clipping. / Cooling Prongs

Clipping’s “Tipsy” was previously only available as part of the 2020 Save Stereogum, an exclusive ‘00s Covers Comp and crowdfunding campaign for the site’s supporters. Clipping was one of 40 artists asked to record never-before-heard covers of songs from 2000-2009. Clipping says, “J-Kwon’s ‘Tipsy’ is one of the greatest party rap songs of all time. We could never make a beat as hard as the original, so we took our version in another direction — something like if Skinny Puppy had somehow remixed it in the late 1980s.”

“Midnight” by Cooling Prongs (AKA Christopher Fleeger, who collaborated with Clipping on Double Live) is a musique concrète tribute to Ice-T’s classic track of the same name. Fleeger’s process involved recording for many weeks, every night between midnight and 6am, with microphones mounted to the outside of his van, at all the locations mentioned in the lyrics to the original song. Hundreds of hours of audio were edited and arranged to create a field-recording companion to the journey the rapper describes through South Central Los Angeles, from the AMPM location on Vermont, through all of the intersections he names, finally ending at Ice-T’s childhood home, just off Crenshaw.