The Murky World of Sampling

Even if you're not a fan of rap and hip-hop, you surely know about "sampling," when an artist incorporates pieces of existing music into a new song. I like sampling when it's used to good effect, whether a sample is a fragment tweaked beyond recognition to create new sounds or a huge chunk of intact music with new lyrics added on top.

What I don't like as much about sampling is that it's so expensive to do legally and that it's so often done with little acknowledgment to the original music and, more importantly, the original artist. I think music sampling should be more like the citation of literary works: free, but with strict requirements about giving credit where credit is due.

Artists not backed by the world's top labels can't afford to sample if they want to sell their music. Making sampling free would level the playing field. Then if the original works and artists were cited more clearly and openly, they could greatly benefit from the increased exposure due to these contemporary borrowers. This is a half-cocked theory that I've had for years and in a way musicians are probably already supposed to do the latter part by listing samples in the liner notes. But who has liner notes when listening to internet radio or buying digitally? Anyway, my point is not to expound on the theory at length right this moment.

What I'm leading up to is this: listening to classic funk is always an eye-opening experience. I love it for its own sake, but it's even more fun to stumble across sounds I recognize from the more recent past. Funk is a seemingly limitless source of cool sounds and hip-hop never hesitates to return to that well. As with fashion, everything old becomes new again, sometimes with very little alteration, since younger generations don't remember the contributions of the older.

A Pandora station I've been listening to lately, which jumps around from classic funk to disco to modern techno, has recently played three songs I recognized as being sampled in famous hip-hop songs. One of them came up while I wrote this post, in fact: The Isley Brothers' "Between the Sheets," which I already knew was the "inspiration" for Notorious B.I.G.'s "Big Poppa." This is somewhat obvious because the sample is a largely intact piece of music from a very famous band.

But the other two sampled songs were never big hits, or at least not lasting hits, they seem to have avoided any resurgence in popularity despite their inclusion in two massive modern hits (is 1997 still considered modern? The movie franchise is technically still alive, so let's just call it modern). Below I've listed two more sets of youtube video links. The first link of each set is the original song, the second is the modern one that sampled from it. If you're under 30, you probably won't need the second links to guess the modern songs, but you've probably never heard of the originals either:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2XhhuM9GZo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7CePeRW6eM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol0ZyaGG5H4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UjsXo9l6I8

Seriously, Jay-Z's "Empire Falls" is New York's anthem, and I hadn't even realized the most famous hook from it is taken note-for-note from a song called "Love on a Two Way Street." I love what Jay-Z and crew did with one epic piece of music from an otherwise boring song, but don't obscure the source. And "Forget Me Nots"...well, you have to give Will Smith credit for turning that into a catchy pop smash by changing the lyrics and adding a standard drum beat. But he should have given Patrice Rushen credit for providing the foundation for his music. Then we could have decided to ignore her on our own terms, rather than on his.