You're listening to Song Exploder,
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.
I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
This episode contains explicit language.
Clipping is a trio made up of producers William Hudson and Jonathan Snipes and rapper Daveed Diggs.
You might be familiar with Daveed's voice from his roles as Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette in the hit Broadway musical Hamilton.
But in Clipping, the whole band takes on different roles,
playing with different tropes and genres within hip-hop,
but setting up these strict, overarching rules for how they make their music.
In this episode, the three of them break down how they made their song,
Work Work, which features guest vocals from rapper Cockpistol Cree.
My name's David Diggs.
We were listening to this DJ Mustard compilation, and there was this Cock Pistol Cree song,
Lady Killers, on there, and we loved that song.
We were really like, man, we should do a song with her.
And that sort of started the conversation about this song,
about Work Work, was actually specifically to get her on a track.
I'm William Hudson.
We were like, who is going to be really amazing to everyone but nobody knows yet?
Who can we put on our album that everyone's like, who is that?