Snippet from his next of the Medicine Show Series:

Madlib Medicine Show #6: The Brain Wreck Show

Madlib is awesome... I got into MF Doom and found Madlib's beats through Doom. The kid I was living with at the time had a ton of Madlib stuff on his Ipod, so I'd just jam to it for hours while doing whatever.. Such chilled out, mellow beats. Then I heard his beats for Dudley Perkins and the beats were awesome, but the sogns around them sucked. There's a song called "Fallin" (I think) by Dudley (produced by Madlib), and I couldnt help but feel the beat was wasted with ****ty talking over top of it. So I had to use that beat and make a song of my own which I am real happy with.. I generally like more scratching and sampling in beats, but Madlib is awesome

What do you mean "more sampling?"

lol right? Madlib samples a ton.

Thirds... yeah,

Blue note records gave him carte blanch with their entire jazz archives for the explicit purpose of him sampling whatever the hell he saw fit. In light of that, Shades of Blue is borderline mediocre, but yeah, that's his gig.

what makes it, in your eyes, borderline mediocre? i thought it was pretty fucking good to be quite honest.

Yeah, I'm probably being a bit harsh. I do like the album. It seems that almost all of the samples were culled from the 60's - 70's acid jazz portion of the blue note collection and the whole album seems to be based around a very small and insignificant part of Blue Note's massive history.
I wished he challenged himself with some older material. The album itself is great. I just think that considering the fact that Blue Note literally gave him the keys to the vault, he would have challenged himself a bit more and used a more diverse selection of samples.

I'll clarify... Sampling of lyrics from other songs. I'm trying to say I usually prefer styles more like Premo.

There is so much to explore in Madlib's discography, and I've just started digging deep. Currently playing Lootpack's Soundpieces: Da Antidote from 1999, anyone heard it? Damn good. The group consists of Wildchild, Madlib, and DJ Romes.








I've also been digging some of Madlib's Beat Konducta releases.

I actually love Madlib's Shades of Blue but I see what you mean - he did very little with the music. It's mostly that I love the original Jazz so much that I like the album - he just added like a sprinkling of hip hop.

I feel the same way about his Blunted in the Bombshelter album. I like it and listen to it now and then but it just sounds so lazy considering how great the source material is. Trojan Records let him in their vault like Blue Note did, I think. I love Madlib but I feel like he should probably smoke less weed when he's (legally!) remixing the classics.