DJ Burn One’s arranging skills are on display in the twenty seconds of foggy, movie music that begins “Bobby Cox” and then, the “Burn one…” drop arrives, some wailing funk guitar not far behind, and that composer pretense is pushed to the side for something with a lot more knock. Burn One is too consistent, too prudent, and too devoted to country rap tunes to forgo their appeal, just to prove he’s the Jerry Fielding of this hip-hop shit. So yeah, “Bobby Cox” is still a beat, but it’s not an “instrumental” in the sense of a rap beat unadorned by an emcee, it’s a hip-hop-tinged piece of music that takes full advantage of not having to worry about who can rap on it and how. Everything gets to be a little more filled-out and sprawling.
Ricky Fontaine’s guitars endlessly glide along and get to have a real musical conversation with one another: “Oh, pleasant wah-wah guitar, meet politely screaming Eddie Hazel guitar.” The drum programming has seven or eight different layers to it, all bouncing and snapping off one another, peaking with that gun-shot-like snare. The second half of the song adds some hesitant pings from a music box (courtesy of Walt Live) and blaxploitation strings from Walt Live. The music box and the strings are the main sounds in the gloomy intro, and they return towards the end of “Bobby Cox,” now in the background and with a new context. It’s a brilliant production touch and bridges the seemingly disparate intro to the rest of this track. Really can’t wait for The Ashtray.
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