What’s good, Hip Hip History fans/community! Today we’re here to celebrate one of the foundational aspects of hip hop music- the sample.

Now, we’ve talked about beats, and producers, but today is for the sample. Of course many beats *are* samples, and many producers (not just in hip hop, but many other genres of popular music) use samples, but what we’re posting today are hip hop songs with samples that we really love! Just as with beats, sampling started with DJs looping parts of old jazz and funk records to keep the vibes going. As techniques for sampling got more sophisticated, the creativity of not only using samples to compose a crucial part of a hip hop song, but of looping, cutting, and deploying them grew exponentially. The possibilities were only limited by the deepest of crate digging, the rarest of vinyl, the elusive snippet of drum or saxophone or even a brief but recognizable voice. Of course, the legalities of sampling and the continued debate over fair use that started decades ago continues today, but the art remains.

For this one, I sent a quick text over to another musicology friend of mine who has taught classes in hip hop performance and history to ask him about sampling. I issued him the challenge (pick a song!) and at first he wrote ‘(HP), why you do this to me, girl!?’..and then after a pretty significant pause, he gave me this one:

He pointed out (he called me like ‘I’m not trying to type all this on my phone!’) that one thing he loved about the sax sample in particular is the way that it is used throughout the song in different ways-sometimes a longer bit, sometimes shorter, sometimes layered in so that you can barely hear it, etc. He said he uses this song in class to start to talk about how hip hop can be considered ‘composed’ in the same way that other genres use quotation and other creative strategies to build on what preceded it.

I’m going to do a rare thing and post a second one here in the header, since I had my own pick ready to go:

This is one of my favorite samples! It’s nothing groundbreaking or even unusual for the Beasties; I just like the way that it comes out of nowhere, with no context, like ‘we found this hilarious record and decided to put this specific moment in this song!’. It makes the song seem like a bunch of talented hip hop crate diggers just celebrating a good find, and so it reminds me of the spirit of sampling and the way in which it has always co-existed with the genre.

Ok-accept the challenge!

1.) The tricky/fun thing about this 30 day ‘challenge’ is that you get one choice (see, it’s a challenge!). Maybe there are a lot of songs you could use here, but there’s no wrong answer! 🙂 Even if you’ve already used one song by a particular artist/producer, feel free to post another one by the same artist/producer.

2.) In order to keep the thread from borking, please limit yourself to one YouTube/media link per post. If someone ‘beats you to it’ and posts a song you would’ve posted, reply under their post saying why you like this song/why it was your pick as well, etc. Let’s not give Disqus a reason to make the thread hard to navigate for those of us listening to the songs! If you want to mention some others, of course that’s fine!

3.) Let’s keep this as positive as we can. Don’t yuck anyone’s yum, don’t snark on someone who may not be as familiar as others, don’t ‘Um, actually’ people, etc. Ain’t nobody earning any Internet Points out here.