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Baker's Dozen

13 Steps To Perfection: El-P's Favourite Albums
Kyle Ellison , October 17th, 2012 12:16

The rapper, producer and Definitive Jux head honcho rifles through his racks and picks out his top 13 records

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Talking Heads – Stop Making Sense
This is just the first record I’d ever heard of theirs. I didn’t even realise for years that there were versions of these songs on records because I was a kid and I didn’t know anything about music. I would go out and just buy shit that looked cool. My vinyl collection started with my father who was a big vinyl collector, and I would look at the covers and listen to them. From there I just fell in love with this record, it was one of the first ‘rock’ records that I ever bought but it didn’t sound like anything else I had ever bought. I’d heard funk records and it sounded a bit like that, but not really that either. Then I started to see the visuals of it, with this guy in the big suit and I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about.

Rappers and producers love Talking Heads, because they just had grooves. Of course ‘Once in a Lifetime’ also, which has kind of been adopted as a classic hip hop break, an unspoken one, but you’re not gonna find a hip hop DJ that’s not gonna spin that shit and bring it back. This record had a special place in my heart also because it was a show and I’d never been to one, but listening to it you felt like you were in a concert and it was this mysterious thing to me.