As quite the fan of early Demigodz tunes and most of what’s come from those cats since, I was very excited to see the new talk on Peter Agoston’s House List podcast, featuring the old battle horse Celph Titled.

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For those who aren’t familiar, The House List usually features older rap cats from the 90s and noughties who Agoston still knows from his own work in and around hip-hop. The talks often consist of a good bit of reminiscing about the olden days and little anecdotes from when everybody was still a bit of a clueless punk just starting out. For an older dude like myself, this is right up my alley.

So now, Agoston met up with Celph Titled and to kick off the talk, with no intro, they play Celph’s latest track “Paragraphs of Murder”, produced by none other than Apathy, his long-time partner. (Hit play above and listen first.)

Besides the chat that follows that’s well worth listening to, the song opens with a big female singer, presumably singing in Turkish. It’s powerful, mesmerising and it creates a great build-up to when the beat finally drops and Celph starts striking that iron. The sample has stuck with me for days and I had to find out who that was. There’s a certain je ne sais quoi about Turkish and Arabic singers. They seem to strike a cord in me. I needed to know where that was from.

Now, the key to digging up a vocal sample is understanding what they say in the first place, so you can try to search for the line and hope somebody’s transcribed that before you. In this case, since I barely speak three words of Turkish, I was a bit lost. And my speculative googling didn’t yield anything. Of course you could still try to get at Apathy and just ask, but it’s probably too soon to reveal his secret, provided he’s cleared the sample. (Let’s assume he has, or else I’m a bit of an ass just now…)

Looking around for more clues I stumbled on a Youtube comment by İsmail Eren Çetinkaya who added the opening lines as a comment underneath the track on youtube. (Thank you, İsmail!)

And from there it was easy as pie. (Or is it pi? No, pie is definitely easier, I’ll go with food over maths.)

In short, this is the track I heard first…

Incredible shit, right?

And this is where the opener is taken from:

Selda Bagcan – Ince Ince (1975)

That’s it, really. Just wanted to share.

Go buy some Demigodz shit, try to catch them live on tour and treat yourself to some more of Selda’s music.

Enjoy,

9@home