The DJ mix is always a question of identity: Who is the DJ? And what are they trying to prove? Not that they’re all so self-conscious, but the mix always asserts something. On The Block is Hot, Pt 2 Blockhead asserted his indvidualism over moody samples from Everlast and Rakim. On Bumps Controller 7 illustrated a knowing reverence for the Golden Age, smooshing De La against Nas and making both sound newly relevant. I’ve heard James Murphy treat a DJ mix as a sketchbook, Greg Gillis treat it as a urinal, Primo as another excuse to scratch a bunch. I’ve heard DJ Shadow do pretty much everything a two-armed human can do on a DJ mix. He was clearly proving something.

DJ Boo’s mash-ups on Recycled Beats feel more academic than most of those, pairing classic hip-hop rhymes with, well, classic hip-hop loops, for the most part. There’s a lot of big New York bluster here, full of that liquid venom Black Sheep and M.O.P. used to hurl, mixed with some fairly safe new picks. So we’ve got Dilla, Jaylib and Tribe, if that’s not redundant, up against Amerie’s still-almost-too-good-to-parse “1 Thing,” which Boo cuts up ravenously, and the likes of Lily Allen, who is there in case that’s your thing, I guess. The end result of all this can understandably be a bit unfocused–do we need reminding that “Paper Planes” samples The Clash, for example?–but there remains an ineluctable appeal to the curating here. I mean, I’ll take Tribe twice on a record anyday.

As a listener, you’re left pleased but a little uncertain whether or not Boo is talking down to you. I think not, though. The intent seems, rather, to be a more subtle reinvigoration of the interplay between sample and lyric, an all-but-lost discussion in the synthesized pop landscape of contemporary rap. In that light, the album’s highpoint arrives on well-worn territory, a forty-second patch seven tracks in where the gaps in a Nas verse get played up against the sturdy beat of James Brown’s “The Boss,” taking a familiar breath and using it to alternately patch and emphasize Brown’s omniscient groove. The strings swell and we brace ourselves for Nas’s second verse but Boo cuts abruptly back to Brown’s original, and as the track scratches to a close the mixtape seems to be giggling to itself. Maybe there’s still some life in these old samples after all.

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