Demolition Pumpkin Squeeze Musik

What happens when one of the Invisibl Skratch Piklz gets ahold of a bunch of dawn-of-hip-hop breaks and makes a mix out of them? Here’s the dizzying answer: this 1994 mixtape from Q-bert, which takes the classic early ’80s Zulu Beat Show/Steinski-style mixture of hip-hop breaks and cartoon/cult film clips into the outskirts of absurdism. What makes Demolition Pumpkin Squeeze Musik so wild isn’t its iconoclasm, but its reverence — at least, the kind of reverence towards classic breaks like Incredible Bongo Band’s “Apache,” ESG’s “U.F.O.,” and the Headhunters’ “God Make Me Funky” that frees him up to find new angles to their well-known presence in every old-school DJ’s crates. The early drop of Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” is a good sign of what you’re in for — that legendary descending synth hit dropping concurrent with a bombastic kiddie-record introduction of Spider-Man, then getting put through the wringer with a succession of back-and-forth loops until he pulls it apart and squishes it around like Silly Putty. Additional gags include his decision to let the funky bell-rocking opening break to Bob James’ “Take Me to the Mardi Gras” play out into the significantly less hardcore chirpy mellowness of the song’s remainder as he hammers in some brisk percussive scratches, a run-through of “Theme from S.W.A.T.” overlaid with dialogue from Bugs Bunny’s pseudo-Edward G. Robinson gangster foil Rocky, and some of the damnedest scratched manipulations of the titular vocal from the Mohawks’ “Champ” you’ll ever hear. But beneath all the comedic punch-ins and the wrist-snapping scratch techniques shown off here, Q-bert lays out an itinerary that sounds like the ultimate culmination of Ultimate Breaks and Beats — the building blocks of early-stage hip-hop craftily stitched into giddy mass-media overstimulation.