Features
A Brief History Of Sampling
Through sampling, hip-hop has the power to bring old music to new years, helping music to evolve while paying respects to the artists that came before.




Hip-Hop: that’s music that rips off other people’s songs, right? Why can’t these rappers write their own? Sampling is stealing!
You could look at it that way – or you could say that appropriation has fuelled the evolution of music ever since Day One. Think of all the old blues riffs that have been recycled over the ages… and then the white rock bands that supercharged those licks and helped to forge hard rock and heavy metal in the late 60s and early 70s. Or Bob Dylan: that great wordsmith who’s pilfered from sources as wide-ranging as British folk song ‘Scarborough Fair’ and the Japanese crime memoir Confessions Of A Yakuza.
It’s all part of a wider patchwork, in which something old becomes something new in the hands of a younger generation. And respects are being paid in the process: hip-hop producers wouldn’t build their work on something they thought was terrible. Though many songs might now be more recognisable for a track they were later sampled in, in many cases the producers would have been looking to bring obscure gems to light, both in order to surprise their listeners and ensure that their music was fresher than anyone else’s. Legendary block party DJs such as Grandmaster Flash, Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa would scratch out the labels on the records they were playing with, in order to keep their sources secret – and keep their punters dancing.
Hip-hop’s unlikely heroes are The Shadows: a British instro combo led by bespectacled guitarist Hank Marvin, and best known for backing Cliff Richard. Their 1960 chart-topper ‘Apache’ was covered by The Incredible Bongo Band on their 1973 album, Bongo Rock, and it’s this latter version that soon found its way into the arsenal of every block-party DJ of the 70s, the mix-masters keeping its distinctive drumbeat going ad infinitum for breakdancers (or B-boys and B-girls) to bust a move to. So important is the song in hip-hop’s history that it’s been claimed as the genre’s “national anthem” and, in 1981, Sugar Hill Gang, the group who first took hip-hop into the charts with ‘Rapper’s Delight’, recorded a tribute, ‘Apache’, capturing the spirit of those early block parties.
Arguably the only challenger to James Brown’s status as hip-hop’s go-to source was George Clinton, whose P-Funk empire has long been part of hip-hop’s DNA, appearing in everything from goofy classics such as Digital Underground’s ‘Humpty Dance’ (built around Parliament’s ‘Let’s Play House’) to gangsta rap landmarks. Indeed, the Parliafunkadelicment Thang even lent its P-Funk epithet to the G-Funk music that Dr Dre helped spearhead, a stand-out example of which is Snoop Dogg’s Dre-produced ‘Who Am I? (What’s My Name?)’, which refashioned Clinton’s solo outing ‘Atomic Dog’ into Snoop’s theme tune.
Like Digital Underground, De La Soul were another Tommy Boy-signed act that proclaimed their love for George Clinton via heavy sample use, notably on their classic single ‘Me, Myself And I’, which brought Funkadelic’s ‘(Not Just) Knee Deep’ to the airwaves when it was released in 1989. But though De La rose to prominence during the Golden Age – a sort of Wild West era where, briefly, anything went – they were brought up short by The Turtles, who sued the group for $1.7 million for using their 1968 recording of ‘You Showed Me’ in ‘Transmitting Live From Mars’, an album skit that barely made it past the one-minute mark.
Perhaps the most famous classic rock sample is Aerosmith’s 1975 single ‘Walk This Way’, a song that, 11 years later, Run-DMC remade entirely in collaboration with singer Steven Tyler and guitarist Joe Perry, resulting in a landmark moment that proved that both hip-hop and rock drew upon similar reserves of energy that could complement each other. Another mid-70s staple that later found new life on a Golden Age classic was Eric Clapton’s cover of ‘I Shot The Sheriff’, which underpinned EPMD’s ‘Strictly Business’, while the iconic bassline for Lou Reed’s ‘Walk On The Wild Side’ helped make A Tribe Called Quest’s ‘Can I Kick It?’ one of the most recognisable songs on the radio in 1991. Not that hip-hop’s rock samples have been limited to well-worn riffs from the obvious names: Public Enemy merged thrash metal’s raw power with their own righteous fury when, in 1988, they sampled Slayer’s ‘Angel Of Death’ for the coruscating intro to ‘She Watch Channel Zero?!’, while, 20 years later, ‘Nothing Is The Same’, a 1970 B-side by Grand Funk Railroad, was given entirely new context when musical polymaths The Roots sampled it for ‘Rising Down’, the title track to their 2008 album.
It took someone with bags of confidence to revisit well-worn tracks in the 21st Century… someone like Kanye West, who made a name for himself doing just that. In his early days, in particular, West super-charged classic soul cuts, making them more bombastic than ever before while bringing these important recordings to a new audience. By the time he turned to Ray Charles’ ‘I Got A Woman’, he had the trick down to a fine art, making that song a central component to his all-conquering ‘Gold Digger’ single of 2005. When he sampled Nina Simone’s cover of Billie Holiday’s iconic civil-rights anthem ‘Strange Fruit’ on 2013’s ‘Blood On The Leaves’ he almost made it sound more chilling than the original.
Reactionary voices might have been “talkin’ all that jazz” several decades ago, but now that hip-hop is as mainstream as Corn Flakes or Disney, it has the power, more than ever, to bring music “people could’ve forgot” to new ears. For every crate-diggin’ muso looking for obscurities, there’s a Kendrick Lamar single that might inspire someone to revisit the old masters (how many people set out to discover The Isley Brothers after hearing ‘That Lady’ sampled in ‘i’?). Something old, something new, something borrowed: that’s how we get from here to there.
Proto-hip-hop icon Gil Scott-Heron might have sung ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’, but as far as the future of music is concerned, the evolution will happen in your ears.
Follow the Rap Royalty playlist for more essential hip-hop classics.




Terry Jones
December 20, 2016 at 8:34 pm
In your essay you clearly forgot another Jazz sample…..US3’s “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)” utilizing Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloop”…..Hip Hop invaded Blue Note’s catalogue on more than one occasion!
DW
November 15, 2018 at 11:55 pm
Did I miss mention of the “Amen Break”? (The Winstons’ “Amen, Brother” sampled in something like 2000 songs)