Doreen St. Félix at The New Yorker:
Timbaland and Elliott developed a grammar, collecting extra-musical noises—sighs, women giggling, coughs, babies gurgling—and stacking them so that they became instruments in and of themselves. They weren’t afraid to experiment with sounds that were nearer to the grotesque than the beautiful. One of the most well known is the burping bass on Ginuwine’s sex romp “Pony.” As if a sort of family crest, it recurs on Elliott and Ginuwine’s carnal duet “Friendly Skies.”
Hip-hop artists are musicologists, and sampling is one way histories are folded into the present. The production of “Supa Dupa Fly” is visionary in how it obscures recognizable samples, bending their internal structures to fit the album’s unconventional tempos. “Sock It 2 me,” for instance, samples the menacing beginning of a horn progression from the Delfonics’ “Ready or Not,” but not its resolution, drawing out its flitting darkness to anchor the entire song.
more here.