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.
