seen this way, not for (mostly) being created using samples, but as a rap track that’s incomplete.

My gripe here is the inconsistency often applied to perceived forms of incompleteness. Even if they don’t appear on the final album version, some of the best versions of songs by the Beatles, the Stones and Van Morrison, to name but a few, are live, from bootlegs or of the songs during their infancy, and are not seen as inferior compared to the final album version. The partial intent of the final studio version on an album is to cloak improvisation and the creative process, akin to concealing the execution of the magic trick. Dumile’s rhymes and flow cannot be denied, but here it takes their removal to elevate the instrumental, so it’s understandable that measure would be viewed as counter-intuitive to appreciating something’s value.

Special Herbs biggest appeal for me is operating as a full-scale descent into musical nerdiness. It’s akin to train spotting, without the need to don an anorak. All the songs sampled by MF Grimm and chosen by Dumile, beats which form the backbones of his albums Mm…Food and Operation Doomsday, are bonafide funk and jazz classics from mostly sixties and seventies soul, and of course, lots of Sade. Some of these are obvious, say “Calamus Root” which is formed from “Black Cow” by Steely Dan. “All Spice” and “Saffron” are both Sade offerings – “Is It a Crime” and “Kiss of Life” respectively. Everyone has their favourite part or section of a song, and so many of the Special Herbs’ samples have a tendency to find the most satisfying part. Looping a portion near the end of “Kiss of Life” by Sade, after the sax and vocal clears out, ushering in the outro, with the cooing backing vocal taking prominence, is inspired.

“Benzoin Gum” can only have come from Isaac Hayes’ “Walk On By”. “Monosodium Glutamate” repeats a sped-up bridge section towards the end of “One Hundred Ways” by Quincy Jones giving it a cheeky exuberance, that belies the original ballad – thankfully this conversion slaps, which is the opposite of Christopher Nolan’s terrible Oppenheimer, which is a somehow irritatingly pedestrian portentous watch but with dialogue of a YouTube video playing at 1.5X speed. “Licorice” repurposes a section of “All I Ask” by the Blackbyrds while “Mandrake” utilizes fragments of “What a Fool Believes” by the Doobie Brothers to satisfying effect.

Others, such as “Hyssop”, threw me for a loop by sampling more than one song. A shard of “I Can’t Go For That” By Hall and Oates is easily recognised, while its more obscure partner “Dark Shadows Theme” by Robert Cobert Orchestra completely stumped me. Fortunately, Google exists, and this Spotify playlist extensively covers most of the tracks sampled. The beat for the sublime “Deep Fried Frenz” is titled “Myrrh” and was harvested from “No Stranger To Love” by Roy Ayers. Even if you can be made to feel a heathen for not being able to spot that one, as I was, the process as a whole is a brilliant way of discovering new stuff – “Na Boca do Sol” by Arthur Verocai was a nice wee find, and I was introduced to a multitude of Ronnie Laws’ stuff which is copiously sampled on Special Herbs.

Still, despite my advocacy and love of this gear, I succumb to momentary doubts. Is the creation of samples somewhat random and fortuitous? Is there a 99% failure rate? I pose this question as I had a go myself. You know when you get a vinyl, then curiosity or boredom arrives and in a fit of delusion you think, what the heck? Let’s pitch it down. Often, this provides calamitous outcomes, but occasionally it surprises. “Substance” by Bocca Juniors sounds better slightly slower, especially the vocal. Rarer still a change of speed can be enough to make a record, or a section of it, sound completely new. My inability to parse, or sample, anything worthwhile from the vinyl records I own leads me to believe that sampling is likely innate and requires a similar level of refinement or expertise as crafting songs from scratch. Whether sampled (or referenced) directly or indirectly, all art is derivative to a degree, but even so there will be snobs who’ll forget this and bristle at me putting that creative process on a par with Bob Dylan, Lenny Cohen, John and Paul and Mick and Keith.

A final suggestion. All of the instrumentals come fused together in three mixes (Special Herbs Volumes 0-9), or as individual tracks (in separate albums; 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 7-8 and 9-0). I advocate getting both, but the latter form is a must. It allows you can curate your own favourite MF Doom instrumentals tracklist, many replete with those irresistible comic book interludes, in the order you desire. This is clearly not as hard as conjuring a kicking beat from a sample, but, given the quality of the source, it allows access to a rewarding creative process for us mere mortals.