Levitating Off This Love

Isaiah Rashad “M.O.M.”

Have you ever eaten something familiar – a sandwich, a pasta dish, a salad – but there was some ingredient that popped more than usual? Like you’ve tasted a lot of basil in your life, but you’ve suddenly encountered the best basil? Something ordinary becomes something unexpected and magical. The full culinary potential of basil is revealed to you, but it’s not clear why that is. Is it a superior, fresher variety of basil? Did the chef do something to the basil? And if so, why doesn’t everyone do that?

This is how I feel about the snare in “M.O.M.,” which my body and mind immediately clocked as a better, crisper, more kinetic snare hit. I’ve heard so much snare in my life, but Isaiah Rashad along with producers Hollywood Cole, KTC, and Julian Sinfonia found a way to make one of the foundational elements of popular music more beautiful and effective.

I have very limited technical knowledge of how beats in modern pop music are created and engineered, but I happen to know someone with a lot of expertise on this topic: Nick Sylvester, occasional music critic, drummer, label owner, and full-time record producer. I asked him to demystify this snare sound for me.

“The drum sample sounds like it leans on the bottom snare mic a little more to pick up the sizzle of the snares on the bottom head a little more,” he told me. “It has a little more top end, which is how it cuts through so nicely, which is the crispness you’re hearing. A lot of snare samples sound like this but what’s so special here is that the top end of the music is uncluttered, which lets the snare ring out a little more, so there’s no masking.”

I suspected the minimalism of the mix was part of it. There’s not a lot of sounds in the mix, and everything is compelling – a perfect pocket of rhythm, Rashad’s vocal popping off the beat, and a keyboard riff with a distinctive understated tone that’s just as beautiful to my ear as that snare. The percussion sounds urgent enough to insist on physical movement, but there’s also a relaxed feel to the track that sets muscles at ease. It’s built for fluid, natural, steady movement.

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