And that’s what happens to Coolio’s character here. They simply shut up, letting the interviewee carry on, expanding their story, filling in blanks, turning back on and contradicting themselves. Researchers and other interviewers have a well-known – and no less effective for that – technique for getting the most out of their subjects. But what really makes it work is Coolio’s storytelling and self-justification. This song earns its sample, in other words.
They turn the 1976 track from sermon to single. The stern, basic backbeat makes Wonder’s strings hit hard, the bassline gives the track a sinister momentum “Pastime Paradise” never had. If “Gangsta’s Paradise” were only didactic it wouldn’t be effective, and it wouldn’t be great pop. It wants you to remember how sweet soul could be in the early 70s, and then it wants to tell you, as straight as it can, why it can’t be that way now. And “Gangsta’s Paradise” deliberately forces Stevie Wonder’s conscious, anti-materialist soul music into dialogue with that more brutal context. Isolating musical developments is a luxury: it means ignoring music’s social and economic context. With that reading, Coolio using Stevie Wonder’s beautiful “Pastime Paradise” so fully was flaunting rap’s supposed lack of creativity. For some critics, to draw a line from Stevie Wonder to hip-hop was to trace a decline: to tell the story of black American pop’s lost soul, from a 70s full of hope, warmth and conscience to a present day of seeming aggression and amorality. Coolio was 32 when “Gangsta’s Paradise” came out, but the man he’s voicing is 23 – born in ’72, then, the year Stevie Wonder released Talking Book.
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