Rhyme Report

Published on January 31st, 2019 | by Guest Contributor

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Reddit Thread Reveals the Most Underrated Genres in Hip Hop Sampling

It takes one glance at the Billboard Top 100 to see that sampling is more commonplace in the music industry than it ever has been before. From hooks and vocals to entire melodies, old songs continue to be chopped, changed and given a fresh lick of paint for their second turn in the musical spotlight. Let’s not even get started on the topic of the scandalous “borrowing” of beats that hits the headlines time after time.

A recent Currys campaign delves into the topic by looking at the history of sampling throughout time. From the results, hip hop accounts for 64% of all samples ever used. Arguably, sampling is the reason the genre exists as we know it today.

What do hip hop artists like to use in their work? According to the campaign, they most commonly look to 60s-80s funk and soul tracks to inspire their next project. The most sampled artist of all time? 70s crooner James Brown, of course!

Recently, a Reddit user put out feelers to discover whether there are underrated genres hip hop fans want to hear sampled – the response was instantaneous.

Japanese music in its many forms cropped up among responses, with mention of Japanese jazz, Jpop and anime frequenting the feed. Many don’t realise that anime themes are being sampled by big-name rappers regularly – think Big Boi’s ‘Kill Jill’ (featuring Hatsune Miku), Chance the Rapper’s ‘Nostalgia’ (which samples a scene from Gundam Wing) and Lil Yachty’s ‘Dipset’ (which samples ‘Green Bird’ from the Cowboy Bebop OST). What’s more, Childish Gambino and Lupe Fiasco famously argued about which of the two watches more anime. And with anime shows such as ‘Samurai Champloo’ and ‘Afro Samurai’ demonstrating hip hop influences, it’s clear that there is mutual appreciation between the two sub-cultures.

Another long-standing pairing is hip hop and gaming, and one that fans want to see more of according to the Reddit thread. Hip hop has been paying homage to the video games industry for many years now, and vice versa. Back in 1988, Fresh Prince and DJ Jazzy Jeff delivered a buzzworthy track entitled ‘Human Video Game’, which, as it says on the tin, is a pure homage to video games. Amidst the narrative about playing games all night, you can detect samples from the original Donkey Kong. Fast forward to 2009 and another classic was called upon, as Wiz Khalifa sampled the Sonic the Hedgehog theme song in ‘Ms Rightfernow’ – to name just a couple of examples.

It would appear there’s a running theme among the Reddit responses – one that suggests that cross-media collaborations could spell the future of music, perhaps? Watch this space to see how sampling continues to transform the music industry.


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