Yo, why don't you bring back the other track

N.W.A. - 'Something 2 Dance 2' (Straight Outta Compton - 1988)

N.W.A.'s landmark 1988 album, Straight Outta Compton, is an album of genre-defining music that was a catalyst for rap music widening its horizons—pulling away from what had happened in the early 1980s and the rest of the decade on the East Coast of the U.S. Building on World Class Wreckin' Cru (featuring Dr. Dre and D.J. Yella), they fired a shot eastwards from California that reverberated far and long enough to essentially birth what soon would be called hardcore or gangsta rap. That's certainly true of the first 55 minutes; the last song on the album is a different proposition.

"Something 2 Dance 2" samples D-Train's "You're The One for Me", a pioneering post-disco track that paved the way for electro tracks such as “The Message”, “Planet Rock”, “Nunk” or others of the class of 1982. It also features Sly and The Family Stone's "Dance to The Music" and would itself go on to be sampled by Squarepusher on "Come On My Selecter ", famed for Chris Cunningham's warped and demented 1998 video.

Arabian Prince left shortly after the release of the debut album over royalty and contract disagreements. "Something 2 Dance 2" is his sole writing credit on the album and is only a minor vocal. Given how out of place the song seems, you wonder whether it was initially a Trojan horse for the gangsta rap; Have something closer to the party-records coming out of the West Coast at the time, get a hit, and build on that. It has the gimmicky use of the mid-century U.S. animation Mighty Mouse and a Gang Busters sample, a U.S. radio programme showcasing true crime stories.

You've got the Fairlight CMI ORCH-5 sting that evokes early 1980s hip hop and electro, particularly Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force's "Planet Rock" that the group adds into the mix and provides a meta-commentary as they put it together.

It is the lone club jam on the album, the only one that is backwards looking rather than forwards. The other 11 tracks do so much to lay out how the genre evolves over the next decade to the point where it becomes artistically and financially one of the most critical sub-genres of music by the turn of the century. As a result, it seems almost perverse that they tacked on this retrograde effort at the album's end. It is hard to take that seriously in the same way that if Nirvana had ended an album with a non-lampooning hair metal song. Had it become a hit, there may have been a "Song 2" vibe to it.

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