An electric guitar motif, lightly jazzy, hammered-on and partially chorded, plays over and over. A flute flutters in. There’s some ambient noise in the background, a sniff from an actor, as it turns out. A spoken word dialogue comes in; filmic and scene-setting, alliteratively criminal in nature – ‘pimps, pushahs, prostitoots‘. The jazz refrain continues, the flute freestyling above it.
Willie Hutch – Brothers Gonna Work It Out
A girl sashays her way in. “Brothers gonna work it out,” she suggests, offering her observations to the dilemma of those two conversing actors. The flute replies sweetly to her melody. We’re two minutes in before the tempo kicks in. A descending harp glissando, a sharp sweep of strings, then a paradiddle of tribal drums. The “Brothers gonna work it out” refrain returns, call and response this time between male and female voices, as a ubiquitous wah-wah struts the rhythm underneath a splashing hi-hat. We have lift off.
Brothers Gonna Work It Out is widescreen sociofunk, cut from the same loose-fitting cloth as Curtis Mayfield, as hard-hitting as an Ali right hook but as danceable as disco. Cut for the soundtrack to mid-’70s blaxploitation film The Mack, it brought its creator out from behind the scenes (he’d been a Motown staffer, writing lyrics for the Jackson 5 amongst others) and slapped him bang in the middle of a musical movement that was smoothing at the edges as it transitioned from uptown to midtown, from Harlem’s Apollo to Manhattan’s Studio 54.
Brothers Gonna Work It Out straddles that dividing line effortlessly and coolly. It’s a groove, as they say.
The Chemical Brothers know a good line when they hear it. They took the ‘brothers gonna work it out‘ refrain and recast it as something of a manifesto – Dust Brothers to Chemical Brothers – for their first release to promote debut album Exit Planet Dust.
Chemical Brothers – Leave Home
Leave Home is a stall-setting cris de guerre. ‘The brothers gonna work it out‘ hookline is in your face straight away. So too is a snaking bassline and a window-rattling snare. It’s relentless and full on, full of squelchy 303s and rat-a-tat-tatting 808s. A four-to-the-floor big beat headthumper, it has, for good measure, divebombing electronic whooshes, random voices and breakdowns that lead inevitably to The Drop, when it all picks back up and comes in twice as furious as before.
Leave Home also has the dirtiest bassline this side of Bomb The Bass’s Bug Powder Dust, a real key ingredient which in parts sounds like a motorbike grinding through the gears as it overtakes you at 108mph, or 108 bpm if you’re being smart. Elsewhere it provides head-nodding grooveability, the concrete flooring upon which the ‘Brothers go about their business of working it out. Young folk these days might call this a banger. A Tom ‘n Ed Banger, even.
Plain Or Pan 