It’s fair to say that sampling is one of the most important techniques in modern music production. What began as an arduous process of splicing and looping pieces of tape by experimental French composers in the 1940s has become a staple of modern pop music, embraced by artists from David Guetta to Jack Harlow. While those artists crafted their songs out of pieces of the biggest hits of 15-20 years ago, others have gone for more obscure tracks, ones you might not even recognize as from another song. Today we’re gonna change that. Here are 5 songs that have been sampled in your favorites.
1. Sufjan Stevens- Vesuvius
You may not know who Sufjan Stevens is, but he’s been one of the most acclaimed artists in indie music for the past 20 years. This song, sampled in the late Mac Miller’s ode to the then-Apprentice host, comes from his 2010 album The Age of Adz, which supplemented his traditional indie folk and chamber pop sound with heavy electronic elements. It might take you a second to put together where the sample is, but when you do you’ll gain a new appreciation for both songs.
2. Imogen Heap- Hide and Seek
This one has actually had two lives. It began as an early Youtube meme, after being used in a particularly memorable scene in mid-2000s teen drama The O.C. A few years later, Jason Derulo revived it for the chorus of his first hit, Whatcha Say. The bit you know comes near the end, but the rest is so engaging that you won’t even feel like you’re waiting for it.
3. Lew Stone & His Monseigneur Band ft. Al Bowlly- My Woman
Here we have a unique case of a song that’s become something of a sample within a sample. This 1932 track from the contemporary British dance band genre was first sampled in indie pop artist White Town’s 1997 hit Your Woman, a song you’ve almost certainly heard, even if you don’t know the name. That song was in turn sampled by Dua Lipa in 2020 for her track Love Again from her seminal album Future Nostalgia. At this rate in a few years someone will sample Love Again and this will become a third-order sample.
4. Sting- Shape of my Heart
Despite its artist’s massive popularity, this song actually flopped on release, failing to even break the Hot 100. But it’s since become one of the most important songs in Sting’s solo career, entirely on the back of how many songs it’s been sampled in. You probably know it best from its use in Juice WRLD’s breakout hit Lucid Dreams. But he’s only one in a list of dozens of artists that have incorporated Sting’s track into theirs, including but not limited to: Nas, Monica, The Roots, Kygo, and Russ. Sting’s fellow artists picked up the ball that the music-listening public dropped.
5. Billy Squier- The Big Beat
Our last song has an even wider gap between its initial popularity and its popularity in samples than Shape of My Heart did. Despite not charting in any country or even being from an established artist, this track has been sampled hundreds of times, including in some of the most instantly recognizable songs of the 21st century. 99 Problems, Girl on Fire, Oops I Did it Again, Butterfly, the list goes on and on. It’s been in so many songs that you probably won’t even be able to place that opening drum line to any one of them, since they’ll all be swirling around in your head.
Hopefully we’ve helped you identify the roots of some of your favorite songs, and introduced you to new ones as well. Sampling is an important part of what makes modern music so dynamic, and these 5 tracks help to prove it.
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