Beckers & Hatfield: "Mind Rape"

In this world we live in of stripped down tech house grooves, a carefully deployed vocal sample can become a key dancefloor weapon when added to the right beat, or at least a quick way of adding character to a sterile creation. German duo Beckers (he of D-Nox & Beckers) and Hatfield (he of, erm, Leif Hatfield) haven’t made a mere novelty tune here—the funky percussion and rolling bass pulse are on-point enough to move a dancefloor alone—but there’s no denying the vocal adds a distinctive twist to a fairly standard formula.

This may sound weird at first, but the vocal is actually a Rage Against the Machine…well, here’s the thing: it’s not a sample of the “No escape from the mass mind rape” line from “Bullet in the Head,” because it doesn’t sample the original recording, it’s a line sung afresh, given its own tune and transformed into a head-bobbing ear-worm a million miles removed from De La Rocha’s bellowed invective. You can’t really call it a cover version to borrow one line of lyrics from a radically different song and put them to (new) notes, so let’s just call it an homage and leave it at that.

Definitely a unique way of doing the whole vocal-sample trick, especially as it actually contains some potentially thought-provoking message rather than just another time-stretched reference to drugs or fucking. As the line rolls back and forth over the soundsystem, you might be prompted to consider that maybe club/rave culture, for all its romantic counter-______ idealism, is at best a temporary respite from the capitalist drudge of everyday life, and at worst just another nodule of the economic superstructure designed to keep us placated and in place under the myth that taking drugs and staying up all night is somehow transcendental. It becomes almost a taunt in its sing-song repetition, especially if the listener paid double figures to get into a happening nightspot to hear it. You might even start to consider Louis Althusser’s claim that everything is ideology, and get temporarily lost in the mind-vortex of considering how a track calling out ideological pretenses can still be part of that ideology.

But more likely that vocal line’ll get misheard as “No escape from the mass mind rave,” which is a much cooler concept, especially at that time of night. And I guarantee you will not second-guess the breakdown when it arrives. The music drops out and the vocal gets pitched down, which is all well and cliché, but then it suddenly comes back in helium high and filtered out over a swaggering dub groove with huge echoed snares. It’s definitely the most out-there way to do the whole “take the beat away and slam it back again” thing I’ve heard in months, and it ensures that “Mind Rape” is one step above the chasing pack of techy groovers.

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