‘Sample Credits Don’t Pay Our Bills’: How ESG birthed the hip-hop revolution
As the Scroggins sisters – better known as ESG – looked out at a disparate crowd in New York, they must have wondered if this whole music thing was worth it. Degraded from a headline act to the opening band for some unknown British group called A Certain Ratio and unable to get a record deal for love or money, the history of ESG could have been depressingly short. However, walking through the bustling streets of Manhattan in 19980 came a beacon of hope, in the shape of Mancunian icon Tony Wilson. “Do you want to make a record?” he asked.
Wilson was already noted for championing the underdogs of independent music, signing groups like Joy Division and Durutti Column to his legendary record label, Factory. Recording with Bronx dance-punks, ESG marked something of a departure from the original sounds of Factory, predicting the rise of dance music that would eventually engulf New Order and lead to the rise of The Haçienda. But before Wilson would forever change the cultural fabric of Manchester, he took a virtually unknown Bronx act down to a recording studio in New Jersey, accompanied by a disgruntled producer.
Martin Hannett was already synonymous with Factory Records by this point, having produced seminal works including Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, it seemed as though everything he touched turned to post-punk genius. After recording ‘Moody’ and ‘You’re No Good’ in one take, Hannett had the realisation that there were a few spare minutes of recording tape left. In a decision that would epitomise the “we’re not about making money; we want to make history” ethos of Factory Records, Hannett told the group to record one last song, which then became ‘UFO’.
For a piece recorded on the fly, ‘UFO’ has a legacy that almost eclipses the band itself. Undoubtedly the defining track of ESG, its inherent funk and no wave influences combined with the haunting guitar tones of the song give it an unforgettable quality. The seminal work was written by lead vocalist Rennee Scroggins after watching the Steven Spielberg film Close Encounters of the Third Kind and imagining what would happen if aliens landed on the housing projects of South Bronx, where the sisters had grown up. Although ESG never hit the charts with this – or, indeed, any other – track, it did cement the band of sisters as icons of New York’s underground scene.
At the same time as ESG were in the recording studio with Hannett, New York’s hip-hop revolution was rising in prominence. As more mainstream acts like Blondie and The Clash recognised the underground rap scene, the movement gained a sense of legitimacy. A huge aspect of early hip-hop that still prevails to this day is sampling. The act of taking a section of audio and repurposing it originated in the innovative stylings of musique concrète but soon became synonymous with rap and hip-hop. Many of those early tracks sampled old soul stars, particularly James Brown, but it did not take long for old-school hip-hop junkies to get their hands on ‘UFO’.
Sampled well over 500 times by everybody from the Beastie Boys to Wu-Tang Clan, ‘UFO’ goes down as one of the most commonly used samples in musical history. Its prominence in the world of hip-hop helped to establish ESG as a legendary New York outfit with growing relevance in both hip-hop and dance music scenes. However, the group themselves weren’t too pleased to find their song had been sampled so much. After all, the early days of sampling were awash with copyright infringement and improper royalties, meaning that for at least 20 years, ESG never made any money from the countless tracks that were built off the back of ‘UFO’. The band dealt with this in a typically ESG fashion, naming their 1992 EP Sample Credits Don’t Pay Our Bills.
‘UFO’ did not pay ESG’s bills in the short term, but they have certainly ended up with the last laugh. To this day, the Bronx group has continued relevance and popularity thanks to their unique sound and incredible impact on the early days of dance music and hip-hop sampling. Although the term ‘New York bands’ might elicit thoughts of The Velvet Underground, the Ramones or Television, the sisters of ESG have just as much claim to enriching the cultural landscape of the city’s underground scene.
