Tower Of Power What Is Hip

Getting Familiar With Tower Of Power's What Is Hip

The 1973 track What Is Hip off the album Tower of Power came out on independent soul/jazz-funk recordings before the group signed to Warner Bros. It is one of their more well-known cuts, the one that usually plays on classic soul radio when someone is trying to get a crowd moving. The song runs about five minutes and features the full horn section doing what they always do — tight stabs, call-and-response with the lead vocal, and a groove that locks in from the first measure. If you are looking for the song, your options depend on what you actually need. Streaming platforms carry it. Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music — all of them have the original album version. If you want something you can download and keep, the most straightforward route is purchasing it from a digital store like Amazon MP3 or iTunes. That gives you a clean, lossy or lossless file depending on which store you pick. For around nine-nine dollars, you can grab the entire Tower of Power album and this track comes with it. I ran into a situation a while back where I needed a clean instrumental stem for a DJ set — specifically the horn section without the vocal — and the individual tracks were impossible to pull. What ended up working was running the vocal track through a phase-inversion trick on a DAW. You duplicate the track, invert the phase on the copy, and sum them together. It is not perfect but it gets the vocal out far enough for live use. Takes maybe twenty minutes if you know what you are doing.

There are a few things to be aware of if you are digging into this record. The original pressing on independent labels can vary quite a bit in sound quality depending on the source. Some copies are remastered aggressively and lose the low end punch that makes the bass line work. If you are serious about the sound, look for the 1999 remastered reissue or the Warner Bros. catalog versions — they tend to sit better in a mix and translate through speakers without getting muddy. Another thing nobody tells you about this track: the tempo is deceptively tight. It sits around 118 to 120 beats per minute depending on how live the session player feels that night, and the horn hits lock into the backbeat in a way that makes quantizing it afterward feel stiff. If you are trying to sample or loop this for production work, you will get better results by riding the tempo map rather than snapping everything to grid. The human swing in that recording is the whole point of it. For people who just want to hear it, the easiest path is a quick search on YouTube for "Tower of Power What Is Hip official audio." Most uploads pull from the right sources and sound decent. If you are hunting for sheet music or chord charts, JazzMusician.com and Musicnotes carry arrangements, though some of the horn parts require reading fast sixteenth-note figures that are easier to learn by ear than from a page.

The track has been covered a few times over the years and sampled in hip-hop circles, which means you might come across alternate versions or edits when searching. Not all of them are accurate to the original recording, so if you are trying to reference the actual studio take, stick to the album version from the 1973 self-titled release or the later compilations that list the original track listing.