Strictly Butter | 03

"King of Diggin'" - Lord Finesse

"The Package" - De La Soul

"I Juswannachill (Instrumental)" - Large Professor

"Reminiscent Of The Golden Era" - K-Def

"Can't Take My Eyes Off of You" - Lauryn Hill

"Floetic" - Floetry

"Lovesick (Extended Mix)" - Gang Starr

"One Step Featurecast Re-Edit" - Aretha Franklin

"On Your Face" - Treble N Bass

"I Know You Got Soul" - DJ Snatch

"Fresh Rhythm" - Quantic

"Finally Moving" - Pretty Lights

"June (TM Juke Remix, DJ Supermarkt Dub Shredit)" - Gizelle Smith

"Uptown Anthem Instrumental" - Naughty By Nature

"Don't Walk Away (J Period Q-Tip Intro, Skanktified Mix)" - Jade

“King of Diggin’” — Lord Finesse

Our opener arrives off Lord Finesse's all-instrumental The SP 1200 Project: Sounds & Frequencies in Technicolor, released March 7, 2025 through Coalmine Records and the Underworld Label Group. Finesse told Passion of the Weiss the track "represents the fact I'm still digging in the crates," a working principle backed by a personal vinyl library he estimates at ten thousand records. The title is also a tip of the hat across the Pacific. Tokyo's DJ Muro, whose King of Diggin' tapes Wax Poetics has documented at length, passed Finesse a stack of those very mixes at a mid-90s Roosevelt Hotel record convention, beginning a friendship that has run through three decades of D.I.T.C. lineage. The album credits frame the project as a "re-enhancement," a refusal of the over-compressed sound of contemporary rap production in favor of warmth, depth, and the kind of frequency detail you can only feel on a system with headroom.

“The Package” — De La Soul

Released November 6, 2025 as the lead single from Cabin in the Sky, "The Package" is the group's first record since Trugoy the Dove's death in 2023, and it carries posthumous verses Dave laid down before he passed. The album is the sixth installment in Mass Appeal's "Legend Has It…" campaign, a year-long New York canon project that has rolled out new music from Slick Rick, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, Mobb Deep, and Big L, with a Nas and DJ Premier collaboration set to close the run. Pete Rock handles the production with the warmth that has been his signature since Mecca and the Soul Brother. Per WhoSampled, the beat is built from The Impressions' "Seven Years," Kid Dynamite's "Uphill Peace of Mind," and Black Merda's "Cynthy Ruth."

"I Juswannachill (Instrumental)” — Large Professor

Issued by Geffen as a 12-inch single in October 1996, "I Juswannachill" was tied to Large Professor's debut The LP, an album whose subsequent disappearing act became one of golden-era rap's small tragedies. Geffen shelved the record after several delays. A bootleg surfaced in 2002 once Extra P. regained his masters, and an official release didn't arrive until 2009, thirteen years after the sessions. The instrumental rides on a Milt Jackson "Enchanted Lady" loop, all relaxed boom-bap and jazz-funk warmth that never turns glossy, what The Source's contemporaneous review called "the mantra for all these extra-hard acting/posturing hip-hop types". By the time the 12-inch landed on Geffen, Extra P.'s production credits already included three of the cornerstones of Illmatic: "Halftime," "One Time 4 Your Mind," and "It Ain't Hard to Tell."

“Reminiscent of the Golden Era” — K-Def

"Reminiscent of the Golden Era" sits as track 20 on The Unpredictable Gemini, released January 29, 2016 on Redefinition Records. The label's release notes describe a multi-year build with K-Def producing, composing, arranging, and mastering well over a hundred tracks before settling on the final sequence, in line with Redefinition's quality-over-quantity ethos. The Newark producer's resume runs back to the early 90s as Marley Marl's protégé, with co-production credits on Lords of the Underground's Here Come the Lords (1993) and Keepers of the Funk (1994), through to ongoing instrumental work for Redefinition and Slice of Spice. The cut is what its title says, with unhurried technical craftsmanship and the true spirit of the Golden Era.

“Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You (I Love You Baby)” — Lauryn Hill

Lauryn Hill's Bob Crewe and Bob Gaudio cover was recorded in 1997 while she was eight months pregnant, reportedly cut in a single take on the floor of producer Commissioner Gordon's New Jersey home studio. The track's path onto The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is unusually backwards. It first appeared in Conspiracy Theory (1997), wasn't included on the soundtrack album, and only reached an audience after a KMEL radio jockey in San Francisco played it off an unauthorized CD. The airplay snowballed across the country and Columbia eventually added the cover to Miseducation as a hidden bonus track, where it became the first hidden track in history to receive a Grammy nomination.

"Floetic" - Floetry

Marsha Ambrosius and Natalie Stewart's debut single, released August 2002, is the title track from their first album and a confident introduction to their hybrid of sung hooks and spoken-word cadence. The duo branded themselves as a two-part instrument, Ambrosius the "songstress," Stewart the "floacist," and the album's production circle drew from the same early-2000s neo-soul scene that produced Bilal and Jill Scott. The most revealing detail is the songwriting line. The credits on the album's release page place Ambrosius and Stewart alongside Mel Tormé and Robert Wells, because the track contains a documented interpolation of "Born to Be Blue," routed through Jack Bruce's 1971 reading of the standard. Pulling from a song with that pedigree gives "Floetic" a different parentage than the usual neo-soul tracings.

"Lovesick (Extended Mix)" - Gang Starr

"Lovesick" is a Gang Starr cut produced by DJ Premier and Guru for their second album Step in the Arena, released January 15, 1991 on Chrysalis. The album is widely held as one of the records that cemented Premier's grammar of the era, scratch-and-loop technique meeting Guru's compressed monotone authority. Recording sessions ran through Calliope Productions in Manhattan and the Brooklyn rooms Firehouse Studios and Such-A-Sound. The Extended Mix sticks close to the album version, whose sample stack leans on Ohio Players ("Pain," "Never Had a Dream") and the warmth of The Delfonics' "Trying to Make a Fool of Me," with an Upbeat Mix on the same 1991 12-inch flipping the chassis to Young-Holt Unlimited's "Ain't There Something That Money Can't Buy."

"One Step Featurecast Re-Edit" - Aretha Franklin

Aretha Franklin's "One Step Ahead" began life as a 1965 Columbia non-album single, the A-side that peaked at #18 on the Hot Rhythm & Blues chart and never made it onto a Columbia studio album. Decades later the song re-entered rotation through Mos Def's 1999 "Ms. Fat Booty," whose making is unpacked beautifully on Microchop, and through its closing-act use in Moonlight. Featurecast's edit comes out of the UK white-label economy of edits and reworks, first appearing on Wah Wah 45s' Dubplate series in 2009 before the original 7" hit Discogs at top shelf pricing.

“On Your Face” — Treble N Bass

The cut comes off That's Not An Edit Vol.12, released May 12, 2020, the twelfth installment in the Australian re-edit collective's compilation series. Treble 'N' Bass are a Sydney production team in the project's broader stable of edit-makers, and their rework treats the source material with the right kind of restraint. The original is Earth, Wind & Fire's "On Your Face," from the band's 1976 album Spirit, the album dedicated to longtime co-producer Charles Stepney following his death during the sessions, a record where Maurice White's mystical melodicism met Stepney's arranging gravity.

“I Know You Got Soul” — DJ Snatch

DJ Snatch's "I Know You Got Soul" is a digital edit released on his Bandcamp as track 5 of Snatch Edits pt.03 in December 2019. The Athens-based DJ and radio producer describes the track as "Eric B & Rakim meets Beatnuts," collapsing two eras of New York rap onto one chassis: Eric B. & Rakim's 1987 cornerstone and The Beatnuts' 2001 "Let's Git Doe" with Fatman Scoop. The Eric B. & Rakim original is itself built around Bobby Byrd's 1971 "I Know You Got Soul," the James Brown-produced single widely credited with opening the floodgates of James Brown samples in rap. So Snatch isn't sampling a record so much as sampling a hip-hop cornerstone - a cornerstone that was already a sample.

“Fresh Rhythm” — Quantic

"Fresh Rhythm" was the B-side of Will Holland's first 7-inch as Quantic, paired with "We Got Soul" and released on Breakin' Bread in 2000. This is the moment before the larger Quantic universe came into focus. Tru Thoughts hadn't signed him yet, the Quantic Soul Orchestra wasn't a thing, and the Latin and Caribbean projects were still years away. 45 Live's framing of the original 45 captures Holland's emergent skillset. The B-side flexes a three-source sample stack documented on WhoSampled: Harry Stoneham and Johnny Eyden's "Coming Home Baby," Dickie Goodman's mid-70s novelty cut "Mr. Jaws," and Redd Foxx's "Side Two."

“Finally Moving” — Pretty Lights
"Finally Moving" is track 4 on Taking Up Your Precious Time, Pretty Lights' debut album from October 2006, made when the project was still a duo of Derek Vincent Smith and Michal Menert. The track's sample sourcing is its own minor case study in how lineage gets misread. Sonny Stitt's 1969 "Private Number" is itself a cover of Judy Clay and William Bell's 1968 Stax original, and Smith's lift from the Stitt version overlapped at the source with Nightmares on Wax's earlier "You Wish," which sampled the Clay and Bell. Layered on top: Etta James' "Something's Got a Hold on Me," the same Etta vocal Avicii would catapult into pop ubiquity five years later on "Levels," and Beside's "Change the Beat (Female Version)," the most-sampled record in hip-hop history.

“June (TM Juke, DJ Supermarkt Dub Shredit)” — Gizelle Smith
Issued by Milan's Record Kicks in November 2009 as a two-track single pairing the original with TM Juke's remix, "June" marks the moment Gizelle Smith stepped out from her work with the Mighty Mocambos into a solo lane. Smith's bio at Will Work 4 Funk tells the rest of the arc: a Manchester-born singer of Seychellois and Afro-American heritage, daughter of a Four Tops member, championed early on by Kenny Dope, who released her "Working Woman" on Kay-Dee. The version in this mix routes the TM Juke remix through DJ Supermarkt's dub shredit, an unofficial edit out of the Too Slow to Disco orbit that strips the track down to its rhythm-section bones.

“Uptown Anthem (Instrumental)” — Naughty By Nature
"Uptown Anthem" was credited to Naughty By Nature's core trio of Vincent Brown, Anthony Criss, and Keir Gist, with production by Kay Gee. Recorded for the Juice soundtrack and later added to the group's self-titled 1991 album on Tommy Boy, the record sits in that early-90s window when the New Jersey pipeline ran through Queen Latifah's co-sign and onto the radio. Chart-wise it landed as a minor hit by Billboard standards: #27 Hot Rap Singles, #58 Hot R&B/Hip-Hop, but the cultural footprint outran the chart performance, helped by the track's placement in the Juice opening credits and a video shot in East Orange.

“Don’t Walk Away (Skanktified Mix)” — Jade
Jade's "Don't Walk Away" was released by Giant Records in November 1992 as the second single from Jade to the Max, written and produced by Vassal Benford III and Ronald Spearman. The song built on Kool & the Gang's "Jungle Jazz" drums and the chord progression of Stevie Wonder's "That Girl," and it became a transatlantic breakout: #4 on the Billboard Hot 100, #2 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop chart, #7 in the UK. The track's afterlife is most remarkable for what Q-Tip did with the bassline. As Microchop documents, Q-Tip used to spin "Don't Walk Away" at his DJ gigs and watch the room react. He told J.Period years later, "When I heard that bassline I'd be like, 'Yo, that bassline is so mean.'" The track’s afterlife is most notable for Q-Tip’s sanctification with A Tribe Called Quest sampling the “Don’t Walk Away” bassline for “Award Tour.” 

Listen to: Strictly Butter | 01