Lick a Shot

The production starts with a sample from the Cannonball Adderley Sextet’s “The Weaver,” a 1962 jazz recording, and buries a fragment of James Baskett’s “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” somewhere underneath. Neither source is recognizable in the result. What Muggs made from them is dense and deliberate. Select magazine noted at the time that “fat, acoustic sounds predominate” on tracks like this one. That is accurate as far as it goes. It does not account for how intentional the weight is. B-Real does not embellish over a track like this. The groove does the work and the vocal follows it. The song is exactly as dense as it needs to be. Not one thing more.

Muggs and B-Real share the only two writing credits. No third contributor. Muggs produced it alone, as he did the rest of Black Sunday. Ruffhouse released “Lick a Shot” as a UK-only single in 1994, nearly a year after the album dropped. It reached number twenty on the UK Singles chart and number nine on the UK Dance chart. The album that carried it hit shelves thirty-three years ago today, on July 20, 1993. Black Sunday debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 and went quadruple platinum in the United States. The single arrived late and only in one territory. It still charted.

Korn borrowed the riff from “Lick a Shot” and used it to close out “Blind,” the opening track of their self-titled debut in 1994. They re-recorded it themselves rather than sampling the original. It appears at the end of the song after the main track winds down. Korn would go on to sell more than thirty-five million records and define the sound of alternative radio for a decade. That lineage is rarely discussed in the context of this song. It should be.