Come Away with ESG: The Most-Sampled Record Nobody Knows

Five hundred is a conservative estimate of the hip-hop records built on parts of Come Away with ESG. De La Soul used it. Gang Starr used it. The Beastie Boys used it. Heavy D used it. A generation of producers reached for the same record and pulled pieces out, and the pieces kept working no matter what was built around them. The Scroggins sisters, who recorded the album in 1983 as teenagers from the South Bronx, saw almost none of what those samples generated.

The gap between ESG's influence and ESG's recognition is not a footnote to the history of hip-hop and post-punk. It is the story.

Four Sisters and Ed Bahlman

Renee, Valerie, Deborah, and Marie Scroggins grew up in the South Bronx in the late 1970s, five minutes from the block parties where hip-hop was being invented and playing in a scene, the no-wave and post-punk underground, that was happening several miles south in downtown Manhattan. Their mother, known as Mama C, managed the band and pushed them toward both worlds simultaneously. Ed Bahlman of 99 Records, a downtown Manhattan label that sat at the intersection of post-punk, funk, and the emerging dance underground, signed them and released their first recordings. When ESG toured the United Kingdom in 1982, they played Factory Records shows alongside Joy Division and A Certain Ratio, who were working in an adjacent territory of minimal groove and rhythmic austerity.

The band's sound was not a synthesis of these scenes so much as a product of circumstance. Instruments were expensive. Studio time was expensive. What ESG could afford was a drum machine, a bass, a guitar played more like a percussion instrument than a lead voice, and four vocalists who understood rhythm as the organizing principle of everything they did. The minimalism was not an aesthetic choice in the way downtown artists sometimes practiced minimalism as a theory. It was the sound of people making music with what they had.

What the Record Sounds Like

Come Away with ESG, released on 99 Records in 1983, is a compilation of recordings made across several sessions rather than a conventional album, but it functions as one. The record opens and sustains a particular atmosphere for its entire running time: locked grooves, bass lines that do not resolve so much as repeat, vocals that treat the voice as a rhythmic layer indistinguishable in function from the drum machine underneath them. Nothing is emphasized above anything else. The mix does not have a center.

The guitar, where it appears, produces short repeated figures that add texture rather than melody. There are no solos. There are no choruses in the conventional radio-pop sense. The tracks are open-ended by design. A DJ could drop a needle anywhere on most of these tracks and the groove would be immediately usable. That quality of usability is not an accident.

UFO

"UFO" is approximately two and a half minutes of locked groove: a drum machine pattern, a bass ostinato that does not deviate, and a voice repeating a phrase over the top. The song has no bridge, no breakdown, no moment of release. It simply runs at the same temperature from beginning to end and then stops. As a piece of music by normal pop standards it is almost nothing. As a piece of raw material it is inexhaustible.

Producers heard it and heard a canvas. The bass line sits at a frequency and tempo that fits underneath almost any rap vocal. The drum machine pattern has the quality of inevitability that makes a break loop feel like it was always there. De La Soul used ESG's recordings on 3 Feet High and Rising. Gang Starr built tracks on them. The Beastie Boys sampled them. What made "UFO" so persistently useful was the same thing that made it so strange as a listening experience: the track commits to its one idea completely and leaves every other decision to whoever comes after.

The Accounting

Sample clearance as a legal and commercial practice was largely nonexistent in the late 1980s when golden-era hip-hop was being made. Producers sampled what worked and put it on records without paying for the source material. When legal frameworks around sampling tightened in the early 1990s following court decisions like the Grand Upright Music v. Warner case, some artists were paid retroactively and some were not. The economics of who got paid depended heavily on the resources of the artists involved, their label relationships, and whether they had lawyers.

ESG had none of those advantages. The sisters were on a small independent label, had limited legal representation, and were not positioned to pursue the labels that had made money on their work. Renee Scroggins has given interviews over the years about the scale of the sampling and the absence of compensation. The record that generated more samples than almost any other release of its era produced almost nothing in royalties for the people who made it. The sample economy that turned ESG's sound into the raw material of hip-hop was not incidentally exploitative. The exploitation was structural and total.

What Came After

ESG continued to perform and record for decades after Come Away with ESG, releasing new material in the 1990s and 2000s and touring a circuit of venues that understood the record's importance even when the mainstream music industry did not. The band's place in the history of both post-punk and hip-hop has been written about more seriously since the early 2000s, when reissues brought the recordings to a new audience and criticism began to trace the specific lines of influence the band had generated.

The record still sounds current because the sounds on it were never particular to a moment. A locked groove at the right tempo does not date in the way a production trend dates. The drum machine on "UFO" does not sound like the 1980s the way a gated reverb snare sounds like the 1980s. It sounds like a decision about what to include and what to leave out, and that decision was correct, and the correctness of it turns out to be permanent.