Nik Furious: Sunday Best: Ugly
Ugly comes from a time in my life when nearly every day yielded a new beat.
It was late 2004. I was living in Brooklyn and trying to find work in the corporate comic book industry. I interviewed at DC Comics and tried to wriggle my way into Marvel. But there were no real prospects.
Frustrated by the experience, I distracted myself by sampling pop songs and adding my own digital drums to them. Some of these compositions ended up becoming favorites of mine for years to come (see Diamond, Nothing, Showdown, and the final track off of Sunday Best, Wakanda).
But others ended up languishing in my files and going unused and unreleased for nearly a decade. Ugly is one of those unused and unloved beats.
The beginning is a sample Craig Safan's score from Good Guys Wear Black, a late 70s martial arts film starring Chuck Norris.
The main sample comes from the extended version of "She Blinded Me With Science" by Thomas Dolby. The only reason I knew about the synth riff on the extended version is because I heard it at the beginning of Mobb Deep's Got It Twisted, which was a minor hit in the second half of 2004.
Overall, this remix is really simple -- a couple layers of Dobly's synth riff and a few variations of digital drums by yours truly. That's it. Some days I love listening to the simplicity of it. Other days, it sounds incomplete and underdeveloped to me.
But most importantly it puts a smile on my face because it gives me a reason to look back on a miserable time in my life with a tiny twinge of nostalgia. As lonely and disappointed as I was back then, I was musically experimental and cranking out new beats like a machine.
