Do football fans resent the international break?

If you've spoken to many football fans this week, you may have found them drifting aimlessly, seemingly without direction. It’s the football international week, and there are many fans who are not happy about it.

It seems like in the past few years, each international week has been greeted with less and less enthusiasm by some fans, who see it as a disruption to the ‘proper’ football; football with club teams. There are a few reasons this might be the case.

Firstly, in many international weeks there aren't always big matches; matches with two top teams playing each other with a lot on the line. With the European Championships being expanded from having 16 teams to 24 teams for Euro 2016, more teams will qualify. This means that qualifying is not that exciting, particularly at the early stage of the process where we are now. England for example, in a qualifying group with Lithuania, Estonia, San Marino, Slovenia, and Switzerland, don’t exactly have a mountain to climb to qualify. With the first and second placed teams qualifying automatically from each group, plus the best third placed team, plus the rest of the third placed teams going into a playoff, not many of Europe’s top teams will be in danger of not making it to the finals. 

Another possible reason for the lack of enthusiasm is because international week breaks up the hustle and bustle of the season. Fans used to having several league matches to watch on the weekend, then Champions League and Europa League matches during the week, have to make do with just one or two televised international matches. In addition, Match of the Day, which is usually something to look forward to on Saturday and Sunday nights, is absent from the schedules.

UEFA, trying to freshen up the format, devised a new ‘Week of football’ idea, with qualifying matches taking place over several days over the international week from Thursday to Tuesday. To me however, so far this has just made it more confusing knowing when teams are playing. England played on Thursday and today, Sunday, whereas international matches used to be played on Fridays and Tuesdays.

International week can often seem like an inconvenience. It brings the league calendar, with its weekly drama, to a juddering stop. It is a necessary thing though in the end, to set up the big international tournaments every few years.  I'm a big fan of international games; I'm like a kid at Christmas when the World Cup or the European Championships are on. I guess, as with so many things, you just have to get through the boring parts to get to the good stuff.

Great Hip Hop Samples: Volume One

Hip Hop is built on sampling. Starting with the first DJs in the 1970s who took two records and mixed them together before getting a friend to rap over the beat, and continuing until today, hip hop beat makers have always looked at songs from other genres and thought, yeah, I'm going to take that and create something new with it.

Here are a few hip hop songs, and the songs they sampled.

Dr Carter/ Holy Thursday

Dr Carter is the sixth track from Lil’ Wayne’s 2008 ‘Tha Carter III’ album. It samples Holy Thursday, a song by composer David Axelrod, from his 1968 album ‘Song of Innocence’.

Holy Thursday sounds like Axelrod has brought a jazz orchestra together for a jam session, with several of the instruments getting an opportunity to do their own thing. Periods of richness and volume blended with more calm periods, and instruments come to the forefront, take some time in the spotlight, then recede into the background again. The song is very playful, and I can imagine how much fun the musicians would have had riffing off each other.

In Dr Carter Lil’ Wayne raps about the state of Hip Hop, seeing himself as the doctor who can cure what he thinks is wrong with the genre. 

The song strips Holy Thursday, taking out a large amount of the instruments to leave a skeleton for Lil’ Wayne’s lyrics. What remains is piano, the bass and drum beat, and the crescendo of strings and horns. Wayne builds his verses up through the calm parts, before using the crescendo to as his cue to end each verse. I really enjoy how he matched the playful beat with a playful, bouncy flow. I also like how he uses the calm parts of the song to talk to the ‘nurse’, before the drum beat kicks in again.

Through the Wire/Through the Fire

Through the Wire was Kanye West’s breakthrough single, and the song that introduced the world to him as a rapper. Released in 2003, it was the first single from his debut album ‘The College Dropout’. It samples Through the Fire by Chaka Khan, which was released in 1985, and is on her ‘I Feel For You’ album.

Through the Fire is a slow R&B power ballad. It’s very 80’s sounding, with big drums and synths showcasing Khan’s big voice. It also has a very 80’s guitar solo at 3.03.

The title of Through the Wire is a play on the fact that Kanye recorded his vocals for the song while his jaw was wired shut after he was in a serious car crash in 2002. The song is about the accident and its aftermath, when Kanye was in recovery.

The song takes Khan’s vocals from the chorus of Through the Fire and makes them higher pitched. Her vocals appear sporadically in the background of the verses at first, then get more regular towards the end of the verses, before turning into the chorus. 

I think Chaka Khan’s soaring vocals really fit well with Through the Wire, helping to add emotion to what is a song about triumphing over adversity. Kanye uses Chaka Khan's song about fighting through adversity for love to tell his story of fighting through adversity for success.

Machine Gun Funk/Chief Rocka

Machine Gun Funk is the fourth track from The Notorious B.I.G.’s debut album ‘Ready to Die’, which was released in September 1994. Machine Gun Funk samples Chief Rocka, a song by Lords of the Underground, a hip hop trio who had some success in the early nineties. Chief Rocka was released in June 1993, from the album ‘Here Come the Lords’.

Chief Rocka was Lord of the Underground’s most successful single, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s a fun song, with an excellent beat which showcases the Lord’s excellent flow and lyricism.

At 3.19 in Chief Rocka is the part of the song Machine Gun Funk samples. 

Machine Gun Funk builds its whole chorus out of just two lines from the Lord’s of the Underground’s song, lines which were no more important or significant than any others in the original song, showing how sampling can turn the smallest part of a song or a part you'd never think of into something new.