I’m sitting in the basement of a low-rise corner building in Bushwick with 23-year-old rapper/producer Cash Cobain, and it’s finally time to throw on the Spice Girls. The basement is a converted corridor of windowless, soundproof closets available for rent, and Cash has commandeered this one specifically for our session. The self-titled “Sample God” has agreed to come in blind, sit with 13 random tracks I’ve loaded onto a thumb drive, and turn them into beats fashioned in his trademark style, known either as “Sample Drill”, or “Bronx Drill,” depending on who you ask.
Drill was christened on the Northeast side of Chicago in the early 2010s. The sound—largely credited to producers DJ L and Young Chop—is a skeletal bass-heavy style paced by stuttering 808s and ticking hi hats, with menacing, repetitive synth melodies and lyrics obsessed with nihilistic violence. After jumping to the UK, where it fused with elements of grime, Chicago drill blew up in New York in 2014, thanks to Bobby Shmurda and Rowdy Rebel. When Pop Smoke, formerly of Canarsie, linked with UK drill producer 808Melo in 2018 and seasoned the dour, punk beats with distinctly Brooklyn lyrical swag, he changed the texture of New York rap.
But the South Bronx-born Cash claims to have made New York’s first real contribution to the drill sound. After Pop Smoke hit big, Cash taught himself the parameters of UK drill, and began laying instantly recognizable samples on top of those vibrating baselines—updating a New York tradition of soulful, sample based-rap that runs from Rick Rubin through Large Professor to Puff Daddy. Now sample drill is very much on the rise on YouTube and in the earbuds of New York City teens. Cash has produced for Lil Yachty, and Drake has posted videos vibing out to his music. His laptop fuels the rising Bronx and Queens artists in his circle, like Big Yaya, B-Lovee, Lucki, and perhaps most notably Shawny Binladen, whose hushed, urgent growl is the perfect compliment to Cash’s music.
As the date of our session approached, I felt a weight on my chest: I was going to pull up to a studio and present samples to one of the most exciting young producers in the city. Where to start? High-pitched synths compliment sample drill’s subterranean tremors, so at first I compiled a selection of ‘70s and ‘80s pop and R&B hits. But as our session grew closer, I came to an epiphany while listening to Shawny Binladen’s “Georgia”—the song seems like a rip of the Ray Charles classic, but it’s actually a flip of Vudu Spellz’s flip, itself used for Ludacris and Field Mobb’s song of the same name from 2009. In other words, Cash is flipping second and third generation samples. So I went back to the drawing board and included 2pac’s “Str8 Ballin”, T.I.’s “Whatever You Like”, and Jay-Z’s “Girl’s Best Friend,” along with the Spice Girls’ “2 Become 1” and Nirvana’s “All Apologies,” as a kind of novelty challenge.
On the night we meet in Bushwick, Cash is wearing distressed denim, a well-worn hooded sweatshirt, Dunk Lows and a trucker hat. It’s the kind of look a fashion-conscious construction worker might wear during the winter, which is fitting, because that’s essentially the work Cash is doing tonight. He’s generally laid-back and thoughtful, his speech littered with the qualifiers and affirmations (“No kizzy,” “No freaky”) of New York City’s Zoomer patois. In spite of his burgeoning fame, he comes off as a friendly, humble guy.
The small studio is crammed with four of Cash’s friends; they keep an endless cipher of joints in rotation, as well as a grip of bodega munchies staples. The kids are typical New York teenagers: obsessed with women and cars, flipping between the evening’s Grizzlies-Thunder game and illicit street racing YouTube videos on a mounted flatscreen. Cash is all business. He eats nothing, smokes nothing, and turns down shots of Maker’s Mark.
How will the room react to a Spice Girls ballad? How will Cash? Can these samples even be flipped for drill purposes? Cash asks for the thumb drive, snaps open his MSI Katana laptop, pulls up FL Studio Eleven—the digital music production software that serves as his instrument of choice—and we go to work.
First up is the Lox’s “All for the Love”, a Swizz Beats production off 1998’s Money, Power, Respect. The synth is a climbing, churning Nokia cell phone ring. Cash immediately loops a clean two bar stretch that opens the song. I can feel the influence of Pop Smoke and one of his go-to producers, 808Melo, both in the sound and the name of some of Cash’s percussion effects, custom labeled “Dior,” “Luciano,” and “Woo.”
Making a beat can be tedious, like putting together a jigsaw puzzle composed of ill-fitting parts. But Cash is indefatigable: He goes over the beat again and again, bouncing steadily in his computer chair, shifting on its casters with an excitement that never wanes. Cash has bragged that it takes him about five minutes to hook up a sample, and he’s not far off—I clocked him at 20-30 minutes on average. He immediately finds the seams and studs of the sample he’s tinkering with. His crew is unimpressed with the alchemy being performed in front of them, but I’m amazed by the moment when he fits the loop and the beat starts to take shape, the way a Bob Ross painting looks like an amorphous blob of incongruent colors until, with a sudden well placed stroke, you can see the vista appearing before your eyes.
“Whatever You Like,” T.I.’s aspirational anthem from 2009, couldn’t be more different than the Lox song Cash just finished flipping, but he’s unfazed by the tenor shift, the approach is similar. The hi-hats are put in place first, a drunken metronomic sequence he appears to use for every beat, with the sample, snares and kicks molded around them based on the source material. Cash begins working around the beat drop in the intro, until I point out a synth-forward break near the end that I think he could rip a nice loop of synth off. He isn’t fussy: he skips ahead to my proposed section and prefers it to his initial draft.
He manipulates the sample in EQ, giving it a pitched-down, opiate-rich, underwater quality reminiscent of the heyday of Cloud Rap. After 20-odd minutes, he’s happy enough with the final product to place his increasingly ubiquitous signature—a clip of Big Yaya spitting, “And this beat from Cash, not from YouTube”—near the intro.
Cash Cobain has never flipped Nirvana, an obvious oversight that needs correcting. But the acoustic rendition of “All Apologies” from the band’s Unplugged album seems unflippable—I’m expecting a wink and a laugh before he discards it. After listening for a minute, Cash doesn’t hesitate. With surprising ease and dexterity, he clips the intro, revs it, and produces a strummy, caffeinated beat that sounds like a chipmunk interpretation of “Pass the Courvoisier”. I’m floored by his ability to turn nearly any source material into drill.
And so at last, the Spice Girls’ slow jam, “2 Become 1.” Cash’s manager, Glyn Brown, has succinctly described the power of his style: “You can’t deny these samples, no matter what age you are. It does something to the soul to hear a familiar sample—it doesn’t even have to be a soul sample. Giving people something familiar with that new kind of sound around it hits the soul.” It’s a powerful mining of familiarity, and nostalgia.
As the song plays, the room suddenly goes silent, and I’m transported back to middle school in 1996. I think about how songs age with you and pick up new layers of context. How they’re unearthed by the generations that come along later, who find new meaning in the song, and add new meaning to it.
I look at Cash as he listens and wonder if one of those moments of reinvention is about to occur in this studio right now—if Cash is about to build a new wing on a song I grew up with. A few seconds after it ends, Cash nods, locates a fertile stretch of bridge after the second chorus, and goes to work.
The resulting production is my favorite of the session. Cash has said he likes “sexy beats.” Some of his best work has come from flips of Mary J. Blige, Lauryn Hill, and Faith Evans. The Spice Girls aren’t an obvious corollary, but the shimmering, moaning vocal sample Cash pulls out of this rose petal-littered bathtub and champagne slow jam makes sense in the context of his work.
Cash works fast partly because he believes in the method—“When a beat is done, it’s done. I overworked beats before, you can get obsessed, you can put too much into it. You gotta know when to leave it alone,” he tells me at one point—and partly because at the moment, sample drill’s solution to the red tape of music sharing is to ignore it. Glyn Brown cites Juice Wrld’s uncleared jack of Sting’s “Shape of My Heart”, used to make his hit “Lucid Dreams,” as their inspiration — the illegal sample cost Juice the profits from that monster song, but it also opened the door for other hits that powered his fame. Cash has said, “If somebody sues me, I already made (the song) so I don’t care no more…… Especially if you own your own song and you’re Black? Wassup? I’m Black too. Come on, I’m coming up, you were coming up too……Clear that!”
So the purpose of these songs is to garner attention, to make a name with something that does crazy numbers, before leveling up. This may explain the rough-sketch feel of much sample drill. For now, it’s a volume game, which suits Cash’s ability to flip samples in the time it takes to stream an episode of Seinfeld. Cash’s drill innovations are still in the early, experimental stages—but his potential and possibilities feel limitless.
