Sample the music you love
Have you ever been listening to a hip hop song on the radio or on your phone and you hear a part of the song that sounds extremely familiar, something you know you’ve heard before in another song? You may have wondered why it sounds so similar. Did this artist mean to do that? No doubt they did.
A lot of inspiration and motivation travels through every hip-hop artist, whether it’s through their rhymes, their beats or even their lifestyle. Some fans might not even notice, though, that a certain part of their music was inspired by another artist.
Especially today, artists love and admire a certain part of another artist’s song and transfer that piece of music to their own project.
Whether it’s from the mainstream, where artists are well known and signed to labels, from the underground, where artists are working to get their name heard, or even from outside the hip-hop community, it doesn’t matter. All artists inspire each other sample each other’s work.
One instance of a sample in hip hop is the song “Workout” from J. Cole’s 2011 Cole World album. This song samples Kanye West, who released “The New Workout Plan” seven years earlier on his 2004 College Drop Out.
The reason for this sampling is that hip-hop artists are always painting a picture with their lyrics, whether it’s about money and women, or about where they grew up and how their life was hard. But they need that little something that’s missing in their music.
This is when artists go and look around for outside sources that they can use in their music to help imagine what they want to create. These outside sources don’t actually have to be other artists in the same genre.
For example, J. Cole wanted to find something that could help him paint a picture of himself back when he was in high school thinking about girls, so he incorporated two songs into his music – “Mariya” by Family Circle and “Impeach the President” by The Honey Drippers.
In April of 2015, Cole released “Wet Dreamz” on the album 2014 Forest Hills Drive. By June of 2016, the song had gone platinum, and by October the album itself had gone double platinum. In 2015, it won Top Rap Album and Album of the Year at the Billboard Music Awards and the BET Hip Hop Awards.
In the underground world, artists notice this process, and it gives them inspiration to one day make it in the Hip Hop world – like the Maryland rapper Logic. In his underground days, he became known for his lyrical wordplay and his music sampling.
Sometimes he would barely adjust an existing song so that his lyrics fit the original rhythm. For example, he rapped over the instrumental of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” allowing him to create the song “Wordplay,” included on his Young, Broke and Infamous mix-tape in 2010.
Logic has put his lyrics on almost any kind of music because he loves all styles and takes inspiration from hundreds of musicians. He admits that sometimes he sounds like another artist, but he embraces it because he believes all hip-hop artists are all mixed in with each other’s music, and everyone is recycling from one another
Even former up-and-coming rap artists in our own communities use the technique of sampling in their work. JL is an amateur Yuma artist whose “Lounge” samples “Feelin’ It” from Jay Z’s 1996 album Reasonable Doubt, which helped him express the thought that he doesn’t care about what life has to throw at him and he is just going to relax and adopt a new perspective.
Sampling, which has motivated and inspired many musicians, has changed the face of hip hop by evolving fresh new concepts.
