So I just heard “Like Toy Soldiers” on the radio. I’m ashamed to say that I actually rather like it - and about 10,000 times more ashamed to say that I have the original Martika song on single somewhere at the back of a very dark cupboard.
But… what is up with the drums? When I heard the song on the radio I thought “No, the drums can’t sound that bad”, but I have just listened to it again and they do! I can’t quite work out whether they are programmed (very bad idea… programmed buzz rolls never work) or just played by an untrained ape.
Can anyone think of a song that has made it onto vinyl with worse drumming?
“Like toy soldiers” uses the same break used in Eminem’s previous song “Soldier.” Dr. Dre produced both. It also appeared in Kanye West’s recent “Jesus Walks.” Kanye brags about stealing breaks from tertiary sources like other hip hop songs rather than their originals, and has been open about taking snare sounds from other Dre songs, so I’m assuming he got it from “solider.” But I don’t think that Dre originally made/programmed the break, because his beats are much more simplistic than the military-ish polyrhythms present in the snare.
Still, it’s not a recognizable breakbeat according to the-breaks.com, which is a pretty exhaustive archive.
A slight aside - I really hate the drum sounds that have taken over mainstream hip hop over the past few years. There’s been a really “dinky” movement in drums - ticky snares, dinky toy-sounding claps, and plastic kicks. Hip hop’s always drawn on the canon of amazing breakbeats, or at least cut up those beats into component sounds to create original beats. Some of the fattest, nastiest snares I’ve ever heard have been on A Tribe Called Quest or Gang Starr songs, but these days the sounds are just weak, pop, and cheesy.