Fine Young Cannibals 1989 release The Raw & The Cooked is a soul album in the way you’d envision an 80’s New Wave soul album to be. In other words, it’s an eclectic mix of sounds and styles that incorporates breakbeat, New Wave, dance, and rock elements filtered through the gravitational pull of Motown soul to create something definitely 80’s with an old-school charm. Fine Young Cannibals self-titled debut was a bit of a political treatise but the band decided to write a more pop-oriented record for their second album, focusing on universal themes such as love and loss. These elements all made The Raw & The Cooked a smash-hit, going triple platinum and earning both contemporary and historical critical acclaim.
Besides #1 hits like “She Drives Me Crazy” and “Good Thing”, The Raw & The Cooked also forged its place in music history through a single revolutionary sound– the snare drum on the aforementioned “She Drives Me Crazy”. It’s a sound that’s almost immediately recognizable to anyone who is a fan of late 80’s dance music, and upon release was extensively sampled in various mediums that included other songs as well as an advertisement for soft-drink brand Pepsi. It’s an iconic sound, and as Minneapolis, MN based producer David Z (who worked extensively with legendary singer-songwriter Prince ahead of producing The Raw & The Cooked) tells it, the production of that sound was a labor intensive creative process that fell into his lap after some significant experimentation:
“I took the head off a snare drum and started whacking it with a wooden ruler, recording it through a Shure 57 microphone. As I did that, I started twisting the hell out of the [API 550] EQ around 1 kHz on it, to the point where it was starting to sound more like a crash. I blended that with a snare I found in the Linn itself, which was a 12-bit machine, so it sounded pretty edgy to start with.”
But the coup de grace for the sound was when Z pumped the processed and blended sample through an Auratone speaker set upside down atop another snare drum, which rattled the metal snares and gave the result some ambience and even more high end. The whole thing was limited slightly and then sent to a track on a roll of Ampex 456 running on a Studer A800 at 15 ips. Only a slight amount of reverb was added to the track later on. The sonic result was closer to a hollow wood block sound than any snare found on a conventional rock record, and in becoming, along with Gift’s vocals, the signature of the song, it would go on to have many lives of its own subsequent to the single’s run up the charts.
– “Fine Young Cannibals: She Drives Me Crazy” via Mix Online (2001)
It’s actually funny to hear how much influence Fine Young Cannibals likely had on TV On The Radio, specially with their lead singer’s Tunde Adebimpe’s falsetto approach. It’s almost a near replica of Roland Gift’s lead vocal performance on “Don’t Let It Get You Down”, which is a great thing. At the time Fine Young Cannibals was on top of the charts Gift was commonly compared to legendary Motown singers Otis Redding and Al Green, and that history has carried on into the next century with a new generation of avant-garde singers.
Standout Songs: “She Drives Me Crazy”, “Good Thing”, “It’s OK (It’s Alright)”
