Roland Clark “I Get Deep”

The birth of our underground brand, Factory 93, not only brought on an adrenaline rush reminiscent of the renegade warehouse-era of raving—on which Insomniac was founded—but it also had us thinking back to all the people, places and parties that made this whole operation possible. And with that came a burning desire to crack open our collection and dust off the classic records we couldn’t live without. Through our From the Crate series, we’ll be breaking out both seminal and obscure cuts alike, imparting some knowledge in the process.

As long as there have been music scenes, there have been veterans bemoaning the decline of said scenes due to the newer participants who, for some unknown reason, can never seem to match the energy, creativity, and purity of the previous era. Such was the case with New York DJ, producer, and vocalist Roland Clark when, in 1999, he penned the lyrics to his single, “I Get Deep.”

“[It] came out of a frustration from coming back into the house scene after a small hiatus and feeling like things have changed from true believers of the music to a more commercialized version of what used to be,” Clark said in a 2014 interview. “Even down to the way people danced seemed very fake and technical. The flow of how people moved [had] changed.”

The resulting lyric—“They know what is what, but they don’t know what is what. They just strut. What the fuck!?”—found an obvious home on the in-house record label of long-running NYC deep house venue Shelter. It was a cutting analysis of the new kids who had been invading the city’s underground for some time, driven by the surging popularity of electronic music at the peak of the late-’90s electronic wave. But those words would have their own inception moment just a year later, when superstar Norman Cook used Clark’s vocal on “Star 69,” the fist-pumping second single off his third album, Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars.

The poetic paean to keeping it underground—spoken in Clark’s effortlessly cool cadence and chock-full of smooth, urban semantics (“That’s my shit. Wha? Whoooooo!”)—was now appearing on a record by a chart-topping electronica superstar. The AV Club called it “a big load of disposable fun and funk that’s fluffier than cotton candy and just as weighty.”

Most listeners at the time hardly knew of the original, even though the complete vocal of “I Get Deep” was also used on the album closer, “Song for Shelter,” for which Clark was fairly credited. (More mysterious is the ambiguous Roger Sanchez credit currently listed on both Discogs and Wikipedia, even though the very detailed liner notes printed on the UK CD single make no mention of the S-Man.)

Critics, for the most part, lacked the experience to even acknowledge the underground versus mainstream paradox in the Clark-Cook case, having just learned to face the reality of writing about dance music as a legitimate genre at the end of the previous decade. Besides, they were too mystified by Cook’s gimmicky use of an unearthed Jim Morrison poem on another album track, “Sunset (Bird of Prey),” to even wonder who Clark (and by proxy, Cook) was referring to in the line, “Up in the booth at the dread man spinnin’ the song.” (It was Shelter resident DJ Timmy Regisford.)

This left Clark himself to confront the conundrum (in the same 2014 comments): “It was very disheartening at first, but later I came to accept it because the whole goal of the genre is to spread out, not to keep it all to ourselves. In other words, I stopped worrying about what other people were doing and just continued to do what I did best.”

A similar sentiment actually appears in the latter half of “I Get Deep” itself. As the anecdotal evening at the Shelter club continues, Clark describes the moment when everyone eventually catches the same fever on the dancefloor. In the end, Clark calls out, “So, for all you hip-hoppers, you doo-woppers, name-droppers, you bill-boppers, come into our house, to get deep.”

That is why, no matter if it’s running on top of the original ‘90s house beat and chopped into a fist-pumping anthem, or wrapped around any number of remixes that have been released in the past 17 years, Clark’s fundamental message remains the same. It doesn’t matter when you started digging the music, as long as you’re willing to get deep once you’ve arrived.