Jay-Z set out to obliterate the overuse of “Auto-Tune” in hip-hop with “Death of Auto-Tune,” but he may have accidentally rekindled the fire in an unknown producer’s belly. No, I’m not talking about No I.D. Mah’Ko 37 is the French producer who sampled Janko Nilovic’s “In the Space” for a song titled “Appel à l’ordre.” No I.D. would go on to freak the same sample on Jay-Z’s “D.O.A.” Mah’Ko says that the No I.D. concoction has rekindled his desire to create music once again. I reached out to MHK 37 to get his thoughts on the song and he had some interesting things to say about the music industry from the perspective of a non-American artist. Dive in, it’s sweet.

What’s the history behind “Appel à l’ordre”?
“Appel à l’ordre” was from a double-cd mixtape called Appel à l’ordre . In English it means something like “call out for order.” It was the theme of the tape, but order about any kind of subject. Our track was about order in the rap game since we were thinking everything was going in the wrong way, which is I guess the same purpose with the Jay-Z’s joint since it’s about the death of Auto-Tune. We mostly called amateur MCs who never recorded before and most never recorded after, which made the quality of the tape not that great, but we wanted to give something to all the people we knew that never had the chance to record in a studio, kinda like a workshop, but we did a little tour around France with that CD, we shot a video for the song, but now there’s only a live version from Africa available on YouTube.

Stereo Neg – “Appel à l’ordre”

How did you come across the sample?
I found it in the Janko Nilovic LP that is left in France (I’m in Canada right now) but I remember the cover was all black library music kind of cover, because we had this guy who gave us a whole bunch of library music LPs from his mother’s work, and there was a lot of cover missing, broken records etc but this one was in good condition but with no cover. When I heard the track I did the beat directly, and we recorded the track in our cheap home studio and that gave us the lead for the whole project.

How did you feel when you heard the same sample on Jay-Z’s “Death of Auto-Tune”?
At first I was like “what the fuck?!” and yeah I bitched a lot about it [laughs] since it’s not the first time it’s happened to me and to any low key beat maker I guess. But it makes you feel like bad as an artist in a way that you did something that people didn’t really care about, and then someone famous does the same and it’s making a lot of noise.

I got many beats that people didn’t feel were good enough that sometimes after having been made by some famous American artists, then people like it.

And now Jay-Z is not my favorite artist but we can safely say he’s the biggest right now. And that’s how it goes in France and I guess in many countries that have a market for rap music. If you do something original they won’t like it until someone famous does it. But I guess most people are followers, so you can’t blame them.

Any final thoughts?
Overall I’d say it makes me more motivated, more hungry and also proud because I feel like I was in advance, in the right way even if people always thought the opposite, nah’mean? I stopped doing music for a minute but this makes me wanna keep trying. It’s hard for unknown people in USA but its even harder for foreigners. It’s kinda frustrating but what can I do against a Jay-Z. I know my beat sounds kinda wack because the mix is bad but still I prefer the way I flipped the sample because I didn’t just take 4 bars stuff and looped them, I tried to create something a little bit different from the Janko Nilovic music. But I love the Jay-Z joint too, because that guitar riff is powerful and I guess no matter how you use it, you’re gonna bang your head to it!