Over at Happy Furry Puppy Story Time with Norbizness: All Samples Cleared!, we’re talking about the use of sampling in hip-hop (and other) music. It’s funny because I just made up two mix CD’s called “Sample This” that contain the original song followed by the song that samples the original song. Here’s my one-fiftieth of a dollar that I posted on the comments there:
Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer at the beginning and Stevie Wonder’s You Haven’t Done Nothing at the end of 3rd Bass’ Pop Goes the Weasel. Chock full of self-ironic goodness with the line “Why not take your top ten pop hit / fix the music and make senseless ryhmes fit.”
Love Unlimited Orchestra’s Theme From ‘Together Brothers’ sampled in karaoke-like (or is it Diddy-like?) entirety for Quad City DJ’s Ride the Train.
Nate already caught one of my favorites in the Biggie’s Hypnotize…
Isley Brothers’ I Wanta Do Something Freaky To You in Snoop & Dre’s Tha Next Episode (“it’s like this and like that and like this and uh…”)
Van Halen’s Jamie’s Cryin’ in Tone Loc’s Wild Thing.
James Brown’s Payback in En Vogue’s Never Gonna Get It.
Forgot to mention, re: If sample-heavy music is outlawed, that’s a good thing. Not so. Good, creative sampling is a boon for music, bad Xerox sampling is a bane. How do I know the difference? Like Justice Potter Stewart once said of obscenity, “I know it when I see it.”
Good sampling is when sounds from one or more songs are combined/mixed/altered to create an entirely fresh song. Plenty of artists sample creatively (Beastie Boys and Digital Underground come to mind) so that you might hear a familiar riff in the new tune, but its context sounds nothing like the old tune.
Bad sampling is when an artist essentially karaoke-izes most or all of a tune and simply sings or raps new words on it. Puffdiddlicious is most guilty, but examples like Coolio’s Gangsta’s Paradise abound as well.
Somewhere in-between are songs with very familiar loops that are instantly recognizable, but with enough creativity in the new song to avoid karaoke-ization. This group ranges from the in-between-bad of Hammer’s U Can’t Touch This sample of Superfreak to the in-between-good of Rob Base & DJ EZ Rock’s Joy and Pain sample of Lyn Collins’ breakdown shriek in Think.
