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Download: Diddy: "Gettin' Off"

Past girlfriends can attest to my ways with the jazz music en route to sweet movies like Anaconda or classy dinners at the Ground Round. I liked a lot of trumpet player types because that was my gig pre the botched wisdom teeth removal, which meant I owned every Miles Davis album, even all the ones after In A Silent Way. My grandfather's dead so I can finally come clean on that one. I didn't have porn under my bed but I had Pangaea, and I had Live-Evil, which coincidentally did have some tittie action on the cover, which made it doubly dangerous. As far as Poppy was concerned, Miles Davis post-Silent Way was as bad as all those black men saying really fast words into microphones. As bad as, his words, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He always used RHCP as his go-to "why new Miles Davis was bad" example and it's only been since their new album that I've been able to understand why.

Anyway like the rest of the world I have been greatly anticipating the new Diddy album. This is the guy who first introduced me to Led Zeppelin, or at least showed me what the band was really good for, i.e. hiphop rap beats. He's also the guy responsible for LL Cool J's "Phenomenon," which is in the Top 50 rap songs of all time, and my guess is Diddy has a good deal of respect for Lenny Kravitz's "Are You Gonna Go My Way?" which is in the Top 100 rock songs of all time, and Top 80 if you count it with the video. Why Lenny, Diddy, and Cool J haven't started a team mp3 blog yet is beyond me.

Which is why I was bummed to find out that this "Gettin' Off" song has been left off the album. Its probable reason for exclusion is the same one that makes the song so awesome, which is that it samples the opening loops of Miles Davis's "Spanish Key," which was on Bitches Brew. There is a bass clarinet riff that bubbles out every eight or so, I think it was Maupin's, that is one of my favorite "scary" riffs, alongside some of the jams on the Spawn soundtrack. Spawn is actually a movie I took a girl to.

Granted just because somebody starts barking like James Brown over a Miles Davis sample, doesn't mean I'm going to accidentally think this song is as awesome as James Brown barking over "Spanish Key." Yet I will defend this song's relative greatness (Top 500 of 2006 easily), on the strength of the sample and Diddy's weird fable about listening to James Brown records on a Playskool record player, and then his mom tapping him on the shoulder and telling him to "get off." This is apparently the inspiration for the song. And you know what, I can see why. If Mom Diddy didn't see Baby Diddy standing on his brandnew Playskool record player, spinning around in a circle like it was a merry-go-round or something, Baby Diddy probably would have broken the motor.

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