Seems odd that a band most of the contributors to this site seem to feel completely meh about is now up to three posts, but there you go. In any case, this one isn't about Kool & the Gang per se, but about J Dilla. From the new issue of Scratch, ?uestlove: "It all goes back to Jay Dee. There's a Kool & the Gang song he sampled, 'Fruitman' [Ed. Note: used for 'The Diff'rence' on Donuts]. That was one of the songs I first sampled when I got the SP-1200. I always gave up on that song because the drummer would fluctuate. He would never do a straight four-bar meter I could sample. I always got frustrated cause I could never quantize it perfect. I was asking [Jay Dee], 'How the hell did you do that shit?' He was like, 'Oh, the MPC.' I was like, 'I got the same MPC, how'd you do it?' I didn't know there were options in the MPC where [it] can fix the loop, if you want it to be 98 beats per minute it knows how to manipulate it. There's a part where he's, like, reversing, where you can edit, do Pro Tools tricks inside of it. There's a whole bunch of stuff I never knew about it until, 'Yeah, it's in the MPC.' I lost the manual instructions but you can look online. That's the story of most hip-hoppers. They only get 'How can I sample? Okay, I got it from here.' They never go from chapter two to 13 which is a whole world of music."

Right, pretty techy. But the piece does have one rather amazing quote, at least for Netbound dorks like me. "'Jay[-Z], his whole thing is "Don't embarrass me,"' ?uest says of his boss. '"I want an art record. Don't come in here with no Hot 97 bullshit. I want that shit to be dope in your hearts first." He's like, "I don't want to look like a nut saying this is a group with artistic integrity and the next thing you know [the website] Pitchfork is giving you guys a 2.8. That's going to make me look bad."'"