You're listening to song exploder where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh, here way.

This episode contains explicit language.

Clipping is a trio made up of producers William Hudson and Jonathan Snipes and rapper David Diggs.

You might be familiar with David's voice from his roles as Thomas Jefferson and the Marquita Lafayette in the hit Broadway musical Hamilton.

But in clipping, the whole band takes on different roles, playing with different tropes and genres within hip hop.

But setting up these strict overarching rules for how they make their music.

In this episode, the three of them break down how they made their song work work, which features guest vocals from rapper cockpistol creed.

Yup, line dance like a hold down, pants up daytime, whole block of ghost town, ghost ride, ghost face, jeez, get ghost in a moment pour a little foot of ghost of dead homie.

My name's David Diggs. We were listening to this DJ mustard compilation and there was this cockpistol creed song Lady Killers on there and we'd love that song.

The lady like you want to spit some spits on you might get some.

I'm a lady, lady lady, lady, lady, chill. I'm a lady, lady lady, lady, lady, chill. I'm a lady, lady lady, lady, lady, lady, lady, chill, watch me, bitch, watch show me.

We were really like, man, we should do a song with her.

And that sort of started the conversation about this song, about work work was actually specifically to get her on a track.

I'm William Hudson. We were like, who is going to be really amazing to everyone, but nobody knows yet.

Who can we put on our album that everyone's like, who is that, that person's amazing.

I was just on the lookout for stuff like that and then that song was on that mixtape and I was certain that was just the standout by far I thought.

So we made a song that we thought she would sound good on and then tried to find her.

My name is Jonathan Snipes with William Hudson, I make the beats.

The idea was trying to do what is a clipping version of a kind of DJ mustard style beat.

What I think is really sort of interesting and unique about DJ mustard sound is how incredibly limited his palette is and how many songs he can generate out of a handful of sounds.

And this really great sense of this sort of bouncy propulsive rhythm with it.

We're never just going to recreate or try to fit perfectly into the style that we're referencing.

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