Joining the Dots with Bedroom Beats & B-Sides Author Laurent Fintoni

We asked Laurent Fintoni about the musical foundations behind his Bedroom Beats book, including mid 90s hip-hop, Mo’ Wax, Dilla and Madlib

Laurent Fintoni’s Bedroom Beats & B-Sides is an exhaustively researched personal journey through various instrumental hip-hop and electronic music scenes, which makes vital connections and re-maps international musical boundaries. It’s informative and ear-opening without buckling under the pressure of history; Fintoni’s passion for his subject remains the guiding light throughout. This makes for essential reading for all the heads and indeed anyone fascinated by subcultures.

The ways in which Fintoni joins the musical dots in Bedroom Beats made him the perfect candidate to launch our new Joining the Dots feature, where we’ll endeavour to find out more about an artist or author through the music that has impacted them and their work.

Is there an OG hip-hop album you always return to?

If we’re talking albums it’s going to be something from the early to mid 1990s period, which is when I became obsessed with the music and culture. I was going to suggest a French album, then I saw it’s a question below too so I’ll bundle both together: it would be IAM’s L’Ecole du Micro d’Argent for French rap, and it would be a toss up between Enter the 36 Chambers, The Infamous, and Do You Want More?!!!??!. Sorry can’t really choose one, it really depends on mood but these are all albums I’ve returned to over and over in the past 25 years.

What about a specifically boom bap album?

Ummm… I dunno to be honest because I don’t really think about albums as being a specific production style, I think more about eras/periods and how they relate to my own life/experiences. Anyways for the sake of playing the game it’d probably be something from Gang Starr, like Hard to Earn.

A beat tape?

Something from Madlib’s extensive legal and illegal discography or Doom’s Special Herbs vol 1-4.

A French hip-hop album?

See above!

A game changing b-side?

Dillinja’s remix of DJ Krush “Only the Strong Survive”. And a majority of the instrumentals available on rap 12”s in the mid to late 1990s.

What does trip-hop mean to you? Nobody likes the term, right? I always preferred Mo’ Wax’s sleeve sloganeering myself…

I agree with you that the early Mo’ Wax sloganeering is better, and has also to a degree aged more gracefully – though some of it is pretty cringey. To me trip-hop was my introduction to beat culture. It’s very specific to a time in my life, like 90s hip-hop and it shaped a lot of my tastes and aesthetic preferences. And while getting older has thankfully taught me that tastes and preferences should be challenged, as a whole I’d say that these early foundational experiences have remained very central and if anything I am able to find links between music from all sorts of time periods and these foundational strands of 90s beat culture. I’m also a lot more critical of some of these beats than I was when I was younger, some of it hasn’t aged well but there’s still a lot of gems.

How important is Mo’ Wax to the story you tell in Bedroom Beats & B-Sides?

Relatively important. I’m not a fan of weighting these things, but it’s central to the early parts of the story, alongside Ninja Tune and others, and it definitely become a touching point for many in the following decades so it regularly comes up in interviews as something that inspired people so clearly it had an impact on a lot of people. In a way telling that story was the easy option, I could have opted to try and put the focus somewhere else while still talking about Mo’ Wax and Lavelle but I wrote early drafts of this chapter at various points and ultimately I felt there was a place to tell the story once more in a longer written format and with a view of it being a sort of scene setting for what comes next.

There was a lot that was problematic with Mo’ Wax, which I touch on a little but don’t get super into, but I think Charlie Dark said it best: Mo’ Wax and Lavelle were really precursors to the whole hype beast culture that has arisen in the 2010s. I’d argue that’s more of their legacy than the music, even if some of that music is still important.

I really enjoyed reading the Attica Blues origin story. Charlie Dark is a real force for positivity right now and his Friday morning show on WorldwideFM has become a weekly beacon for me. Do you have another Attica Blues / Charlie Dark story that didn’t make the book?

Yes Charlie is great. There is actually, a couple bits he shared with me about Dego’s importance which I couldn’t really weave in the book, here they are as told to me (with some stuff in between I removed):

I have video of Dego programming an MPC 2000 in Philadelphia and that’s one of the reasons I started Blacktronica, it was one of the most amazing things I’ve seen in my life. […] He played me a lot of hip-hop beats he’d made on his laptop. We were on our way back from Japan and he played me all this stuff. Jay Dee esque stuff. How did you do that? On a laptop bruv. What? There was a divide coming in, samplers vs computers. That was interesting to me, you could marry the two now. […] I’m in Philly in King’s house and Dego is washing dishes. That’s freaking me out, he’s my hero, my guru, I’ve dissected his music, and he’s doing the dishes in front of me and we’re not even talking about music. We’re just talking about life. And that’s when I understood this music thing is about life, it’s about more than music and that’s where I’ve been going wrong.

One of the most impressive things about the book is how you join the dots internationally. Was this a natural approach given that you’ve lived in various cities across the globe?

Yeah I think so. It’s definitely something that comes naturally to me having had the chance to live in different countries and also coming from a background that included different cultures and was encouraging of discovering and learning about other cultures. In a way I feel like if you’re not trying to draw these links, especially these cross cultural / international links, then you’re leaving a large chunk of history out. Nothing ever really happened in a vacuum. At the same time, and as I mention at the end of the book, I still have blind spots that I’ve tried and continue to try to address and there are still things that had to be left out.

I definitely suffer a little from wanting to do too much, and in doing so diluting the core of what I’m trying to do. Thankfully I think I managed to avoid some of that with the book, but if I’d not been guided by my editor I would have probably drowned myself in it, as I was already drowning in research. You can’t be everything to everyone is the moral there I guess.

Which city or cities do you feel at home in?

Tokyo and Los Angeles. They’re two cities on the edge of the world so to speak, you can’t go beyond them without crossing the dateline. Part of it is my upbringing and life experiences, but I’ve felt most inspired and in a way freest when I lived there. Ironically they’re also the two cities where I would realistically never want to settle down.

What’s happening in Los Angeles right now?

I actually left LA about six months ago, a combination of Covid, unemployment and family reasons. So I can’t speak to what’s happening there right now but it was pretty grim during the first six months of Covid when I was there, all music/art/culture stuff shut down and the combination of pandemic, social injustice, and global warming effects felt very heavy. From what I know things haven’t changed much and I know the local music scene I’m plugged into is suffering to various degrees. I hope we can find ways to recover that can enact meaningful change.

I really appreciated the Glasgow love in the book (it’s the city closest to my heart, although I don’t currently live there). What does Glasgow mean to you musically?

Thanks. Glasgow’s a special place for sure. Musically it’s definitely one of those places that’s just very eclectic and diverse and welcoming. I tried to do it some small justice but there’s so much more to say. London gets a lot of attention, historically and currently, but really cities like Glasgow, Manchester, and Bristol are arguably as important, if not more, when it comes to modern music history in the UK.

What impact did the Rawkus label have? It’s a shame they’re not still around. Did they burn too bright?

Rawkus were influential in shaping the aesthetics of a generation. In many interviews with people my age (I’m born in 1979) it always comes up as the label whose singles and b-sides were favored because you could always get the beats. I think they didn’t last because ultimately they were built as a business first and foremost, and that always means you’ve got an end date, whether you know it or not.

Is Dilla’s influence only being fully appreciated now?

At a larger level yes – e.g. he was included in the Netflix hip-hop series for the super producers episode, which I think is very telling and shows that people in the right places know his name, and to a degree why he matters. It’s the eternal you don’t know what you have till it’s gone. It’s a shame that people like him have to die to receive their flowers but at the same time I’d imagine that if he was still alive he would not be receiving the appreciation he is. I think his influence will continue to be felt, I think he’s on the level of musicians like a Coltrane whose influence is always felt because the music is timeless. There’s always something there for someone to discover, learn from, and appreciate.

What’s your go-to Dilla album?

Welcome 2 Detroit.

Could you talk about MF DOOM and his legacy?

I can’t really speak to Doom’s legacy as a rapper, there are others much better qualified than me who have done so and you should seek them out. As regards beat culture, I really like the idea I heard on the NYT Popcast in the weeks after his death which made the argument that he is another source/precursor to the chill hop / music to study to wave that has happened in the last decade. I listened to Special Herbs again recently and it’s definitely super in line with that whole thing, it’s funny. He never gets mentioned because that whole movement is built on deeply faulty historical misconceptions, putting Dilla and Nujabes at the center of their mythology. But thinking about Doom as being another source of where kids are at today with instrumental beats I think reinforces the point I made in the book that beat culture is cyclical. It also shows what a great ear he had for samples, his output as a beat maker was pretty short lived but remains super solid. Doom was hugely important in his giving no fucks approach, it’s a shame he is gone so soon.

Madlib cannot help but join the musical dots and in fact won’t stick to any genre with his own productions. Does he therefore embody much of what Bedroom Beats is about?

Yes for sure. Madlib is definitely unique in that regard, equalled only by Jay Dee during his lifetime and I would argue today by someone like Georgia Anne Muldrow, whose range and proclivity for moving across styles/approaches resembles Madlib’s. He is special though, he hears in such a beautiful way. To go back to the point about trip-hop above, to me he evokes that aesthetic I mentioned, which Strictly Kev has referred to as magpie music and which I really like as a metaphor. Madlib makes beats from all these pieces that he assiduously collects, whether a sample or a riff or a rhythm. It’s incredible. I hope he stays with us.

Which of Madlib’s current albums are you digging the most?

The last two are great, the one with Karriem Riggins and the solo one with Four Tet. I can’t really think of a single Madlib album/project I don’t in some way like.

What’s your go-to Madlib album?

The Medicine Show series is probably my favorite thing of his, in that it really captures the vastness of his creativity. Vol 5, History of the Loop Digga, I go back to a lot. Also the Dill Withers / Dill Cosby double joint (from the Beat Konducta series) he did after Jay died. Incredible stuff.

What’s a key beats record for you that folks might not think of as beats?

Urban Tribe’s The Collapse of Modern Culture, which is the subject of the first Detroit chapter alongside Jay’s Welcome 2 Detroit. It’s an incredible album, often referred to as house/techno but to me is straight beats and just so incredibly Detroit. It has aged beautifully too, listening to it today it feels incredibly current.

How has Covid re-shaped the beats scene? Can it continue to be so internationally driven?

It’s hard to say and I haven’t paid a huge amount of attention but from what I see/know and people I’ve spoken with I think it’s been impacted like all the other scenes have – everything has moved online, which is having positive and negative effects. I’m seeing a lot of great community efforts and engagement, a lot of educational stuff, but that also unfortunately means a lot of noise, a lot of stuff that sounds the same. I don’t think the international aspect has to suffer, if anything the lack of travel but potential local reopenings should help drive more local communities, ideally. The internet still connects us so I don’t think that goes away.

What record do you want to hear in a club when that’s possible again?

Ah, that’s a great question. Mala’s “Anti War Dub” (and many others).