Only Built 4 Hyperlinks (Part 1)

Following the excellent Kon + Amir Present: The 50 Greatest Hip-Hop Samples Of All Time, it seems dusty fingers have swapped crates for keyboards, and internet forums have been buzzing with hip-hop heads debating which samples and breaks were key in making 90s hip-hop such a formidable period in the genre's history.

Always digging, the Soulful Strut love to reflect upon our own favourite breaks and beats, and so we're chronicling them with "Only Built 4 Hyperlinks", a series exploring our most-loved funk and soul samples. Over the coming weeks we'll be revealing those rare crate-digging moments when you discover a loop on an old piece of vinyl that unexpectedly gives up a secret from hip-hop's golden age.

We'll kick things off with Bob James, a jazz fusion pianist who is pretty well-known in sampling circles, but who nonetheless created some of the biggest beats of all time. Without Bob James, would we have ever heard Run rock rhymes or Rakim's journey of the journal as a journalist, and would Nas even have picked up a microphone at that infamous barbeque?

There are several outstanding Bob James tracks to choose from, but we've opted for an absolute monster from his 1974 album, One, called Nautilus.

Click to hear Nautilus

The album features James (keyboards), Gary King (bass) and Steve Gadd (drums), the latter being a legend in his own right and worth investigating further.

Listening to this track for the first time still ranks as one of our most memorable beat-digging moments. The first few eeire bars kick in, and from the spacey void some of hip-hop's greatest artists emerge, first with Jeru and Pete Rock, before an awesome guitar lick washes up Ghostface Killah ... and we're only a few bars in!

The track races into a glittering fusion of orchestral swell and classical piano, rolling over a strong b-boy beat before plunging 20,000 fathoms of funk into a deep underwater dimension, leaving only a crashing breakbeat and haunting organ stabs that bubble into classics for Run DMC, Ultramagnetic MCs and Eric B & Rakim, with Main Source (featuring Nas) also floating in the deep soundscape.

The list, of course, goes much, much further, and it's easy to lose count of the funk flotsam and jetsam used by hip-hop all over this track, making it one of the most sampled of all time. But it is also just an unforgettable track in its own right. A real classic.