Black Sheep / Silence of the Lambs - The Instrumentals, Vol. 1 / 2010
The Choice Is Yours (DJ Anointed)
loose, funky, confident
This is the instrumental version of Black Sheep's 1991 single "The Choice Is Yours," stripped of Dres's vocal and presented as a beat-only artifact from a compilation of instrumentals pulled from the group's debut album "A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing." With no lyrics to parse, the piece functions as a showcase for the track's bassline, horn stabs, and scratch work rather than as a narrative text.
sampling and crate-digging aesthetics golden-age hip-hop production duality/choice as a structural hook DJ culture and instrumental use
Who's speaking
There is no vocal narrator; the 'voice' here is the producer's arrangement of samples and breaks, addressing DJs and listeners who want the beat without the rap.
What happens
As an instrumental there is no lyrical narrative to trace. Any sense of progression comes from the arrangement: how the groove is introduced, broken down, and brought back, likely including the famous call-and-response horn riff and bassline that anchored the original song's hook.
How it's built
Presumably mirrors the original's verse/hook architecture but with the vocal removed, leaving space for the instrumental hooks (horns, scratches, bass) to carry the transitions that lyrics would otherwise mark.
Section by section
Album context
Its home on an instrumentals compilation signals its intended use: for DJs to scratch over, for other MCs to rhyme over, or for fans who want the musical bed of a well-known single isolated from its vocal.
Original song's role
The parent song title plays on the idea of two options — famously tied to the Eric B. & Rakim sample and the hook's binary structure, this or that — but with lyrics absent here, that thematic duality is only implied by the title and the building blocks of the beat rather than enacted in words.
Reading it
Without lyrics, the most defensible reading treats this as a functional, archival object: a producer's track isolated for sampling, remixing, or DJ use, valuable for its musical hooks rather than any verbal message. A looser reading might extend the 'choice' framing metaphorically to the listener's own choice of how to use the instrumental (rap over it, dance to it, study the production) — but that's a stretch built on the title alone, not on content.
Context
"The Choice Is Yours" is one of Black Sheep's best-known singles, originally released in 1991 and later widely sampled/referenced in advertising and other media (notably the Kia Soul hamster commercials used a different song, but the Black Sheep track has had its own pop-culture afterlife). This instrumental appears on a 2010 compilation presumably assembled to give DJs and producers access to the bare tracks from the group's debut. I'm not certain of the specific details of this instrumentals compilation's release or curation.
Listen for
- the interplay between the bassline and horn stabs that originally anchored the hook
- any scratch work standing in for the vocal hook
- how the drum break is looped and varied across what would have been verse and chorus sections
- production textures that reveal the early-90s sampling techniques Black Sheep and Mista Lawnge used
About Black Sheep
Black Sheep is an American hip-hop duo from Queens, New York, United States, composed of Andres "Dres" Vargas Titus and William "Mista Lawnge" McLean. The duo was from New York but met as teenagers in Sanford, North Carolina, where both of their families relocated.
1991 - present / United States
Full biography and catalogue