Isaac Hayes walked into Ardent Studios in Memphis in 1969 with a vision for soul music that nobody in the industry was prepared for. While Stax Records was built on tight three-minute singles, Hayes wanted to stretch out — long, cinematic arrangements that breathed and built over side-long album tracks. "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic" was the manifesto. Built on Charles Pitts' hypnotic wah-wah guitar figure and a rhythm section locked into a relentless groove, the track unfolds across nine minutes of psychedelic soul-funk that sounded like nothing else in 1969.

For hip-hop producers, the track was a goldmine. The Bomb Squad sampled it for Public Enemy's "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos," using the brooding atmosphere to underscore Chuck D's prison break narrative. RZA chopped it for Wu-Tang Clan's self-titled battle cry. Biggie opened his debut album with it. De La Soul flipped it playfully for "Me Myself and I." The song's density — its layers of guitar, organ, bass, and drums — meant every producer heard something different in it, and the sample list runs into the hundreds.

Hayes himself went on to score "Shaft" and become one of the defining cultural figures of the 1970s, but "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic" remains the purest distillation of his musical ambition. The made-up title — his word for something beyond description — turned out to be prophetic. Fifty-five years later, producers are still finding new ways to chop it.