🎁 free sample

do you know this song?

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We went to the grade school production of Annie.

The next day the kids wanted to listen to the soundtrack.

After It’s The Hardknock Life, I played them Jay Z’s Hardknock Life (Ghetto Anthem). The conversation turned to sampling, and our 7yo wanted to know what it was.

Sampling:

the reuse of a portion of a sound recording in another recording

Here’s how it was in the 1977 cast recording of Annie…

…and here’s the new song Jay Z made with it 21 years later:

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We tried to guess what was the most-sampled song ever.

There’s Tom Tom Club’s Genius Of Love:

Which is sampled in Latto’s Big Big Energy…

…which features a guest appearance from Mariah Carey, who also sampled Genius of Love in Fantasy:

But it’s not just that catchy synth hook & funky guitar. Mark Morrison sampled the drums for Return Of The Mack:

All told, Genius Of Love has been sampled in 173 songs.

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10x More Sampled

We thought that might be the most sampled, but James Brown’s Funky Drummer has been sampled ten times more—1777 times. You’ve definitely heard it before:

As far as James Brown songs go, Funky Drummer is pretty mediocre, but Clyde Stubblefield’s drum break is legendary.

It’s in Sublime’s cover of Scarlet Begonias:

It’s in Ed Sheeran’s Shirtsleeves:

Heck, it’s in the Powerpuff Girls Theme!

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3x more sampled than that

But the most sampled song in history is one I’d never even heard:

Amen, Brother by The Winstons.

Don’t recognize it? The part you know starts about a minute later:

These four bars of drums have been sampled 6053 times.

The first was Salt n Pepa’s I Desire:

It’s in Lupe Fiasco’s Streets On Fire:

It’s even in the theme song to Futurama:

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Why hiphop? Why drums?

It’s easy to forget how different times were.

These days recording live drums is still a messy, noisy affair. But we have so many alternatives to recording live drums:

• the step sequencer in GarageBand or Ableton

• the virtual Drummer in Logic

• loop libraries like Yurt Rock

Back in the infancy of hiphop, DJs would scour records for “drum breaks”—short sections where the rest of the band drops out.

DJs would buy two copies of the same record, playing those few seconds of drums on one copy while cueing up the same spot on the other. Over and over they’d repeat this process, seamlessly looping while the emcee rapped a verse… I’m stressed just thinking about it.

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Dang kids these days don’t make real music…

New music builds upon the music that came before it.

And that was true even back in the “good old days.”

Before there was The Beatles’ Come Together…

…there was Chuck Berry’s You Can’t Catch Me:

Before there was John Mayer’s Still Feel Like Your Man…

..there was a Primitive Radio Gods song…

…that sampled BB King’s How Blue Can You Get? from Live At Cook County Jail:

Before there was Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love…

…there was Willie Dixon’s You Need Love:

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We could go on and on this way.

• JS Bach’s St Matthew Passion becoming Paul Simon’s American Tune.

• Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto #2 becoming Eric Carmen’s All By Myself

But let me leave you with this delightful example.

Rodney Crowell wrote a song about the first time he heard Johnny Cash sing I Walk The Line. When it came time to record the tune, he got Johnny Cash to come sing the chorus.

Check it out:

That’s all I got this week.

See you next Wednesday.

Josh

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